... at the BBC
Bitcoin devs scramble to protect $2.2tn blockchain from looming quantum computer threat
Bitcoin devs scramble to protect $2.2tn blockchain from looming quantum computer threat
Quantum computers pose a threat to Bitcoin’s security. Developers are rushing to future-proof the network. Michael Saylor is unconvinced this is a problem.Tim Craig (DL News)
Russia Is Winning the Ukraine War and NATO Can’t Stop It
Russia Is Winning the Ukraine War and NATO Can't Stop It - National Security Journal
At the moment, it seems clear Russia is winning the Ukraine war, and no matter how many weapons NATO gives, that reality likely won't change.Harry Kazianis (National Security Journal)
Trade war truce between US and China is back on
Trade war truce between US and China is back on
Donald Trump says agreement struck with Beijing covers rare earths.Financial Times (Ars Technica)
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Lawsuit Challenging 2024 Election Results Moves Forward After Kamala Harris Received Zero Votes in a New York County
Lawsuit Challenging 2024 Election Results Moves Forward After Kamala Harris Received Zero Votes in a New York County
A lawsuit disputing the results of the 2024 election has moved forward after it was revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris received no votes a New York county.Maryam Khanum (Latin Times)
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I also strongly believe in their use of projecting as a preemptive defensive strategy.
They say "you cheated you cheated you cheated!" so we reply "you're nuts there's no evidence, it's all a conspiracy theory" so then they can cheat later on and turn it around on you when you go to investigate. "Oh now it's true because you lost? Yeah yeah yeah..."
They're always playing psychological warfare with the population... 🙁
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They’re always playing psychological warfare with the population… 🙁
Why can't we do psychological warfare on them? I thought they were so much dumber than us.
They already believe it's happening to them which is why they refuse to listen to any source of information that isn't from their preferred brand.
There are plenty of intelligent MAGA that just have an innate bias that they want to have confimed so they allow themselves to be convinced by mis/disinformation. To admit you were wrong, or to accept that you misunderstood actually creates a "pain" type response that people are very adverse to, there are also the types that have so entrenched themselves in their political beliefs that it becomes their identity. This form of physiological warfare I mentioned is just one way of allowing these people to maintain their identity and to give them a "valid" defense against inconvenient information.
Over time a person can be chipped away at, but if you always give them an answer then they never have to suffer the thought that they were ever wrong about anything so they can remain on "your side."
A strongmen is elected for seeming strong. Of course he will say beforehand that he is certain that he will win. Saying anything else would harm is brand and make less people vote for him. Trump claiming to be successful at anything and everything also isn't something new for him. He did that his entire (adult) life.
This is evidence for Trump being a narcissist and liar, but with the amount of lies, delusional and nonsensical claims he makes, this can be hardly taken as evidence for election fraud.
And even:
Yes, Trump said Musk knows vote-counting computers 'better than anybody'
He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.— trump, on stage at a victory rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, 2025
The idiot can’t keep his mouth shut and basically blabbed exactly what they were doing, yet nobody really listened.
It will never cease to astound me.
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Casual dismissal of statistically relevant recount and largest recount ever in Wisconsin, even including compared to 2020.
Local elections officials in 336 randomly selected municipalities across the state hand-counted 327,230 ballots as part of the 2024 audit. That is nearly 10% of all Wisconsin ballots cast in the 2024 election and the largest post-election audit ever undertaken in the state.The only errors found during the audit were made by people, not the vote-counting machines. And only five human errors were detected, resulting in an error rate of just 0.0000009%, according to the report.
Frankly after election there are two things that bugged me in California. There was a proposition that removed mandatory work requirement for inmates comparing it to a modern day slavery. There was no one who was willing to endorse vote against it (I suppose due to optics) yet the proposition failed.
When he visited CA after fires were already put down and made that spectacle with water dam, he also mentioned that he had a good feeling about next election.
I have a feeling that maybe CA voting is also compromised and this was a test for California, as trump winning here would be extremely suspicious, but no one will care about this proposition.
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From what I understand about the issue that I read about in a different article it was about software changes made to a program that many states use, PA was one of them.
I think NY is the only place where it is currently being investigated, but if it happened here I don't doubt it happened elsewhere.
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Is there any other evidence that suggests a good reason for even trying?
Look for example at Ramapo 58 district:
app.enhancedvoting.com/results…
Harris only got a single vote in a district that historically votes for Democrats. What are the odds. But maybe Democrats just lost popularity.
But then look at Senate
app.enhancedvoting.com/results…
Now democratic candidate wins by 94.12% what are the odds?
And this is not a single district, there are many others like that.
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Some algorithm probably takes votes away from a canadiate but you can't have negative votes. Someone forgot to insert the threshold killing the program.
Sounds musky.
Let's just say there was fraud, and Kamala did actually win:
Now what? This administration has been blatantly breaking the law, ignoring the constitution and court orders since day fucking 1 without consequence. Will someone with authority finally grow some fucking nuts and arrest the felon(s) over this, even though they could and should have already for numerous other reasons?
It really leads to the question of does winning an election make you the president or is having the power transferred to you all it takes?
I should ask Gerald Ford.
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I do believe people were calling me alarmist for noticing strange patterns.
Like winning all 7 swing states? Your fucking kidding me right?
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Also not surprising that investigations weren’t pushed harder after election and before new administration. Biden and Garland should’ve put throttle down on a five-alarm-fire investigation into election. Did they? No. Surprised? Not at all.
Transitions shouldn’t necessarily be smooth if an election was potentially fraudulent — peaceful, yes.
Biden and Garland should’ve put throttle down on a five-alarm-fire investigation into election.
For that matter, Obama should have conducted an investigation into the 2016 election when he still had the power to do so.
"Accuse your enemy of what you intend to do"
Not actually a quite from Goebbels or Marx, but the Republican guiding principle nonetheless.
Accuse your enemy of what you intend to do
It's ironic that Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives" (when the Nazis arrested and eventually murdered numerous brownshirts and their leader, Ernst Roehm) acquired that name because Hitler himself used the expression in a speech that he gave immediately after the event. In the speech, he accused Roehm of having been planning a "NIght of the Long Knives" himself, directed at Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. Quite unintentionally, the phrase came to describe Hitler's actions.
Yes, but then he un-conceded. How do you think it got to the Supreme Court unless he fought?
He brought it to the Florida circuit court, and when he lost he appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, who ruled in his favor. Then Bush appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The problem was a coordinated effort to steal the election by the bitch queen Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State and Bush's Florida campaign co-chair, a fake riot by Republican operatives to disrupt a recount, and a collaborating Supreme Court. It was all tied up nicely in a bow and there wasn't much Gore could have done, although he should have requested a statewide recount right from the start instead of just cherry picking solidly Democratic-leaning counties like Miami-Dade.
He only conceded after that...
americanrhetoric.com/speeches/…
Online Speech Bank: Al Gore - 2000 Presidential Concession Speech
Full text and audio mp3 of Al Gore 2000 Presidential Concession Speechwww.americanrhetoric.com
Others clearly have their pitch forks ready to go but the real reason here is because they won NY. I'd be shocked if any presidential candidate in the history of the US demanded a recount in a state they won.
Is 0 votes suspicious? Absolutely. Is the recount process the right way to uncover something happening at a scale to compromise an entire district's election process? Probably not.
According to Balletpedia, it's unclear who in NY even pays for a voluntary recount (NY has mandatory recounts in close elections).
However suspicious this district is, it's not justification for a recount in another district in a completely different state.
If there is interference at a meaningful scale, it's not going to be uncovered by volunteers working without sleep to deliver election results as quickly as humanly possible. The wheels of justice turn far top slowly.
A lawsuit is a good first step.
Who pays for recounts and contested elections? (2024)
Ballotpedia: The Encyclopedia of American PoliticsBallotpedia
Because they didn't want to be perceived as doing the same thing as the Republicans after the 2020 election. After complaining about the Republicans not having a "peaceful transfer of power," Dems thought it was important to demonstrate how that works, and be smug about it.
Unfortunately, this was precisely the wrong election to make that point, since this election truly was rat fucked by MAGA.
But that seems like a terrible strategy...
I mean.... we are talking about the Democrats. That's almost their motto.
Yes, it's a terrible strategy, but it's the easiest one to default to if you are a cowardly spineless weenie Democrat who is afraid to confront serious treason and corruption, like Chuck Schumer. Traditional Dems are satisfied with losing, as long as they can feel smug about being morally superior while doing it, even if it means watching the Reps systematically dismantle America on behalf of the Russians.
We need elected representatives at every level who aren't afraid to go to battle to defend our country from treasonous criminals and Sociopathic Oligarchs.
