Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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 cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Any fans of “Well There’s Your Problem” or “Trashfuture” in here? Both podcasts really hit that “TechTakes” sweet spot imho.
I don’t know how well this fits here, but, well I don’t know where else to post nixos drama. So without further ado:
NixOS drama
Quick introduction: nix is package manager that allows you to reproducibly build any piece of software. It has been exploding in popularity over the past few years and has gotten to the point of receiving commercial endorsement. It has also received endorsement from more controversial companies, and this is where issues start to brew
A few days ago, after the success of an open letter condemning nixcons sponsorship of Anduril, a new open letter showed up. This time it discusses the creator of nix, Eelco Dolstra, and how he is becoming detrimental towards the goals of the nix community. The letter is not quite as well received as the anti-anduril letter, mostly because of its padded length and aggressive tone. I think delroth captures my personal feelings towards this letter.
Furthermore, Eelco has dropped a response, which ends in him suggesting users to move away from the community-run nix foundation and towards his consulting company, Determinate Systems. Needless to say I don’t like this call towards division at all.
Now I haven’t don’t a particularly deep analysis of this whole drama, since I’m basically merely a user and not all that active in the development of nix. Here is a link for if you want to get more details from someone who did go more in depth dissecting both articles
well, dolstra’s actions vidicated the open letter completely; also i really hate using the dismissive phrase “drama” for something that is actually a large issue with open source project governance and acceptance of blood money.
we have some running commentary on FreeAssembly, a smaller community on the same instance as TechTakes for open source collaboration. I don’t mind having posts about the open letter here too though; what happens to Nix will have an impact on our instance, because it’s a NixOS deployment and because I (the infrastructure admin) have previously been fairly active in the Nix community.
for the record (and to summarize the other thread), there’s not a lot of gray to my stance: anduril, eelco, and friends can fuck off, and I regret letting folks convince me that the systemic problems I’d heard about from marginalized folks in the Nix community were minor or solved. we unfortunately know what the Nix project will look like if it continues down this path: it’ll become something a lot like Urbit, which is a grim fucking fate for something I think is still technologically worthwhile.
there’s not a lot of gray to my stance
Which more people should be comfortable with doing tbh. It’s amazing how our culture moved towards editorialising and couching everything in ambiguities when “nazi punks fuck off” is all you need for most day-to-day moral quandaries.
When the first big wave of musk stanning started, there was a strain of “we should be proud” remarked at (and sometimes by) ZAians. It always irked me because from the getgo I saw the charlatan, and over the years as it’s gotten worse…well, y’know.
Why do I reminisce about this? Oh, no reason:
groan. everything about that makes me groan.
A lesswrong attempts to explain physics using Information Theory!. This irritates me.
If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.
No, you can’t, because you’re still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you’re saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you’ve made a screwdriver.
Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.
We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.
Forgetting where things are doesn’t give you psychoflexitive powers!
And from the comments:
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.
No. If you don’t incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You’ll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.
For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn’t seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.
This is how The Sequences teaches you to think. Construct a thought experiment and use your feelings about how things “should” work to come to a conclusion.
Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don’t check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law…
A related issue that I doubt they’ve ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they’re functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn’t be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of “high entropy” and “low entropy” states that ignore the momentum part. But when you’re reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students’ misconceptions about it.
What the heck did I just read because it appeared to be a proof that hourglasses can’t possibly work if you look away from them for a moment.
Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?
I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the “uniform distribution over (0,x)” is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.
Argh. These people just don’t know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.
I think there is in fact a notion of continuous entropy where that is actually true, and it does appear to be used in statistical mechanics (but I am not a physicist). But there are clearly a lot of technical details which have been scrubbed away by the LW treatment.