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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 day ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

More flaming dog poop appeared on my doorstep, in the form of this article published in VentureBeat. VB appears to be an online magazine for publishing silicon valley propaganda, focused on boosting startups, so it's no surprise that they'd publish this drivel sent in by some guy trying to parlay prompting into writing.

Point:

Apple argues that LRMs must not be able to think; instead, they just perform pattern-matching. The evidence they provided is that LRMs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning are unable to carry on the calculation using a predefined algorithm as the p,roblem grows.

Counterpoint, by the author:

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

As someone who already knows the algorithm for solving the ToH problem, I wouldn't "fail" at solving the one with twenty discs so much as I'd know that the algorithm is exponential in the number of discs and you'd need 2^20 - 1 (1048575) steps to do it, and refuse to indulge your shit reasoning.

However, this argument only points to the idea that there is no evidence that LRMs cannot think.

Argument proven stupid, so we're back to square one on this, buddy.

This alone certainly does not mean that LRMs can think — just that we cannot be sure they don’t.

Ah yes, some of my favorite GOP turns of phrases, "no unknown unknowns" + "big if true".

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

"I don't understand recursion" energy