Ironic that the devs of these patches seem to have more airtight security on their discord servers than major car manufacturers have on their $20k+ products.

that’s cool of you to give it even that brief review! At the end of the day, we 100% agree - Wikipedia is best for surface-level research. But that is what I love it for! Because of Wikipedia, we can all be surface-level experts on almost any topic in minutes. One of the few treasures of living in the 21st century.

Can you give an example of an article with an error that you tried to correct? Not trying to cast doubt on your statements, genuinely just curious what kind of roadblocks you hit. I’m no Wikipedia expert, but I have started to dip my toe into editing in recent months.

I do appreciate the direct link to exactly what Wales said, and the full conversation with his replies and such. It’s definitely a bit heady - Wales points out that editors are overstretched and he gives an example where he used ChatGPT to give helpful feedback to a new contributor. Then, a bunch of editors file in and point out parts of the GPT response that are inaccurate and go against Wikipedia policy. They also point out how LLMs themselves are already making life hell for editors.

If the site is being flooded by LLM submissions, and then Wikipedia starts using LLMs to provide feedback on rejected articles, when does a human step in to clear out the hallucinations? If I was submitting an article, and then I got bot feedback and edited my article with that feedback, and then a human looked at it and told me half the stuff the bot told me was wrong, I would be rightly pissed. If I was a new contributor dipping my toe into the scene for fun, that might just turn me off from Wiki editing forever.

And all of this is without considering the environmental impact of adding yet another major website to the data center load of existing LLMs. But it is clear that there are problems with this idea, even if the environmental costs are a nonfactor.

How many of y’all actually use Usenet? I was on the brink before getting into a few PTs.

Eloquently put 👌

The German high court now suggests that if ad blockers manipulate a site’s structure in ways that violate copyright integrity, they could be deemed illegal.

Now, I’m no legal expert, particularly not in the workings of German copyright law. But an ad blocker does not “manipulate a site’s structure”, so copyright seems like very shakey grounds for a legal argument. All adblockers do is block connections to specific domains, and then what you see is what the website’s server spits out without downloading info from those outside domains. AFAIK there is no adblocker that is editing a website’s actual code, but maybe some of the advanced YT adblockers are doing that, idk.

AI is piracy by corporations, kind of makes sense that this community doesn’t care so much.

Sort of a meandering article that doesn’t have a strong thesis. Posch wants to say that we used to have cool consumer electronics that we owned and now we have subscription services and we own nothing, but it gets distracted by detours into “here’s a history of consumer electronics” and “look at these smartphone features we lost because corporations are greedy”. And like, all of it suggests the thesis, but idk. I don’t disagree that we are in an era of subscription services and surveillance and owning less and less, but everyone knows that so it’s kind of a banal point to make in an article. And the article doesn’t really explore this idea from a new and interesting angle, it’s just recapping everything we already know.

no word suggestion

this is the part i’m struggling with. autocorrect/predict is essential to touch typing, full stop. i am giving it an earnest shot, maybe a hex keyboard will let me type faster than qwerty with predictive, idk. But i remember predictive text being critical to getting used to touch-typing.

That makes a lot of sense actually.

Can we talk about the article saying that 96% of TV and film piracy is streaming?? That one blows me away. We all talk here about downloading our own files and then self-hosting, but apparently all of us account for less than 5% of all piracy? Tf?

Nah bro the AI is totally trustworthy. Just trust me bro all the rich people are saying its reliable the US president is even saying it’s the greatest thing ever bro what you don’t trust the government now? You said ‘trust the experts’ bro i’m trusting the experts and they say eat the bromide trust me bromide!

nothing to see here, just a sitting US president launching new companies and using the power of the office to promote his new companies.

key excerpt:

Most 3D printers work by heating up a filament—often, but not always, plastic—and extruding it through a metal nozzle. The nozzle puts down hundreds, or even thousands, of layers of the heated plastic to form a solid object. Each individual level of the print is called the print line. “So on the firearm, I’m seeing from the trigger guard—maybe print line 200—and the top of the magazine well—print line 400—the marks are staying consistent,” Garrison said.

It was an exciting discovery but it also wouldn’t be admissible as evidence in a criminal trial. Despite the promise that we may one day be able to match a printer to the object that made it, Garrison stressed that the work was in its very early days and that it would take years, perhaps even a decade, of science to work out the truth of toolmarks and 3D printers.