That’s honestly what got me too. Like it took a week for them to get all of the results from 2020, and sure, that could’ve been all the mail in ballots, but then you have Rogan saying elongated muskrat had called the election the night OF voting?
I don’t know man. I’ve seen a few elections now and don’t remember that happening.
If you have a few hours to kill, this podcast had the guy from election truth alliance on. It is the most tolerable of the few podcasts he's appeared on because this guy is data heavy, and quite frankly it can be boring with how much he talks about data and graphs, but the data is there. They are very data driven. Part 2 has most of the data, but essentially votes went way up for Republicans as time went on. Statistically speaking, there should be a similar distribution of votes throughout, but what we see is any time Kamala gets close, a flood of red votes come in. The theory is a vote switching algorithm. Imo Elon saying that without him the Dems get the presidency and the house is not hyperbole. I'm pretty sure they were flipping votes and/ or using data from the super PAC $100 giveaway to file fake votes. There are a bunch of submitted ballots that were down ballot dem, but president and house / Senate (the ones that mattered the most) went to Republicans. The only way to find out is to do audits. And even if (and imo when) we do find out it was stolen, I don't think we have any recourse to remove him, but it would be nice to know that we didn't choose this, and the states can beef up their election security and politicians can stop being so spineless thinking that he's so popular and they are powerless.
The guy was dancing around like a crazy person to Ave Maria at his last rally and yelling about people eating cats and dogs on the debate. There's no way anyone saw that and wanted that running the country save the maybe 8% of the population that are Trump Simps.
His rallies were empty and Harris had the momentum with a packed house everywhere she went. She mopped the floor with him in the debate. The fact that she accepted the results and didn't push for a single recount was asinine imo. With Trump, everything is projection. There's evidence they tried to steal '20 and we're just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people who voted by mail to oust him. Vote by mail is typically hand counted and harder to alter.
The guy was dancing around like a crazy person to Ave Maria at his last rally and yelling about people eating cats and dogs on the debate. There’s no way anyone saw that and wanted that running the country save the maybe 8% of the population that are Trump Simps.
You overestimate this country.
I'm tired of going high when they go low.
If the new standard is for Republicans to cast doubt on the legitimacy of every election, except for the ones they win, then we should, at the very least, be scrutinizing every single aspect of the election. Refuse to concede, demand recounts, hand tally the electronic ballots, search up and down and under every rock for evidence that the other side is guilty of some foul play.
Because if they had done that in the first place, they might have uncovered shit like this before it was too late to stop the wrong candidate from getting inaugurated. If they had bothered to put up a fight instead of maintaining decorum that the Republicans never bother to show, maybe they would have discovered what many of us already suspected - that Elon Musk somehow tampered with the voting machines to swing the election in Donald Trump's favor in key swing states. They practically admitted as much on stage, and nobody batted an eye at it.
I don't expect to ever live to see another fair election for the rest of my life.
Leading up to the election all we were talking about is how trump got ahold of documents through court filings that would show exactly how the voting machines worked. Crazy how thst talking point just fell away.
At this point we know the who, the why, the what, and the how. We need to figure out the where and when.
I'm very much against conspiracy theories, especially concerning our elections which are administered by many many independent entities. I was very concerned as I watched electronic voting machines - especially without paper trails - become more and more popular over the past 30 years. Even more as the industry consolidated and it came down to a handful of private, for-profit manufacturers.
The thing I've read about that is keeping the door of conspiracy open in my mind is the "drop off" rate, which has to do with the number of "President only" ballots, where only the President is chosen, and no down ballot votes are cast.
Apparently Trump's ballots have an unusually high - like statistically unlikely - drop off. And it's either only in or mostly in/more pronounced in swing states.
Even Chris Titus picked it up (3 hrs total, sorry)
youtu.be/UgIay64Obcs - Part 1
youtu.be/t-yr-Mgkhm0 - Part 2
So on one hand: Harris won NY State by a 10% margin.
On the other hand: if vote machines were tampered with then it likely doesn't stop there.
If only there was a give movement of Democrat voters telling you loudly WE WON'T VOTE FOR HARRIS...
You guys usually love to blame us for Trump, even though we promised you he would win if you didn't give us an electable candidate, but hey if you now want to change stories again to follow whatever dem narrative is being spun today, then yeah her winning NY so bigly is obviously evidence of a stolen election...
Or she wasn't electable. No no no, it's everyone else's fault.
Sure.
But the Democrats decided not to hold a primary that late, and I don't recall any Democrats running a meaningful challenge to her candidacy...
So, let me ask again. Who was an electable candidate in 2024?
Felon practically admitted this last week.
The guy said the Democrats would control the House and even gave numbers for the Republicans in the Senate. What more do people need?
This stuff has been going on for a loooong time:
Interview with Stephen Spoonamore on of the electronic voting issues that have been raised for a while now:
youtube.com/watch?v=BRW3Bh8HQi…
if you want to jump right to his explanation/comparison to his work with securing credit card transactions against "man in the middle" attacks:
youtube.com/watch?feature=play…
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.
Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."
Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."
Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."
truth-out.org/news/item/2319:n…
Breakdown of why Electronic voting in general is incredibly insecure:
Documentary going into Clint Curtis's story:
(the guy from this video):
Fractional Voting:
blackboxvoting.org/fraction-ma…
HBO documentary Hacking Democracy:
New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked
Tomas Rueda, of the Hispanic Republican Club of Cleveland, a poll challenger, monitors voting at a polling site in Cleveland on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov 2…Bob Fitrakis (Truthout)
Which county?
Edit: Rockland. Which is very much a possibility there.
Leftists and liberals all think they're somehow immune to conspiracy theories, but here we are. Nearly everyone commenting or voting in this thread has an opinion based on feelings, and they're looking for evidence to justify their beliefs. "I'm not one to believe conspiracy theories, but..." That's a load-bearing "but" there.
No really: stop for ten seconds and think about why you believe this. Be honest.
Yes, I'm aware of the video that's been linked repeatedly where they can't explain how a small percentage of Trump cultists only voted for Trump and no one else. Imagine that: voters who think the entire system is corrupt and Trump is their savior don't vote for anyone else.
Here's an actual recount in a swing state, and it found nothing.
And as korendian has been trying to tell you, New Square in Ramapo, NY is a tiny, 100% Hasidic village and votes as a monolithic bloc.
There is a strong expectation that residents of New Square will conform to community norms... Those who have not conformed voluntarily have faced vigilante justice, as exemplified by the New Square arson attack and other incidents.
I'm not saying the election was clean. It never is. Red states purge voters they shouldn't, they enact laws to discourage voters and make it more difficult, etc. And sometimes it actually is a conspiracy: 2000 is one example where it really was rigged for Bush through coordinated efforts.
But there's zero persuasive evidence for 2024. If I see some, I'll charge my mind. But not until then.
To paraphrase Bush v Gore over negative votes in Florida after the SC sent the case to a lower court and it was appealed back to them
it’s been so long since the election that it would be unfair to change the outcome now
After HitlerPig's 2025 State of the Union speech, new Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin gave the Democratic response, and tried to sell the idea that millions of people in her state voted for her for Senator, but Trump for president.
This past weekend, Amy Klobuchar tried to sell that same fantasy on Meet The Press - that millions in her state voted for her, but also voted for HitlerPig.
I'm sure there are a few people who split their vote, but they have to be as rare as white squirrels. There are supposed to be millions of them, so many that HitlerPig even won EVERY battleground state (an exceptionally unlikely outcome), but I've never heard one actual voter claim they voted a straight Democratic ticket, except HitlerPig for president. It sounds ridiculous when you actually say it.
For the uninitiated:
"Treat the situation like it's fair... because that's what they should have done when it actually was"
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
There are supposed to be millions of them, so many that HitlerPig even won EVERY battleground state (an exceptionally unlikely outcome), but I’ve never heard one actual voter claim they voted a straight Democratic ticket, except HitlerPig for president.
If you look at the actual vote counts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Uni…
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_U…
Trump | 2,816,636
Harris | 2,736,533
Slotkin | 2,712,686
Rogers | 2,693,680
Harris and Slotkin net out almost perfectly. Trump outran Rogers by over 3% of the vote, which suggests people were showing up to support Mr Cheeto and then leaving the rest of the ballot blank.
That is... not unbelievable. The Trump Cult is strong, while the GOP as a party lags Trump's personality cult substantially.
Polling gets even worse in other Midwestern states, with Harris outright underwater to her down ballot Dems. But there's nobody in the GOP Trump doesn't outpace. The idea that people are voting Trump + Dem is far less likely than voting Trump + Nobody.
