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582
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Fucking blood diamonds that don't even cut glass.

  • Your first line is a confession that you are a bad person.

  • Enclosed please find one (1) complimentary ticket to the egress.

  • OK, I will reflect on why you think that comment was unfair.

  • Even setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed — which, frankly, we probably shouldn't set aside — yeah, it's just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.

    Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

  • That Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldn't spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll's law of media accuracy" from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipedia's policy.

    By Crichton's logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!

  • I got curious whether the Wikipedia article for Bayes' theorem was burdened by LessWrong spam. I don't see overt indications of that, but even so, I'm not too impressed.

    For example:

    P(B|A) is also a conditional probability: the probability of event B occurring given that A  is true. It can also be interpreted as the likelihood of A given a fixed B because P(B|A) = L(A|B).

    The line about "likelihood" doesn't explain anything. It just throws in a new word, which is confusing because the new word sounds like it should be synonymous with "probability", and then adds a new notation, which is just the old notation but backwards.

    P(A) and P(B) are the probabilities of observing A and B respectively without any given conditions; they are known as the prior probability and marginal probability.

    But both P(A) and P(B) are marginal probabilities; they're the marginals of the joint probability P(A,B).

    The first citation is to one random guy's book that's just his presentation of his own "subjective logic" theory. And that reference was originally added to the article by (no prizes for guessing) the author himself, writing a whole section about his own work!

    There are long stretches without citations, which I've been given to understand is frowned upon. On the other hand, one of the citations that does exist is to a random tutoring-help website whose "about us" page crashed Firefox on my phone. (I have been trying other browsers on my laptop, but not on mobile yet, due to finiteness of brain energy.)

  • Just in case you needed to induce vomiting:

    The Universal AI University has implemented a novel admissions process, leveraging the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This system integrates optimization algorithms, crowd-generating tools, and visual enhancement technologies within the Metaverse, offering a unique and technologically advanced admissions experience for students.

  • Let's see, it cites Scott Computers, a random "AI Safety Fundamentals" website, McKinsey (four times!), a random arXiv post....

  • From how they're labeled, I think they cycle every day?

  • None of my acquaintances who have Wikipedian insider experience have much familiarity with the "Did you know" box. It seems like a niche within a niche that operates without serious input from people who care about the rest of the project.

    "In The News" is apparently also an editor clique with its own weird dynamics, but it doesn't elevate as many weird tiny articles to the Main Page because the topics there have to be, you know, in the news.

  • Reflection (artificial intelligence) is dreck of a high order. It cites one arXiv post after another, along with marketing materials directly from OpenAI and Google themselves... How do the people who write this shit dress themselves in the morning without pissing into their own socks?

  • Counterpoint: I get to complain about whatever I want.

    I could write a lengthy comment about how a website that is nominally editable by "anyone" is in practice a walled garden of acronym-spouting rules lawyers who will crush dissent by a thousand duck nibbles. I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.

    Or I could ban you for fun. I haven't decided yet. I'm kind of giddy from eating a plate of vegan nacho fries and a box of Junior Mints.

  • "Vibe coding? Back in my day, we called it teledildonics."

  • Please acquaint yourself with the definition of the word latter on your way to the egress.