Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting thisā€¦)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    17Ā·
    2 months ago

    Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)

    In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because itā€™s ā€œthe most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training setā€.

    This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      22Ā·
      2 months ago

      ā€œConspiracyā€ is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

      A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

      Despite Malparti warning that ā€œit would be a waste of time for everyoneā€ I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as ā€œthe unique solutionā€ to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be ā€œeventually achievedā€, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

      Itā€™s been a while since Iā€™ve seen a math book review that said ā€œDo not use for anything.ā€

      ā€œThis book is not a place of honorā€¦ā€

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        5Ā·
        2 months ago

        ā€œDo not use for anything.ā€

        Thatā€™s really harsh since I have a few bad books that are at least useful as monitor stands