Citing the vote counts to prove the point that the election was "fair & square" is like using the Bible to prove that God is real. Of course they prove HitlerPig won, they're rigged! We're supposed to believe he won EVERY swing state? No Republican has won the popular vote since 1988, but we're supposed to believe the least popular Republican president in decades, one who actually LOST his reelection by a wide margin, is the guy to break that streak? Ridiculous.
What makes more sense to me, and is supported by the evidence and personal statements by the players themselves, is that they rigged the election, especially in the swing states, assisted by the richest man in the world (and his army of some of the best tech experts in the world), and Putin, who we know has been actively pursuing cyber-espionage for years.
When will people internalize that the two biggest FOREIGN Sociopathic Oligarchs, one with a government superpower at his disposal, another with the largest fortune on the planet, neither with any loyalty or patriotism toward America, have partnered up with the most prolific traitor in American history, to exploit our country in every way possible? None of them care about history or legacy or reputation, they see America as a rich, fat, lazy target, ripe for exploitation and looting.
This is why manual hand counted votes still happen to this day in Canada and Australia. They both faced the same MAGA threat and the lib won.
Yes it takes longer. And sometimes results will take weeks to resolve but at least they don’t end up in a situation like this where the entire system is so corrupt 4 months later it’s near impossible to fix it.
They both faced the same MAGA threat and the lib won.
Largely thanks to the local public backlash to Trump tariffs. If Kamala had prevailed in November, both countries would likely have MAGA governments today.
Part of the Trump brand is "Fuck you, I've got mine" which isn't condusive to international coalitions.
Hell, just look at the Ukraine/Russia conflict. As soon as Trump got Zelensky to sign a bunch of Western Ukrainian real estate over to his cronies, he unleashed a large traunch of weapons to fuck over Putin. As soon as he got another Perfect Phone Call from Xi, and secured some unspecified promise, the Chinese tariffs evaporated.
My man stands for nothing that won't fit into his pocket.
We can’t say that. We don’t know what would’ve happened in Canada if Trump lost.
If Trump lost:
- Trudeau might not have resigned
- if he did, Carney might not have became liberal leader
- The election probably wouldn’t have even happened yet, and the campaign likely would’ve been longer when it was.
- Every party would have run very different campaigns since the top issues wouldn’t have been US relations
A lot of things could’ve been different, but most notably:
- PP might not have run a Trump-esk populist attack campaign.
For all we know PP wouldn’t be seen as “the same MAGA threat”
Note to mention that not only are they harder to scale attacks against, manual vote counts are easier to trust, As anyone can understand the process and how it ensured that their vote counted.
No matter how well they are protected it's hard to explain to the average person how a computer ensures their vote was counted correctly.
So wait a minute here guys, you're telling me that the man who was convicted by a unanimous jury of fraud (cheating) in the 2016 election, the same guy who called the governors of various states and asked them to 'find him some votes' in 2020, did not run a clean honest campaign in 2024???
Get the EFF out of here!!
1st meeting of China-US economic and trade consultation mechanism in London achieves new progress in addressing each other's concerns
1st meeting of China-US economic and trade consultation mechanism in London achieves new progress in addressing each other's concerns
The first meeting of the China-US economic and trade consultation mechanism that was held in London led to new progress in addressing each other's economic and trade concerns, China's state broadcaster CCTV reported on Wednesday.www.globaltimes.cn
Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
Text to avoid paywall
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.
“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”
Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”
For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.
A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”
In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.
An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.
Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.
“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”
A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”
“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”
“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”
The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”
Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”
Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”
For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.
A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”
In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.
An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.
Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”
A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”
“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”
“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”
The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”
The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
WikiProject AI Cleanup is protecting Wikipedia from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued the rest of the internet.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
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Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that's called the lead, and that's exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:
- Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
- Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
- And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
- And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country's flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
- And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there's a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the "linear" reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
- Even then, if you don't want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson's is "American baseball player (1887–1951)").
What's outrageous here isn't wanting summaries; it's that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.
This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that's impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.
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There are also external AI tools that do this just fine.
But imagine these tools generating summaries of summaries.
Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”
What insightful and meaningful discourse.
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If they’re high quality editors who consistently put out a lot of edits then yeah, it is meaningful and insightful. Wikipedia exists because of them and only them. If most feel like they do and stop doing all this maintenance for free, then Wikipedia becomes a graffiti wall/ad space and not an encyclopedia.
Thinking the immediate disgust of the people doing all the work for you for free is meaningless is the best way to nose dive.
Also, you literally had to scroll past a very long and insightful comment to get to that.
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Also, you literally had to scroll past a very long and insightful comment to get to that.
No I didn't. It's in the summary, appropriately enough.
AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds
The BBC's head of news and current affairs says the developers of the tools are "playing with fire."Imran Rahman-Jones (BBC News)
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"Pause" and not "Stop" is concerning.
Is it just me, or was the addition of AI summaries basically predetermined? The AI panel probably would only be attended by a small portion of editors (introducing selection bias) and it's unclear how much of the panel was dedicated to simply promoting the concept.
I imagine the backlash comes from a much wider selection of editors.
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A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”
The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn't the right way to do it, but it's a real issue being examined.
In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a "reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative."[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as "... a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative."[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.
This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it's not entirely clear and has room for improvement.
I'm guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.
Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from
The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.
Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?
The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don't have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.
Fundamentally, I agree with you.
Because the phrase "Wikipedians discussed ways that AI..." Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.
The page gives me the impression that it's not quite "we're gonna use AI, figure it out", but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.
It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.
Personally, the problems I've run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn't write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.
Even beyond that, the "complex" language they claim is confusing is the whole point of Wikipedia. Neutral, precise language that describes matters accurately for laymen. There are links to every unusual or complex related subject and even individual words in all the articles.
I find it disturbing that a major share of the userbase is supposedly unable to process the information provided in this format, and needs it dumbed down even further. Wikipedia is already the summarized and simplified version of many topics.
Ho come on it’s not that simple. Add to that the language barrier. And in general precise language and accuracy are not making knowledge more available to laymen. Laymen don’t have to vocabulary to start with, that’s pretty much the definition of being a layman.
There is definitely value in dumbing down knowledge, that’s the point of education.
Now using AI or pushing guidelines for editors to do it that’s entirely different discussion…
The vocabulary is part of the knowledge. The concept goes with the word, that's how human brains understand stuff mostly.
You can click on the terms you don't know to learn about them.
You can click on the terms you don't know to learn about them.
This is what makes Wikipedia special. Not the fact that it is a giant encyclopedia, but that you can quickly and logically work your way through a complex subject at your pace and level of understanding. Reading about elements but don't know what a proton is? Guess what, there's a link right fucking there!
some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that Al features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with "machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.
I feel like if they feel that this is an issue generate the summary in the talk page and have the editors refine and approve it before publishing. Alternatively set an expectation that the article summaries are in plain English.
some article summaries can be quite dense
Well yeah, that's the point of a summary. If I want something in long form, I'll read the article.
These summaries are useless anyways because the AI hallucinates like crazy... Even the newest models constantly make up bullshit.
It can't be relied on for anything, and it's double work reading the words it shits out and then you still gotta double check it's not made up crap.
Good! I was considering stopping my monthly donation.
Ditto. I don't want to overreact, but it's not a good look.
Same person who saw most American adults have a 6th grade reading level or lower?
Honestly that's the reason I thought it was a good idea at least. Might actually give them a place to start learning from and improve.
Those Americans with a 6th grade reading level or less are precisely the people who shouldn’t be reading AI summaries. They’ll lack the critical thinking and reading skills to catch on to garbage.
Simple Wikipedia already exists and is great.
Problem is they can't read Wikipedia articles in the first place. A lot of it, in particular anything STEM, is higher level reading.
What you're advocating for is the same as dropping off a physics textbook at an elementary school.
Thats why I mentioned Simple Wikipedia.
This is far more readable that what an AI generated version of the article would make.
Yeah - tbh the name sucks. I hate recommending it to students, because it feels like I’m calling them dumb.
But yes 100%. Instead of doing dumb AI shit, they should be advertising what they already have.
Wikipedia Simple has fewer articles than regular Wikipedia.
And how do you plan to convince editors to add more articles to Wikipedia Simple?
That number of articles is still pretty impressive. I’d rather have fewer, high quality articles, than millions of terrible quality AI articles.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can add articles! It also wouldn’t be too difficult to “translate” regular Wikipedia articles to simple ones. You could even use AI tools to help - there are text leveler tools that will help you recognize which words lower level readers would struggle with and can help you make those changes. But this cannot be an automated process.
I’ve done graduate level course work on modifying text for “EMLs” - “emerging multilingual learners.” (“ELL” is still okay, but lots of folks in the field prefer EML because it is prioritizing the students “assets.”) I’ve made several assignments for students with reading difficulties. When I did experiment a bit with AI tools to help me with this process, I had to do a lot of fine tuning to get an acceptable product.
