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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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. If you're wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)

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[-] joXn@wandering.shop 9 points 6 hours ago

@Amoeba_Girl even better news, it requires no references outside of 90- and 75-year-old results in theoretical computer science! nobody since Rice has made any progress on this important problem.

Kolmogorov complexity:

So we should see some proper definitions and basic results on the Kolmogorov complexity, like in modern papers, right? We should at least see a Kt or a pKt thrown in there, right?

Understanding IS compression — extracting structure from data. Optimal compression is uncomputable. Understanding is therefore always provisional, always improvable, never verifiably complete. This kills “stochastic parrot” from a second independent direction: if LLMs were memorizing rather than understanding, they could not generalize to inputs not in their training data. But they do. Generalization to novel input IS compression — extracting structure, not regurgitating sequences.

Fuck!

[-] joXn@wandering.shop 2 points 3 hours ago

@lagrangeinterpolator can you understand without generalizing? arguably yes. can you generalize without understanding? also, arguably yes. how else can a mathematical theory of physics give “right answers” in novel physical circumstances?

you could say, I suppose, that it’s the humans doing the calculations that are doing the generalization but one can do the calculations without understanding them.

this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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