Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in.
So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA so people could laugh at them.
Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.
The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.
Agreed. I ran across SomethingAwful when I was quite young (maybe 12-14?) and it was rather upsetting. I kept seeing calls to action that sounded like "Hey guys, let's go be mean to _____ for entertainment! Bonus points if we make them cry!" The whole culture seemed to be like that, so I closed the site and never went back. I never understood what others saw in it.
I think it is important to remember that while SA has become normalized as a community over time, more Reddit than 4chan, at its heart it was not simply a nerd community but a community for nerds to mock other nerds. Trolling and aggression was honed at SA. In many ways it was a bigger and broader successor to alt.tasteless and other shock sites. It definitely amplified the culture of snark and misanthropy in nerd culture.
Brigading those ugly guestbooks was relatively harmless fun. The owners were usually enraged and nonplussed but didn’t feel anything of value was touched. This was before death threats and harassing employers and roping traditional news in to amplify the attack, and all that.
The Uwe Boll fight was very funny.
I think, though, my favorite lowtax moment was a recorded talk he gave at a university, in which he expounded on the “greater parrot-in-ass theory” about how much worse the world becomes when people with extremely niche and unacceptable interests are able to find each other online and convince each other that they’re normal and healthy. Prescient.
No mention of Tom Lehrer?
I still remember the -LY song he wrote.
One recurring joke was based on 2001. A giant monolith would crumble to reveal the sound of the day while Also Sprach Zarathustra played.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY0GhNBMkM8
Tom Lehrer may be obliquely mentioned (but not named):
Lynette Murray of Washington, D.C., who was 12 years old at the time, marveled at the power of the silent e.
"One thing surprised me, that the way they take the e off the word and it comes to another word," Murray explained. "Like for ride you can take the e off then the word becomes rid."
That same word-play may have appeared in the show outside of it, but Lehrer contributed a song with exactly that gimmick: https://tomlehrersongs.com/silent-e/
There is a distinct drop in quality as time passes, anything written in the 50s is golden (Untouched by Human Hands, Store of Infinity) , in the 60s is mixed but still some good stuff (Can you Feel Anything When I do This?). After that is pretty hit or miss (Options), including a collaboration with Zelazny that I found quite disappointing.
By using expected value, you are assuming that the distribution of the even numbers is uniform. You will need to prove that first, and I suspect that will be difficult.
Since we're looking at Scott Aaronson, you might want to check out "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". It gives a good explanation of the math behind qubits and how they can be used. Best intro I know of.
It also gets pretty macabre in parts. Specifically The Tin-Woodsman of Oz where the title character wonders whatever happened to the girl that was the reason he was cursed. You see, he fell in love with a girl who was enslaved to a witch, so the witch enchanted his axe to chop parts of him off every time he swung it. Eventually, there was nothing left but the tin replacements.
And if that isn't enough, it is established that nothing in Oz ever dies. Including all his chopped off parts...
I Am a Strange Loop spends an entire chapter of Hofstadter informing us how he is better than everyone else because he hears Bach better than everyone else. And this attitude fills the book, I found it very obnoxious and am not sure why no else mentions it.
There are at least two places in the book where he talks about an interesting point, then realizes it is a rehash of something from a previous book. And aside from the self-congratulations (did you know being a vegetarian makes you more of a person?), anything interesting in this book was done better in a previous book.
I would recommend The Mind's I instead. It's a collection of stories and essays from most of his influences, see what Turing, Lucas, et al. actually said.
He also spends a chapter trashing Searle, in a way that seems a little unnecessarily vindictive.
I still enjoyed it. It's not for everyone, but I found that his meanderings served to break up the seriousness of the subject in a way that made for an easy read, much easier than GEB.
I once registered a password using a special character, but I could not get in. It turned out that they url encoded it, if I used %21 instead of "!" I could get into the site.
By this logic, would Guitar Magazine, which published very complete sheet music for many of these songs have a copyright claim? I know I have a magazine at home with Stairway to Heaven and I'm pretty sure there's a copyright in there somewhere.
Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in.
So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA so people could laugh at them.
Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.
The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.