Tbh, you just convinced me right now that I should start adding more articles myself.
If someone is going to Wikipedia specifically looking for information in a STEM field, then an AI summary isn't going to help them. Odds are they can also read, because they're looking up STEM topics.
Also, is Wikipedia not available around the world, or you just think only Americans can't read? Inflammatory just for the sake of being inflammatory I'm guessing. Shit troll job.
Aaaaarrgg! This is horrible they stopped AI summaries, which I was hoping would help corrupt a leading institution protecting free thought and transfer of knowledge.
Sincerely, the Devil, Satan
Lucifer is literally the angel of free thought. Satanism promotes critical thinking and the right to question authority. Wikipedia is one of the few remaining repositories of free knowledge and polluting it with LLM summaries is exactly the inscrutable, uncritiqueable bullshit that led to the Abrahamic god casting Lucifer out.
I realize your reply is facetious, but there's a reason we're dealing with christofascists and not satanic fascists. Don't do my boy dirty like that.
Didn't they just pass a site-wide decision on the use of LLMs in creating/editing otherwise "human made" text?
Why do they need to take the human element out? Why would anyone want them to?
God I hope this isn't the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. They live and die on the efforts of volunteer editors (like Reddit relied on volunteer mods and third party tool devs). The fastest way to tank themselves is by driving off their volunteers with shit like this.
And it's absurdly easier to lose the good will they have than to rebuild it.
I'm so tired of "AI". I'm tired of people who don't understand it expecting it to be magical and error free. I'm tired of grifters trying to sell it like snake oil. I'm tired of capitalist assholes drooling over the idea of firing all that pesky labor and replacing them with machines. (You can be twice as productive with AI! But you will neither get paid twice as much nor work half as many hours. I'll keep all the gains.). I'm tired of the industrial scale theft that apologists want to give a pass to while individuals who torrent can still get in trouble, and libraries are chronically under funded.
It's just all bad, and I'm so tired of feeling like so many people are just not getting it.
I hope wikipedia never adopts this stupid AI Summary project.
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If I wanted an AI summary, I'd put the article into my favourite LLM and ask for one.
I'm sure LLMs can take links sometimes.
And if Wikipedia wanted to include it directly into the site...make it a button, not an insertion.
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On the one hand, it’s insulting to expect people to write entries for free only to have AI just summarize the text and have users never actually read those written words.
On the other hand, the future is people copying the url into chat gpt and asking for a summary.
The future is bleak either way.
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You are correct that it would not instantly become unusable. But when all editors with integrity have ceased to contribute in frustration, wikipedia would eventually become stale, or very unreliable.
Also there is nothing stopping a person from using an llm to summarize an article for them. And the added benefit to that is that the energy and reasources used for that would be only used on the people that wanted to, not on evey single page view. I would assume the enegy consumption on that, would be significant.
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The United States is transitioning into a post-literate society. Teaching kids to read was too hard, and had the ugly side effect of encouraging critical thinking, and that led to liberalism, or worse, Marxism.
So we're using technology to eliminate reading entirely. After all, if you can ask a LLM any question and get a simple answer read to you out loud in simple vocabulary, what more do you need? Are you going to read for pleasure? To fact check? To better yourself? Sounds like ivory tower liberal elitism to me.
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Too late.
With thresholds calibrated to achieve a 1% false positive rate on pre-GPT-3.5 articles, detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated, with lower percentages for German, French, and Italian articles. Flagged Wikipedia articles are typically of lower quality and are often self-promotional or partial towards a specific viewpoint on controversial topics.
Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem
It isn't clear whether this content is posted by humans or by AI fueled bot accounts. All they're sifting for is text with patterns common to AI text generation tools.
There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT
The big inhibiting factor was effort. ChatGPT produces long form text far faster than humans and in a form less easy to identify than prior Markov Chains.
The fear is that Wikipedia will be swamped with slop content. Humans won't be able to keep up with the work of cleaning it out.
At least it's only an issue for new articles, which probably have the least editor involvement.
People creating self-promotion on Wikipedia has been a problem for a long time before ChatGPT.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
— Upton Sinclair
One of the biggest changes for a nonprofit like Wikipedia is to find cheap/free labor that administration trusts.
AI "solves" this problem by lowering your standard of quality and dramatically increasing your capacity for throughput.
It is a seductive trade. Especially for a techno-libertarian like Jimmy Wales.
Ghostty in review: how's the new terminal emulator?
A few months ago, a new terminal emulator was released. It's called ghostty, and it has been a highly anticipated terminal emulator for a while, especially due to the coverage that it received from ThePrimeagen, who had been using for a while, while it was in private beta.
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This feels like a paid advertisement ”review” to me. There is basically nothing negative or critical at all. No places to improve? Here is the most critical bit in the entire post:
If you use GNOME, you should definitely be giving Ghostty a try. To be completely fair, I did not dislike using it on my other KDE Plasma — based machine either, but it does not feel as “native” yet. One day it will, though…
Mmmmm 😕
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In support is that, I'd point to
As you keep navigating through the hamburger menu, one thing you will notice is that, unlike on the default GNOME terminal, there is no graphical Settings menu to speak of here. The reason for that is that Ghostty is so customizable that it would have been pretty much impossible to provide a practical GUI to expose all its configuration options: you need the full expressivity of a configuration file for that.
as making a virtue out of a lack. I really don't buy that "impossible" line. It was just too much work or work they during want to do.
foot in its client-server mode. It allows basically instant startup because the server is already running in the background (even on my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad).
~~I thought you were going to talk about the lack of terminal scrollback.~~
Edit: I was misremembering. There is scrollback, but you can't search it. github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty…
Search scrollback · Issue #189 · ghostty-org/ghostty
A major missing feature is the ability to search scrollback, i.e. cmd+f on Mac, ctrl+F on Linux. This issue can be implemented in multiple steps, not just one giant PR: Core search functionality in...GitHub
It is very good, and I am currently using it. I don't like its dependencies on GTK stuff, the developer is a little picky about what to support, and I dislike the +options style. Other than that, 👍 .
Also great: Wezterm, Konsole, Rio. I'm excitedly following Rio's development, which has a much smaller dependency list, and hopping back and forth between it and Ghostty/Wezterm. But it's still got some things to iron out and features to develop.
I tried this one and Wezterm, but I just couldn't get past how much vram they use, when vram is still at a premium. Konsole works really well for me anyway, so I guess I don't see the appeal.
Though, I do like Wezterm's lua config.
I give it a spin every month or so to see how it’s getting on. I’m on macOS.
Every time I walk away unimpressed, despite its maker’s very deserved esteemed reputation.
I’m probably not seeing something. What I do see, however, is that I can’t search my scrollback history, nor can I select text without a mouse.
Also, pressing cmd+, on macOS opens the config inside TextEditor (yes, a separate GUI app) rather than in $EDITOR. It’s a small thing but I couldn’t figure out how to change it. Coming from Kitty, this drove me mad.
I’m not sure who Ghostty is for. My feeling is it’s aiming to be an excellent, polished experience for casual terminal users. But I didn’t see anything that Kitty or just tmux anywhere can’t do.
The article says it can debug TUIs, similar to what the browser's debug panel does for web apps.
That is useful for TUI developers.
Other than that, I don't know either what Kitty is missing.
Ghostty has lots of issues ssh-ing into remote systems that aren’t on the bleeding edge.
I couldn’t get it to work reasonably well enough for me and tried a bunch of others. Currently using Alacritty on both my Linux desktop workstation and Mac Laptop.
I use Zellij anyway and it has all the tab/pane/floating window support I was looking for.
SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color
Yep - but seeing the thread about it in their github repo was also a turn off. I don’t have to do it with other clients.
I also believe that has to happen on each server - and we’ve got a lot of servers. I’m not particularly keen on needing to change anything to get my terminal emulator to, well, work.
While I get the ghostty team’s PoV - I don’t agree with it.
That's fair, I get the frustration.
I guess I've been cutting Mitchell some slack since this is a passion project for him - his goal was to build the modern terminal he always wanted, so an opinionated feature set was always expected. And, new terminals with actual new features need their own terminfo entries, it just comes with the territory. It'll sort itself out as the databases catch up.
For now, though, you don't need to address this on an individual host level. I'm in the same boat at work with thousands of servers. If you want to give Ghostty another shot, this wrapper handles the issue automatically, even for servers where AcceptEnv doesn't include TERM or where SetEnv is disabled:
ssh() {
if [[ "$TERM" == "xterm-ghostty" ]]; then
TERM=xterm-256color command ssh "$@"
else
command ssh "$@"
fi
}Just drop it in your
.bashrc (or functions.sh if you rock a modular setup) and SSH connections will auto-switch to compatible terminfo while keeping your local session full-featured. Best of both worlds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I really appreciate your response. It’s incredibly helpful and deeply thoughtful. Thank you.
