“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

    • There’s zero consistent theme.
    • The images are generated.
    • They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
    • It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
    • The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
    • At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

    Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?








  • 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.


  • That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

    1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
    2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
    3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

    It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.


  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldMissing project?
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    1 month ago

    it shouldn't be that hard?

    OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

    The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.


  • The difference: Israel is in Syria for imperialist aggression. Ukraine is in Ukraine to protect their homeland from imperialist aggresssion. Combine that with Israel’s pathological need to cover up and deny their extensive, seemingly neverending war crimes in Gaza… Yeah, I don’t have any faith until Israel can prove this was opsec rather than covering up. Israel has destroyed their chance for benefit of the doubt.

    Even if it is opsec, they have no right being there, so fuck 'em. I hope their opsec isn’t maintained and their soldiers do die in much the same way I’d hope for a Russian base in Donetsk.


  • I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.


    Re: Entropy:

    • Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
    • Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.





    • I’ve shown you how The Guardian has quoted a statement from the police about the Tesla incendiary to the exact same effect. So “it sure does feel like a pattern” sure feels a lot like bullshit you made up with no evidence.
    • After an FBI statement called it an “intentional act of terrorism”, the Guardian article now references this three separate times (I think this was changed like a few hours after you wrote your comment).
    • You’re making up a ridiculous strawman about colloquial versus technical terminology, where in reality domestic terrorism’s legal definition is how it’s used colloquially. You did read what I linked, right? Four hours after the bombing, where was the evidence the police were supposed to present showing it was terrorism in the colloquial sense? That it happened at a fertility clinic? Did you play Ace Attorney and think “Now that’s how we should do detective work”?
    • “be[ing] very carefully precise with language” is 1) exactly what the police should be doing and consequently 2) exactly what any reputable newspaper should be reporting in the immediate aftermath absent additional sources, and 3) not even what was happening here; if you think not throwing around “terrorism” in the immediate aftermath of a bombing where the perpetrator is dead is “very carefully precise”, then I hope high school essays and forum posts are the extent of your writing. If you want sensationalist bullshit, don’t rag on good outlets; go to Newsweek and consume your slop.
    • Not at all what sealioning is.

    I don’t know what you want except to make yourself look like a jackass who can’t learn from their mistake when gracefully given the opportunity.



  • Didn’t this just happen less than four hours ago? And ostensibly the perpetrator is dead? The police aren’t lawyers and have more leeway with what they accuse people of (let alone a dead(?) person), but domestic terrorism has a specific criminal definition. In four hours, the police have responded, gotten people to safety, made sure the attacker was dead(?) and there were no others, and started to investigate the scene. And you surmise that during that investigation, they’ve so far found compelling evidence this person whose corpse(?) may not even be identified yet was motivated by one of the intentions in Criterion B?

    Also, who’s “they” who very actively came out with terrorism first? Trump and Musk? Because literally of course the fascists did. I’d like to see what the police said in the first few hours of those attacks. Moreover, why do you want to whataboutism to alleged bad police behavior elsewhere to explain why the police should behave badly here?


    Edit: here’s how The Guardian covered a story about an incendiary device at a Tesla dealership two months ago. Notice how it’s fascist Trump mouthpiece Pam Bondi talking about “terrorism” so immediately, while the police statement mentions nothing of the sort.

    “On Monday, March 24, 2025, at approximately 8.04am, Austin police department (APD) officers responded to a found/abandoned hazardous call at the Tesla dealership located at 12845 N US 183 Hwy SVRD NB,” Austin police department said in a statement shared with CBS Austin.

    “When officers arrived on scene, they located suspicious devices and called the APD bomb squad to investigate. The devices, which were determined to be incendiary, were taken into police custody without incident. This is an open and ongoing investigation, and there is no further information available for release at this time.”


  • They’re happy to call it an intentional act of violence, so they’ve ruled out a lot of the explanations for an exploding car.

    That’s Criterion A and the first part of Criterion B* of domestic terrorism. There are three criteria, and the second part of Criterion B is the hardest.

    The bar for “terrorism” is pretty low - they charged an Atlanta student with is for tossing bottles of water and dry ice out his window.

    The bar for terrorism is as defined in what I just linked, and specifically Criterion B is where most of the uncertainty would lie.

    Regardless, it’s definitely a journalistic choice whether to quote the police lieutenant’s very careful, and possibly technical statement, or to quote the business owner (Musk) or US President speculating.

    The Guardian is a UK-based center-left newspaper with a generally good track record of journalistic integrity. Yes, quoting the police lieutenant is a choice here, because it’s the correct one. They currently have the most information about the situation. This isn’t rhetorical, I genuinely don’t understand: do you want them quoting Trump’s unhinged rant about this bombing that I don’t think he’s even put out yet?

    And maybe it just turns out that it’s carefully ethical journalists reporting on potential right-wing violence, and usually unethical hacks reporting on possible attacks on the corporatocracy, but it sure does feel like a pattern.

    Dude, it’s The Guardian. Here’s how they recently covered Tesla dealerships if you care to explain how it’s biased compared to this story.


    * By “first part of”, I mean the phrase “appears to be intended”. What it appears to be intended to do is the hard part.