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.

  • skillissuerEnglish
    10·
    8 months ago

    While the above analysis may seem to be critical, we do believe that many of our points could be adopted in the next version of this work. More scrutiny of the “new” materials needs to be performed prior to putting them into a database and claiming “…an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. In fact, we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the GNoME and Stable Structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions.

    This brings us to our final point concerning the claim of “an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. We would respectfully suggest that the work by Merchant et al. (1) does not report any new materials but reports a list of proposed compounds. In our view, a compound can be called a material when it exhibits some functionality and, therefore, has potential utility. Since no functionality has been demonstrated for the 384,870 compositions in the Stable Structure database, they cannot yet be regarded as materials.

    then they proceed to explain how badly have they fucked up in the only one example where they tried to find some utility of “new” “material”

    The few examples of functionality mentioned in the article are associated with Li±ion conductors. While the proposed materials are encouraging, their compositions leave much to be desired since they incorporate chemically soft anions. These anions are usually associated with narrow electrochemical stability windows, which renders materials that incorporate them somewhat pointless as Li+ solid electrolytes. (29)

    this is basically closest you can get to “you fucked up, do better” in a published article. saying “you fucked up, actually don’t even try to do better, go home” is not what i’ve seen ever really in published piece, excluding obvious cases of cooked data, even if it’s warranted this time. it’s in conclusions section https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      8 months ago

      this is a lot more damning than the 404 media article let on, and I’m very happy that’s the case

      • skillissuerEnglish
        6·
        8 months ago

        it is really a damning with a slight hint of praise

        We also note that, while many of the new compositions are trivial adaptations of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound

        In closing, we hope the comments presented here will usefully serve the large community of materials scientists and engineers in their continued quest to develop the next generation of useful materials. While we are confident that the tools of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have a bright future in the field of materials discovery, more work needs to be done before that promise is fulfilled.

        the other paper cited is that preprint from el reg article from some two months ago

        also i wouldn’t agree that research on plutonium intermetallics is useless, it’s still a very useful material. granted, in civilian use it’s mostly in form of ceramic plutonium dioxide, and i guess that some (most?) of plutonium alloying chemistry came to be in search of something that could be called stainless plutonium, which would make nuclear weapons design much easier and more reliable. but it’s not completely useless and it can have actual civilian applications

        also authors note that even such noncontroversial thing as writing compound formula in standardized, conventional way and sorting them by compound class was too hard for them