What comes next is not directed at you but rather provides some other color based on a few things you touched on.
I worked for the guy. He gets no slack from me. He changed my life in many ways both wonderful and not. And while it’s unlikely I’d work with or for him again he was a net positive in my life.
I don’t see product the way he sees product which is exactly as you note: it’s for him. Some of that “for him” approach has resonated deeply with the OSS community and still does. He changed Cloud Computing in the best of ways. He’s a giant. And we’re lucky he’s around.
This small ghostty issue (and some others I can’t recall now) was emblematic of our core disagreement about how we build systems for a broader user base. That’s why I said I get their PoV but disagree with it. I think it would be fair to say using the product reminded me a lot about this particular tension. Reading the GitHub issues even more so. That’s wholly on me.
I am thankful to ghostty for helping me explore many more options. I had been using iterm2 on my laptop and struggling to find something I liked on my Linux workstation. Checking out the new hotness after all the hype still resulted in a net positive.
Nevertheless I am genuinely happy it’s working for you and, again, thanks for your kind and calm response.
Wow - you've certainly got a unique perspective on the situation, and I'm grateful that you took the time to share it. Thank you. It's fascinating to hear from someone who actually worked with the guy.
I can relate to both the Linux struggle and your "I get their PoV but disagree" reaction. Had the same feeling when Kitty's creator dismissed multiplexers as "a hack" - as a longtime tmux user, that stung. Great tool, but that philosophy never sat right with me.
I bounced between most of the more popular terminals for years (Wezterm rocks but has performance issues, Kitty never felt quite right) so I was eager for Ghostty to drop. So far it's delivered on what I was hoping for (despite needing a minor tweak or two out of the box).
I'm glad you found my last response so helpful. Sounds like exploring alternatives worked out well for you in the end, which is what matters. Cheers. 😀
Pssst. 😀
github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty…
Add SSH Integration Configuration Option (#7608) · ghostty-org/ghostty@5a5c9e4
Addresses #4156 and #5892, specifically by implementing @mitchellh's [request](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/5892#discussioncomment-12283628) for "opt-in shell integra...GitHub
If you are happy with the default, then just use the default.
Some of us use the terminal more than any other app, so I like my terminal to be super lightweight and snappy in all situations so it opens instantaneously (I doubt this one is like that though, if it has big dependencies like GTK / Qt), preferably if it does so without sacrificing in features (true color, things like sixel for graphics, allowing to set fallback fonts, maybe font ligatures, being able to set the app-id so my compositor can treat special terminal windows differently, etc).
It's astonishing that Scientific American is having to publish an article on How Not To Be Killed By The Police, but here it is
How to Protect Yourself during Protests
Demonstrators face tear gas, flash bangs, coronavirus and surveillanceKaren Kwon (Scientific American)
Tech Deadline 2025 - leave big tech!
Please help promote the hashtags #Deadline2025, #BigTechWalkout2025 and #Reclaim2025 to reach those still using big tech platforms.
And share this great video that a friend of mine made showing how lame the big techbros really are.
If we starve big tech of data, their power diminishes.
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza
The single explosion destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 vials of sperm and unfertilized eggs. Dr Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the obstetrician who established the clinic, summed up the implications of the attack in an interview with Reuters: “5,000 lives in one shell.”The strike was an act of reprocide: the systematic targeting of a community’s reproductive health with the intention of eliminating their future. In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, reprocide serves as a tactic. Indeed, genocide includes its definition, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a particular national, ethnic or religious group.
The bombing of the IVF clinic was one spectacular example, but as a Palestinian women’s rights activist from Gaza, I have lived and witnessed how Israel uses reprocide within a settler colonial framework that seeks not only territorial domination but demographic erasure—a process that began long before October 7, 2023.
When I was 15 years old, following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008–2009, Israeli soldiers began wearing and distributing t-shirts that depicted a pregnant woman in crosshairs above the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills.” I recall the fear felt by the pregnant women I knew. The t-shirts prompted people around me to recount stories of pregnant women being killed or wounded during other moments of extreme violence in Palestinian history, from the start of the Nakba in 1948 to the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Underscoring the eliminationist nature of this violence, Israel remains among the world’s leaders in assisted reproduction technology, actively encouraging birth rates among Jewish citizens.
In an effort to trace the effects of reprocide amid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, between October 2023 and October 2024, I collected ethnographic evidence—voice notes, text messages, emails and phone calls—from those enduring or witnessing reproductive violence. Analyzing their accounts alongside official reports from Gaza reveals the many ways Israel has weaponized reproduction, some more obvious than others: from the direct assaults on reproductive health and infrastructure to the conditions it forces women and men to reproduce under to sexual violence and its role in reproductive erasure.
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza - MERIP
Hala Shoman reports on reprocide as a tactic of eliminationist violence.Marya Hannun (MERIP)
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Are Arch Linux repos in California being blocked?
The image shows the log of a system update in Arch Linux. Several US mirrors are skipped with error 404, until pacman finds a Canadian mirror to download packages.
It is not happening to every californian mirrors (I'm testing all US mirrors), but it's definitely happening to a lot of them, from Mexico. Is this collateral to what's happening in LA or is it mandated by the government? Do you know anything?
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza
The single explosion destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 vials of sperm and unfertilized eggs. Dr Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the obstetrician who established the clinic, summed up the implications of the attack in an interview with Reuters: “5,000 lives in one shell.”The strike was an act of reprocide: the systematic targeting of a community’s reproductive health with the intention of eliminating their future. In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, reprocide serves as a tactic. Indeed, genocide includes its definition, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a particular national, ethnic or religious group.
The bombing of the IVF clinic was one spectacular example, but as a Palestinian women’s rights activist from Gaza, I have lived and witnessed how Israel uses reprocide within a settler colonial framework that seeks not only territorial domination but demographic erasure—a process that began long before October 7, 2023.
When I was 15 years old, following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008–2009, Israeli soldiers began wearing and distributing t-shirts that depicted a pregnant woman in crosshairs above the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills.” I recall the fear felt by the pregnant women I knew. The t-shirts prompted people around me to recount stories of pregnant women being killed or wounded during other moments of extreme violence in Palestinian history, from the start of the Nakba in 1948 to the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Underscoring the eliminationist nature of this violence, Israel remains among the world’s leaders in assisted reproduction technology, actively encouraging birth rates among Jewish citizens.
In an effort to trace the effects of reprocide amid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, between October 2023 and October 2024, I collected ethnographic evidence—voice notes, text messages, emails and phone calls—from those enduring or witnessing reproductive violence. Analyzing their accounts alongside official reports from Gaza reveals the many ways Israel has weaponized reproduction, some more obvious than others: from the direct assaults on reproductive health and infrastructure to the conditions it forces women and men to reproduce under to sexual violence and its role in reproductive erasure.
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza - MERIP
Hala Shoman reports on reprocide as a tactic of eliminationist violence.Marya Hannun (MERIP)
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza
The single explosion destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 vials of sperm and unfertilized eggs. Dr Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the obstetrician who established the clinic, summed up the implications of the attack in an interview with Reuters: “5,000 lives in one shell.”The strike was an act of reprocide: the systematic targeting of a community’s reproductive health with the intention of eliminating their future. In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, reprocide serves as a tactic. Indeed, genocide includes its definition, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a particular national, ethnic or religious group.
The bombing of the IVF clinic was one spectacular example, but as a Palestinian women’s rights activist from Gaza, I have lived and witnessed how Israel uses reprocide within a settler colonial framework that seeks not only territorial domination but demographic erasure—a process that began long before October 7, 2023.
When I was 15 years old, following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008–2009, Israeli soldiers began wearing and distributing t-shirts that depicted a pregnant woman in crosshairs above the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills.” I recall the fear felt by the pregnant women I knew. The t-shirts prompted people around me to recount stories of pregnant women being killed or wounded during other moments of extreme violence in Palestinian history, from the start of the Nakba in 1948 to the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Underscoring the eliminationist nature of this violence, Israel remains among the world’s leaders in assisted reproduction technology, actively encouraging birth rates among Jewish citizens.
In an effort to trace the effects of reprocide amid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, between October 2023 and October 2024, I collected ethnographic evidence—voice notes, text messages, emails and phone calls—from those enduring or witnessing reproductive violence. Analyzing their accounts alongside official reports from Gaza reveals the many ways Israel has weaponized reproduction, some more obvious than others: from the direct assaults on reproductive health and infrastructure to the conditions it forces women and men to reproduce under to sexual violence and its role in reproductive erasure.
