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 you’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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this, and happy new year in advance.)
As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. I’m not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some 🤔-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!
I thought those non crypto cranks were relatively rare, which is why I added the “really” part. There has been only one templeos after all. And cryptography (crypto too but that is more financial cranks) has that 'this will ve revolutionary feeling which cranks seem to love, while also feeling accessable (compared to complexity theory, which you usually only know about if you know some cs already). I didn’t mean there are no cranks/weird ass claims about the whole field, but Id think that cryptography attracts the lions share. The lambda calculus bit down thread might prove me wrong however.
I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something they’ve gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.
I still need to finish that FPGA Krivine machine because it’s still living rent-free in my head and will do so until it’s finally evaluating expressions, but boy howdy fuck am I not looking forward to the cranks finding it
write a series of blog posts about it, all of which end “And in conclusion, punch a Nazi.”
also sprinkle it at the start, and throughout
because you just know the tiring fuckers won’t bother reading in depth