We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.

It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.

The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.

It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.

You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.

In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.

That’s what the “Talk” section functionally does. People can (and do) check it when an article has lots of frequent heavy editing. And a lot of these edits do get rolled back as they’re exposed, as Wikipedia admins are reasonably good at keeping the propaganda generically pro-western rather than nakedly for-profit or regionally partisan.

At the same time, Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian who is constantly putting his hand out to keep the website funded and operational. I have to assume there’s a certain degree of self-dealing happening in the background just to keep the site from getting the kind of abuse suffered by Internet Archive or Anna’s Archive.

Previous civilizations didn’t have the level of technology required to “end the world” in the literal sense.

Modern civilizations don’t have that level of technology. We can make earth inhospitable to a lot of humans and a lot of mammals. But we’re living through the 6th global extinction event, not the 1st. In a million years, modern humanity will be a distant memory one way or another and life will continue to thrive.

The worst case scenario of climate change is the inverse temperature variation of the last great Ice Age. This was an event that killed billions. But it was not an event that extinguished all life. Not even an event that extinguished all human life. And that’s at the end of the century - 2100 - a year none of us were going to see under the most ideal conditions.

It would be presumptuous to believe our grandchildren would live to see “the end of the world”. To insist its happening in the next 40-60 years? Come on.

I make it to “the end of the day” seven times a week.

That’d definitely a better way to understand history. We’ll all live to see the end of our own cycle of existence. Then we’ll pass the torch.

“Every other civilization that’s fallen doesn’t count. Only my personal experience is real” is a narcissistic sentiment.

I wouldn’t even strictly call it pessimistic, as a lot of the “World is ending” attitude comes from people who have a sadistic desire to see others (particularly privileged elites) kicked out of their comfort zones. I would call it a kind of learned helplessness, as the implicit assumption of living through the End of the World is that we’re beyond the point at which you’re responsible for what comes next.

“The world will end in my lifetime” is one of the more narcissistic takes a human can express.

People on Lemmy hate when you know any amount of history

Any suggestion that there’s something questionable or unreliable about the American democratic process is a trick by the Republican Party to suppress liberal voter enthusiasm. And if you mention it you are helping the Republicans win. Also Russia.

If you’re still in line, stay in line. Our elections are secure. The midterms is winnable if you vote in it. Shut up and do what we tell you or you’re an enemy.

It’s very rational, very scientific.

It’s a simple heuristic based on an 80 year old party game. You can argue it is scientific as an empirical methodology, but it isn’t objective in analysis.

Or believed that people are rational enough to be swayed by facts and logic.

I don’t know how you get a “fact” out of the imitation game. If anything, the game exposes the subjectivity of the subject being analyzed. You can apply logic based on certain axioms, but what are the axioms upon which the definition of “thinking” (or “gender”) are built?

The former, at the very least, is a complex philosophical snarl that could have a tangible answer. The latter is a muddled interpretation of biological sex and social norms, with the social norms taking much higher precedence.

But a “pass” on either one is ultimately rooted in the savvy of the listener not the objective reality of the speakers. Talking about facts and logic in the imitation game is like talking about facts and logic in a poker game. At some point, you’re just going to have to guess based on incomplete information. That doesn’t mean a bluff is the same as a winning hand.

Hard to image a 114 year old Allen Turing not being a shameless geek for modern computer technology. Although, inter-generational attitudes among LGBTQ being what they are, I suspect we’d get a 4000 word easy in The Guardian about how the New Gays Are Doing It Wrong.

The Turing Test is innately arbitrary. “Real” AI can fail the Turing Test for a sufficiently skeptical test taker. Humans can fail the test. Meanwhile, we had very simple chat bots that passed the Turing Test as early as the 1970s.

I would say that “AI Slop” as a pejorative illustrates a sizeable portion of the public aren’t yet fooled. At the same time…

Some people are more gullible than others.

I enjoy the season one art

I don’t think Zhang wrote the headline.

Sort of the dig with these stories. Universal problems get spun as Uniquely Bad Country problems and “Chinese engineer gives his fellow enthusiasts good advice” becomes “Don’t trust hardware from Bad Country”

Well… that’s the line.

But there’s a lot of unreliable narration in The Matrix. The whole movie is riddled with metaphor and innuendo, which is one of the things that makes it so good. I read one analysis - back before the third movie dropped - that Neo, Morphus, and Trinity were actually one person operating at some higher level of The Matrix, and that this was a very explicit and somewhat heavy handed metaphor for being interracial and transgender Jesus.

As a number of the AIs are nakedly hostile to humanity and resentful of needing them to exist at all, its very possible that “you fuckers just couldn’t accept the nice world we built for you” is more a sneering justification for tormenting the captive human population than a serious problem with running a simulation that isn’t torturous.

Honestly, the worst thing about the series was how the final films tried to make everything literal and sensible in between elaborate action scenes. By contrast, many of The Animatrix shorts did an excellent job of playing with the ideas laid out in the first two movies without ever really tipping a hand or issuing canonical declaration of what was Real and what was Simulation.

I’m a Millenial and use lol and lmao

My Greatest Generation grandmother also used them, particularly in her waning years

lmao

This seems to be the bottom of every “America Good, China Bad” argument.

Just 😂🤣🇺🇸😹. It’s Obvious, Idiot. Just Think Logically.

Its not that Chinese tech is any more secure fundamentally

Is it? Is this worth interrogating, even slightly? Is there any actual difference between industrial models or design philosophies?

No. Lolz. Roflcopter.

Americans are going to be so fucked when the only companies producing consumer hardware at scale at labeled “Bad China Companies”.

I remember people hating Japan and Korea back in the '80s, before Sony and Samsung killed Magnavox and strangled Phillips.

I guess time is a flat circle

Are you truly implying it’d be more secure to buy Chinese tech then US specifically

Only if your primary concern was US-centric surveillance. If you cared about Chinese surveillance, idfk. Big hanging question mark as to whether American native systems are more compromised than Chinese native systems. All I can say for sure is that American systems are confirmed compromised by both US-friendly surveillance and Chinese hacker groups.

That’s quite the take lmao.

It’s very easy to believe “Thing from China bad because China Bad”. But once you look into the actual security schema for these tools and applications, you discover Americans did an excellent job of leaving their hardware exposed to domestic infiltration and a terrible job of securing it against foreign intrusion.

Hey look at that: about 70% of the Cuban voters in Florida votes for this.

You have a population that is fully drowning in the worst kind of right-wing propaganda. Hell, look up Operation Peter Pan. Children kidnapped from Cuba who were brought to US indoctrination camps and turned into the next generation of frothing Castro-hating anti-communists. Entire cottage industries of right-wing press to keep Floridians ever vigilante against the slightest whiff of socialism. CIA-backed human trafficking intended to shuttle young girls and loads of drugs between Havana and Miami. Billionaires minted from the flood of military industrial spending, state surveillance, blockading, and torture black sites.

To say “Cubans voted for this” you have to believe the Cuban is just some dumb chud living in a vacuum. The Miami Cuban isn’t an organic consequence of Floridian culture. A Miami Cuban is a manufactured good. Its the closest thing we have to full on brainwashing. Just systematically programmed from birth to be the reactionary vanguard. South Florida is America’s Israel. It is a product and a consequence of decades of US foreign policies.