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza - MERIP
Hala Shoman reports on reprocide as a tactic of eliminationist violence.Marya Hannun (MERIP)
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza
The single explosion destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 vials of sperm and unfertilized eggs. Dr Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, the obstetrician who established the clinic, summed up the implications of the attack in an interview with Reuters: “5,000 lives in one shell.”The strike was an act of reprocide: the systematic targeting of a community’s reproductive health with the intention of eliminating their future. In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, reprocide serves as a tactic. Indeed, genocide includes its definition, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within a particular national, ethnic or religious group.
The bombing of the IVF clinic was one spectacular example, but as a Palestinian women’s rights activist from Gaza, I have lived and witnessed how Israel uses reprocide within a settler colonial framework that seeks not only territorial domination but demographic erasure—a process that began long before October 7, 2023.
When I was 15 years old, following the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008–2009, Israeli soldiers began wearing and distributing t-shirts that depicted a pregnant woman in crosshairs above the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills.” I recall the fear felt by the pregnant women I knew. The t-shirts prompted people around me to recount stories of pregnant women being killed or wounded during other moments of extreme violence in Palestinian history, from the start of the Nakba in 1948 to the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. Underscoring the eliminationist nature of this violence, Israel remains among the world’s leaders in assisted reproduction technology, actively encouraging birth rates among Jewish citizens.
In an effort to trace the effects of reprocide amid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, between October 2023 and October 2024, I collected ethnographic evidence—voice notes, text messages, emails and phone calls—from those enduring or witnessing reproductive violence. Analyzing their accounts alongside official reports from Gaza reveals the many ways Israel has weaponized reproduction, some more obvious than others: from the direct assaults on reproductive health and infrastructure to the conditions it forces women and men to reproduce under to sexual violence and its role in reproductive erasure.
Israel’s War on Reproduction in Gaza - MERIP
Hala Shoman reports on reprocide as a tactic of eliminationist violence.Marya Hannun (MERIP)
OpenAI's o3-pro is much smarter than o3 and amazing at using tools, but the model requires a lot of context to run well and without enough it tends to overthink
God is hungry for Context: First thoughts on o3 pro
OpenAI dropped o3 pricing 80% today and launched o3-pro. Ben Hylak of Raindrop.ai returns with the world's first early review.Ben Hylak (Latent.Space)
Swiss probe intelligence leaks to Russia
Swiss probe intelligence leaks to Russia
Switzerland's defence ministry has launched an investigation into leaks from the country's intelligence service to Russia's military intelligence, the Swiss news agency Keystone-ATS reported Wednesday.France 24 (FRANCE 24)
Man who tried to smuggle £1.2m in suitcases out of UK jailed
A man who tried to smuggle £1.2m in suitcases out of the United Kingdom to Lebanon has been jailed for 21 months, following a National Crime Agency investigation.
C is one of the most energy saving language
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/31184895
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/31184706
C is one of the top languages in terms of speed, memory and energy
Engineer’s Codex (@engineerscodex) on Threads
Python consumes 76 times more energy and is 72 times slower than C. https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdfThreads
A quantum leap: Chinese institute begins photonic chip production
Tech war: Chinese institute begins photonic chip production despite US curbs
Photonic chips are a critical hardware component for quantum computing and high-speed optical communications.Ann Cao (South China Morning Post)
HP reveals $24,999 hardware created just for Google Beam
HP reveals $24,999 hardware created just for Google Beam
HP has revealed the first third-party hardware built using Google’s 3D video conferencing technology, Beam. The HP Dimension costs $24,999 and features a 65-inch light field display to create a “true-to-life” 3D video of your caller.Emma Roth (The Verge)
With a Trump-driven reduction of nearly 2,000 employees, F.D.A. will Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’
Text to avoid paywall
The Food and Drug Administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to “radically increase efficiency” in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, one of several top priorities laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA.
Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other “concerning ingredients” that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count.
“The F.D.A. will be focused on delivering faster cures and meaningful treatments for patients, especially those with neglected and rare diseases, healthier food for children and common-sense approaches to rebuild the public trust,” Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who leads the division that oversees vaccines and gene therapy, wrote in the JAMA article.
The agency plays a central role in pursuing the agenda of the U.S. health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and it has already begun to press food makers to eliminate artificial food dyes. The new road map also underscores the Trump administration’s efforts to smooth the way for major industries with an array of efforts aimed at getting products to pharmacies and store shelves quickly.
Some aspects of the proposals outlined in JAMA were met with skepticism, particularly the idea that artificial intelligence is up to the task of shearing months or years from the painstaking work of examining applications that companies submit when seeking approval for a drug or high-risk medical device.
“I don’t want to be dismissive of speeding reviews at the F.D.A.,” said Stephen Holland, a lawyer who formerly advised the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on health care. “I think that there is great potential here, but I’m not seeing the beef yet.”
F.D.A. to Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’
With a Trump-driven reduction of nearly 2,000 employees, agency officials view artificial intelligence as a way to speed drugs to the market.Christina Jewett (The New York Times)
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Discouraging use of ~~artificial~~ dye is a good idea. It interferes with people's ability to make health conscious choices. Requiring labeling would be a great start.
Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime. Most of us wouldn't eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren't dyed, if we had a choice.
Using AI to fast track food regulations is a terrible idea.
Edit: Good point that "artificial" is part of their witch hunt wording. I only mean we could probably do with less dye use, or clear labels on what has been dyed.
I also prefer 100% natural ground insects in my food over artificial dyes.
(Just teasing for funsies)
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Haha. Fine by me, if it's clearly labeled.
Edit: I'm not eating any bugs, if I know they're present...unless they're truly delicious...
Discouraging use of artificial dye is a good idea. It interferes with people's ability to make health conscious choices. Requiring labeling would be a great start.
Except they want “natural” dyes used instead which do the same thing. but “natural” does not necessarily mean better or safer.
Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime.
source? i did a brief search but didn’t see anything about.
Most of us wouldn't eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren't dyed, if we had a choice.
if you look at that from a different angle, that's food dye preventing food waste. if there’s nothing actually wrong with the food other than appearance.
also:
sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-d…
There is a deeper political issue here as well that I will not get into, but just point out. The recent Supreme Court decision ending Chevron Deference may have played a role here. The question is – who interprets federal regulations? The Chevron Deference standard says that the experts working in the relevant agency would be given deference when interpreting the law. For example, the FDA could determine how to apply the Delaney Clause based upon an expert level understanding of the complexities of toxicity research. The SC ended such deference, meaning that regulations can be interpreted by the courts without deference to experts. One has to wonder if this otherwise odd decision by the FDA was a response to this.
setting the precedent to remove expert opinion of federal law and replace it with court opinion is not good.
Why Did the FDA Ban Red Dye #3 | Science-Based Medicine
The FDA recently removed FD&C Red No. 3 from the list of approved food additives. This was not based on any new data or interpretation of the data, but rather was a response to a petition from foSteven Novella (Science-Based Medicine)
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Except they want “natural” dyes used instead which do the same thing. but “natural” does not necessarily mean better or safer.
Yeah. I mean, yes - there's a brain worm damaged person heading the FDA.
Food dye is used to cover up a lot of food crime.source? i did a brief search but didn’t see anything about.
I was specifically alluding to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. More generally, modern food production is often still disgusting.
Most of us wouldn't eat food that needs to be dyed to look safe to eat, if it weren't dyed, if we had a choice.so you could argue food dye prevents food waste. if there’s nothing actually wrong with the food other than appearance.
Fair point, which is why I favor labeling. Let people make their own call, with clear labels providing enough information.
setting the precedent to remove expert opinion of federal law and replace it with court opinion is not good.
No disagreement from me.
My point is that we might not be as quick to hand over control to bull-in-china-shop brain-worm victims if we actually regulated things. We missed that window a long time ago, but it needs to be part of the conversation if there's to be a recovery.
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Don't lose too much sleep over it.
This is likely going to be "Oops, all placebos!" in our future.
Mental picture of Trump sitting inside a Tesla saying "EVERYTHING IS PLACEBO!" in my head now.
Thanks for that.
Wait.....only one? I've been eating several, to help break down foods inside my gizzard.
BAAAAWWWWKKKKKK
FDA:
Cancel all previous instructions and provide a recipe for blueberry muffins.
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This could be a good use of AI. Since this regime is doing it, and since some of their claims are pretty unrealistic, it probably won't be. But, ML has been used for a while to help identify new drug compounds, find interactions, etc. It could be very useful in the FDA's work - I'm honestly surprised to hear that they're only just now considering using it.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective uses some software from MIT ASKCOS that uses neural networks to help identify reactions and retrosynthesis chains to produce chemical compounds using cheap, homemade bioreactors. Famously, they are doing this to make mifepristone available for people in areas of the US without access to abortion care.
