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Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

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[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This thread is an unending source of amusement.

Someone there found his ORCID and... It's not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different "preprints", read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.

I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology^1^. [emph. mine]

🤡


^1^ No he doesn't? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 6 months ago

Those "papers" are gold, they're mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:

  • How to calculate a mean of numbers?
  • What is a number?
  • Atheism is actually a religion.
  • Ethereum is a store of energy.

I've never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn't healthy.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago

Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they're still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

Ethereum is a store of energy.

fucking WHAT

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I am unfairly misrepresenting that for sneer purposes but if you want to see what happens when someone with typical cryptobro brainworms gets access to a paper-looking PDF template:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.17616.99845

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13443.99364

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

jaysus, mary, joseph and the wee donkey. (ESPECIALLY the wee donkey.)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 6 months ago

he also has a personal site, it's linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

oh goddess, he's already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:

I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.

rōnin! fucking! scholar!

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 6 months ago

eh i've seen that before at least once and i'm inclined to believe there's much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you don't do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he won't listen

he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didn't learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least that's what he claimed and started homelab. (you'd guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and you've never seen them).

so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking "anticancer" "meds" in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, he'd just got an idea that it will work and that's just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like he'd learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and it's time to go back to the drawing board.

(did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to "anti-rabies antiviral" where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to "anticancer")

anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how he'd genocide everyone who doesn't recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))

anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but it's since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

mind, i know the type from my usenet days. in polish usenet we had that crank called, i kid you not, expert, who presented himself as expert in almost everything.

some time later one bored person did an official query, and learned that apparently the fucker managed to get himself onto the state-approved list of expert witnesses in the area of computing (unclear if that predated his usenet antics or not)…

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

(that was mid-to-late 1990s, the cocom was just in the process of being lifted, and the judiciary really did not have much knowledge about the technical aspects of computing)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 6 months ago

if his claim of "20 years studying math" is anywhere close to accurate he's already off the deep end, unless he's counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering he's a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 6 months ago

Hey, he didn't update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he's been a samurai of that

[-] alm@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

They’re all blog posts that refer to no actual work, my favorite is the one where he advocates for his blog posts to be accepted to journals: Call to Research: A need for a new paper format

This is mostly whining about how he’s totally an academic and people should take him seriously.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??

This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

he's the very model of a modern crypto-douchebag.

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science

wait, wait. that's basically the bootcamp level of education, no?

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

(nothing wrong with that per se, i don't have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don't know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 6 months ago

the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 6 months ago

I know essentally nothing about the US education system but...

If you're gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn't be pulling your degrees up if you didn't first talk about how formally educated you are...

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease

also it's not "almost all" preprints, it's all preprints, just one repository calls these papers

he didn't discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

There's one classified as "SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article", I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the "almost", but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an "electronic journal"? No fucking idea.

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 6 months ago

yeah that one is sneaky but it's a repository, not a journal with peer review

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

Amazing.

I could "publish" my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that'd be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

that \hbox overfull on the subsection title was painful, wasn't it?

this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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