That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!

on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..

neither of them come across well here.

It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent.

"If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...

There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.

(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)

Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".

Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.

So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.

Job done.

Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.

Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.