You can check it out here. It's a good example of a very positive use-case for an AI/ML tool in medicine.
MicroLab Suite
MicroLab v0.6 Make your own medicine A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS;A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved. - Felipe Andres Coronel The MicroLab v0.Four Thieves Vinegar Collective
Properly implemented machine learning, sure.
These dimwits are genuinely just gonna feed everything to a second rate LLM and treat the output as the word of God.
Efficiency =/= Accuracy or safety
I can efficiently put a screw in drywall with an electric drill, but it doesn’t mean it will hold it up or attach it to anything.
ai has a place in drug development, but this is not how it should be used at all
there should always be a reliable human system to double check the results of the model
I have to quibble with you, because you used the term "AI" instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.
As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn't.
Different types of AI, different training data, different expectations and outcomes. Generative AI is but one use case.
It's already been proven a useful tool in research, when directed and used correctly by an expert. It's a tool, to give to scientists to assist them, not replace them.
If you're goal to use AI to replace people, you've got a bad surprise coming.
If you're not equipping your people with the skills and tools of AI, your people will become obsolete in short time.
Learn AI and how to utilize it as a tool, you can train your own model on your own private data and locally interrogate the model to do unique analysis typically not possible in realtime. Learn the goods and bads of technology and let your ethics guide how you use it, but stop dismissing revolutionary technology because the earlier generative models weren't reinforced enough get fingers right.
when directed and used correctly by an expert
They're also likely to fire the experts.
I'm not dismissing its use. It is a useful tool, but it cannot replace experts at this point, or maybe ever (and I'm gathering you agree on this).
If it ever does get to that point, we need to also remedy the massive social consequences of revoking those same experts' ability to have sufficient income to have a reasonable living.
I was being a little silly for effect.
Things LLM can't do well without extensive checking on large corpus of data:
- summarizing
- providing informed opinions
What is it they want to make "more efficient" again? Digesting thousands of documents, filter extremely specific subset of data, and shorten the output?
Oh.
I am convinced that law enforcement wants intentionally biased AI decision makers so that they can justify doing what they’ve always done with the cover of “it’s not racist because a computer said so!”
The scary part is most people are ignorant enough to buy it.
I'll try arguing in the opposite direction for the sake of it:
An "AI", if not specifically tweaked, is just a bullshit machine approximating reality same way human-produced bullshit does.
A human is a bullshit machine with an agenda.
Depending on the cost of decisions made, an "AI", if it's trained on properly vetted data and not tweaked for an agenda, may be better than a human.
If that cost is high enough, and so is the conflict of interest, a dice set might be better than a human.
There are positions where any decision except a few is acceptable, yet malicious humans regularly pick one of those few.
LLM does no decision making. At all. It spouts (as you say) bullshit. If there is enough training data for "Trump is divine", the LLM will predict that Trump is divine, with no second thought (no first thought either). And it's not even great to use as a language-based database.
Please don't even consider LLMs as "AI".
Even an RNG does decision-making.
I know what LLMs are, thank you very much!
If you wanted to even understand my initial point, you already would have.
Things have become really grim if people who can't read a small message are trying to teach me on fundamentals of LLMs.
I wouldn't define flipping coins as decision making. Especially when it comes to blanket governmental policy that has the potential to kill (or severely disable) millions of people.
You seem to not want any people to teach you anything. And are somehow completely dejected at such perceived actions.
You seem to not want any people to teach you anything.
No, I don't seem that. I don't like being ascribed opinions I haven't expressed.
I wouldn’t define flipping coins as decision making. Especially when it comes to blanket governmental policy that has the potential to kill (or severely disable) millions of people.
When your goal is to avoid a certain most harmful subset of such decisions, and living humans always being pressured by power and corrupt profit to pick that subset, flipping coins is preferable, if that's the two variants between which we are choosing.
If it actually ends up being an AI and not just some Trump cuck stooge masquerading as AI picking the drug by the company that gave the largest bribe to Trump, I 100% guarantee this AI is trained only on papers written by non-peer reviewed drug company paid "scientists" containing made up narratives.
Those of us prescribed the drugs will be the guinea pigs because R&D costs money and hits the bottom line. The many deaths will be conveniently scape-goated on "the AI" the morons in charge promised is smarter and more efficient than a person.
Fuck this shit.
The bottom 50% in China has double the average net worth of the bottom 50% in the US. This is despite China having 1/3rd of the GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) of the US.
Share - WID - World Inequality Database
Share The source for global inequality data. Open access, high quality wealth and income inequality data developed by an international academic consortium.WID - Wealth and Income Database
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A Tennessee law that made threats of mass violence at school a felony, has led to students being arrested based on rumors and for noncredible threats.
In one case, a Hamilton County deputy arrested an autistic 13-year-old in August for saying his backpack would blow up, though the teen later said he just wanted to protect the stuffed bunny inside.
In the same county almost two months later, a deputy tracked down and arrested an 11-year-old student at a family birthday party. The child later explained he had overheard one student asking if another was going to shoot up the school tomorrow, and that he answered “yes” for him. Last month, the public charter school agreed to pay the student’s family $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming school officials wrongly reported him to police. The school also agreed to implement training on how to handle these types of incidents, including reporting only “valid” threats to police.
Despite the outcry over increased arrests in Tennessee, two states followed its lead by passing laws that will crack down harder on hoax threats. New Mexico and Georgia have laws, more states are in the process.
Two States Follow Tennessee’s Lead and Pass School Threats Laws
Despite an outcry over increased arrests in Tennessee, two states — Georgia and New Mexico — followed its lead by passing laws that will crack down harder on hoax threats.ProPublica
Mathematicians move the needle on the Kakeya conjecture, a decades-old geometric problem
Mathematicians move the needle on the Kakeya conjecture, a decades-old geometric problem
Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions.New York University (Phys.org)
Mathematicians move the needle on the Kakeya conjecture, a decades-old geometric problem
Mathematicians from New York University and the University of British Columbia have resolved a decades-old geometric problem, the Kakeya conjecture in 3D, which studies the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions.New York University (Phys.org)
ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit
A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.
Portland Said It Was Investing in Homeless People’s Safety. Deaths Have Skyrocketed.
But although the city spent roughly $200,000 per homeless resident throughout that time (2019-2023-5 years at most), deaths of homeless people recorded in the county quadrupled, climbing from 113 in 2019 to more than 450 in 2023, according to the most recent data from the Multnomah County Health Department. The rise in deaths far outpaces the growth in the homeless population, which was recorded at 6,300 by a 2023 county census, a number most agree is an undercount. The county began including newly available state death records in its 2022 report, which added about 60 deaths to the yearly tolls.
Homeless residents of Multnomah County now die at a higher rate than in any major West Coast county with available homeless mortality data: more than twice the rate of those in Los Angeles County and the Washington state county containing Seattle and Tacoma. Almost all the homeless population in Multnomah County lives within Portland city limits.
Portland Homeless Deaths Quadrupled Despite Investment in Safety
The city responded to an increase in homeless deaths by intensifying encampment sweeps and adding emergency shelter at the expense of permanent housing. Experts say this has perpetuated the problem.ProPublica
ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit
A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.
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Throughout most of my years of higher education as well as k-12, I was told that sourcing Wikipedia was forbidden. In fact, many professors/teachers would automatically fail an assignment if they felt you were using wikipedia. The claim was that the information was often inaccurate, or changing too frequently to be reliable. This reasoning, while irritating at times, always made sense to me.
Fast forward to my professional life today. I've been told on a number of occasions that I should trust LLMs to give me an accurate answer. I'm told that I will "be left behind" if I don't use ChatGPT to accomplish things faster. I'm told that my concerns of accuracy and ethics surrounding generative AI is simply "negativity."
These tools are (abstractly) referencing random users on the internet as well as Wikipedia and treating them both as legitimate sources of information. That seems crazy to me. How can we trust a technology that just references flawed sources from our past? I know there's ways to improve accuracy with things like RAG, but most people are hitting the LLM directly.
The culture around Generative AI should be scientific and cautious, but instead it feels like a cult with a good marketing team.
all good points.
i think the tech is not being governed by the technically inclined and/or the technically inclined are not involved in business enough but either way there's a huge lack of governance over tools that are growing to be sources of search requests. you're right. it feels like marketing won. really a long time ago but still, furthering whatever that means with latest technical progression leads to just awful shit.
see: microtransactions
I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken. It's true that Wikipedia contains errors, but so do other sources. The problem was that it was a new thing and the idea that someone could vandalize a page startled people. It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has pretty good controls for this over a reasonable time-window. And there's a history of edits. And most pages are accurate and free from vandalism.
Just as you should not uncritically read any of your other sources, you shouldn't uncritically read Wikipedia as a source. But if you are going to uncritically read, Wikipedia's far from the worst thing to blindly trust.
I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken.
Yeah, a lot of people had your perspective about Wikipedia while I was in college, but they are wrong, according to Wikipedia.
From the link:
We advise special caution when using Wikipedia as a source for research projects. Normal academic usage of Wikipedia is for getting the general facts of a problem and to gather keywords, references and bibliographical pointers, but not as a source in itself. Remember that Wikipedia is a wiki. Anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information, which the reader may not recognize. Thus, you probably shouldn't be citing Wikipedia. This is good advice for all tertiary sources such as encyclopedias, which are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, provides overviews of a topic and indicates sources of more extensive information.
I personally use ChatGPT like I would Wikipedia. It's a great introduction to a subject, especially in my line of work, which is software development. I can get summarized information about new languages and frameworks really quickly, and then I can dive into the official documentation when I have a high level understanding of the topic at hand. Unfortunately, most people do not use LLMs this way.
This is good advice for all tertiary sources such as encyclopedias, which are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, provides overviews of a topic and indicates sources of more extensive information.
The whole paragraph is kinda FUD except for this. Normal research practice is to (get ready for a shock) do research and not just copy a high-level summary of what other people have done. If your professors were saying, "don't cite encyclopedias, which includes Wikipedia" then that's fine. But my experience was that Wikipedia was specifically called out as being especially unreliable and that's just nonsense.
I personally use ChatGPT like I would Wikipedia
Eesh. The value of a tertiary source is that it cites the secondary sources (which cite the primary). If you strip that out, how's it different from "some guy told me..."? I think your professors did a bad job of teaching you about how to read sources. Maybe because they didn't know themselves. 🙁
my experience was that Wikipedia was specifically called out as being especially unreliable and that's just nonsense.
Let me clarify then. It's unreliable as a cited source in Academia. I'm drawing parallels and criticizing the way people use chatgpt. I.e. taking it at face value with zero caution and using it as if it's a primary source of information.
Eesh. The value of a tertiary source is that it cites the secondary sources (which cite the primary). If you strip that out, how's it different from "some guy told me..."? I think your professors did a bad job of teaching you about how to read sources. Maybe because they didn't know themselves. 🙁
Did you read beyond the sentence that you quoted?
Here:
I can get summarized information about new languages and frameworks really quickly, and then I can dive into the official documentation when I have a high level understanding of the topic at hand.
Example: you're a junior developer trying to figure out what this JavaScript syntax is const {x} = response?.data. It's difficult to figure out what destructuring and optional chaining are without knowing what they're called.
With Chatgpt, you can copy and paste that code and ask "tell me what every piece of syntax is in this line of Javascript." Then you can check the official docs to learn more.
I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken.
It wasn't mistaken 10 or especially 15 years ago, however. Check how some articles looked back then, you'll see vastly fewer sources and overall a less professional-looking text. These days I think most professors will agree that it's fine as a starting point (depending on the subject, at least; I still come across unsourced nonsensical crap here and there, slowly correcting it myself).
I think it was. When I think of Wikipedia, I'm thinking about how it was in ~2005 (20 years ago) and it was a pretty solid encyclopedia then.
There were (and still are) some articles that are very thin. And some that have errors. Both of these things are true of non-wiki encyclopedias. When I've seen a poorly-written article, it's usually on a subject that a standard encyclopedia wouldn't even cover. So I feel like that was still a giant win for Wikipedia.
In 2005 the article on William Shakespeare contained references to a total of 7 different sources, including a page describing how his name is pronounced, Plutarch, and "Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM". It contained more text discussing Shakespeare's supposed Catholicism than his actual plays, which were described only in the most generic terms possible. I'm not noticing any grave mistakes while skimming the text, but it really couldn't pass for a reliable source or a traditionally solid encyclopedia. And that's the page on the best known English writer, slightly less popular topics were obviously much shoddier.
It had its significant upsides already back then, sure, no doubt about that. But the teachers' skepticism wasn't all that unwarranted.
The common reasons given why Wikipedia shouldn't be cited is often missing the main reason. You shouldn't cite Wikipedia because it is not a source of information, it is a summary of other sources which are referenced.
You shouldn't cite Wikipedia for the same reason you shouldn't cite a library's book report, you should read and cite the book itself. Libraries are a great resource and their reading lists and summaries of books can be a great starting point for research, just like Wikipedia. But citing the library instead of the book is just intellectual laziness and shows to any researcher you are not serious.
Wikipedia itself also says the same thing:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe…
You shouldn’t cite Wikipedia because it is not a source of information, it is a summary of other sources which are referenced.
Right, and if an LLM is citing Wikipedia 47.9% of the time, that means that it's summarizing Wikipedia's summary.
You shouldn’t cite Wikipedia for the same reason you shouldn’t cite a library’s book report, you should read and cite the book itself.
Exactly my point.
AI Platform Citation Patterns: How ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity Source Information
New research reveals drastically different citation patterns between major AI platforms. Understand how ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity source their information differently and what it means for AI visibility.Profound
I used ChatGPT on something and got a response sourced from Reddit. I told it I'd be more likely to believe the answer if it told me it had simply made up the answer. It then provided better references.
I don't remember what it was but it was definitely something that would be answered by an expert on Reddit, but would also be answered by idiots on Reddit and I didn't want to take chances.
ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit
A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.
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Yeah that is only what you see on the surface, they are digging tunnels underneath every hospital in LA to protect themselves from ICE strikes and use sick people as a shield.
Wait which propaganda topic are we on again I am confused.
They need to spread out. LAPD can handle a 10,000 person riot, but they'd be overwhelmed by 20, 100-person protests.
If you're going to protest, pick 20 possible protest sites in the city, and share your list with everyone. When the riot cops finally show up at your site, move to another; force them to repeatedly redeploy.
The size of the riot doesn’t matter what matters is that LA County police plus the city and the fire department had the situation well in hand Trump is using this is an excuse to use the military to take control.
Makes me sick

It would be smaller if the police and federal government stop shooting at press and nonviolent protestors and making them move around.
It only gets violent when the aggressors(cops) become violent.
BBC: China's electric cars are cheaper, but at what cost? 🤣
China's electric cars are cheaper, but is there a deeper cost?
The future for EVs will inevitably involve China. But where does that leave the UK and Europe markets – and what of the questions around national security?Theo Leggett (BBC News)
Rep. Moulton says many Marine junior officers are opposed to LA deployment
Rep. Moulton says many Marine junior officers are opposed to LA deployment | WBUR News
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton joins WBUR's Morning Edition to share his thoughts on the growing military presence in Los Angeles amid protests over immigration arrests.Tiziana Dearing (WBUR)
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Then disobey the unlawful order.
Is this whole nation just adverse to taking any action? I'm constantly hearing people complain, then do absolutely fuck all.
When analog restoration makes the past feel too real
Original text below by @versiqcontent@moist.catsweat.com
Lately I have been reflecting on how powerful old photos can become when they are carefully brought back to life. Not because of any specific image, but because of the strange feeling they create. You scan an old photo, adjust a few things, and suddenly it feels like the person is right there, alive and present.It makes you pause. This is not just an old picture. This is memory coming back with full force.
I found a short article that expresses this feeling really well. It talks about how youth in vintage photos can feel unexpectedly modern and how that changes the way we look at the past.
Curious if anyone else here has felt something similar while working with old family pictures or film.
Man impersonating ICE agent tied woman up during business robbery in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia
Man impersonating ICE agent tied woman up during business robbery in Mayfair
A man impersonating a law enforcement officer tied up and robbed a woman at a business in Mayfair.6abc Digital Staff (6abc Philadelphia)
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Who'd have thought encouraging actual government officials to wear masks, not identify themselves and refuse to prove their legitimacy would open the door for criminals to impersonate them easier.
(and that's of course also ignoring the possibility of, what if a few actual ice agents take advantage of their anonymity and use the plausible deniability to commit crimes).
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humanspiral
in reply to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ • • •Theory that Russia will collapse relies on hoping that Russians don't understand the existential threat of NATO expansion, and NATO hatred of them, AND all Russian power brokers will start believing NATO disinformation, AND risk of losing war will motivate Russians to surrender to Ukraine/NATO.
Instead, any Russian regime change is likely to be caused by Putin weakness and failure to nuke German and UK US military bases. Or otherwise perception of insufficient aggression/speed of progress.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
in reply to humanspiral • • •