Yeah, gonna be honest. I ridiculed people for it before, but now I use Google's AI a lot. I haven't used Google in over a decade otherwise and I still don't. I use Brave for search but Google's AI is better than anyone else's for what I do. You heard it guys, I was wrong. I admit it.
Google's search AI caused a panic in my household just several nights ago. We were looking up an issue with our pet and the very first thing my partner saw searching google was an AI answer saying you need to panic, this is an emergency, get your animal to an emergency room asap before they die. That of course kicked her into Oh Shit mode. But aside from that answer none of the actual search results either of us were finding backed up the AI.
We had to decide whether or not to drag our pet to an after hours emergency vet, with all the associated stress and cost, or ignore the AI result and go off everything else we were reading. It's one thing to dismiss AI answers that seem wrong when it's a domain I know well or the stakes are low, but this was not that type of scenario.
In the end we opted to ignore google's AI and fortunately it was absolutely the right call. So, thanks google.
I think that's foolish engagement with the technology though. Never panic, always double check. I don't take it as factual. It's just a statistical summary of something it read and it must always be treated as such. In your case, why not just ask 5 other AI's and take a poll?
Google's AI is solid, but a lot of its benefit comes from the fact that it hasn't been enshittified into the ground like their search. The plain incontrovertible benefit is that it has the potential to reduce clicks from the user - instead of sending the UX through clicking into sites and then back to the main search pane the information is immediately available. That click through ends up being expensive for three main reasons 1 - the site is sometimes potato though google "solved" this with amp, 2 - it takes a while to scroll to the site entry passed all the sponsored links (a problem google created for themselves) and 3 - paywalls and "Please subscribe to our newsletter" popups are legion, but while this was always a little bit of a problem, it is a much more pronounced problem due to 1, the insertion of amp that threatens financial ruin on being crawled by google.
So, at the end of the day Google's AI is better than ye olde Google Search, and ye olde Google Search is now very difficult to accomplish because of how much Google has poisoned the well. Kagi is excellent but most normal people can't stomach paying for search when there's a "free" alternative so your options are Google's AI, Google's Search or and alternative search - most normal folks don't realize non-Google search alternatives exist (outside like Bing) so Google's AI ends up capturing a lot of usage.
Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.
Well, they've mostly left reddit as well, afaik. It's a few stragglers, people being paid to push agenda, and auto-moderation now. I was reading / moderating reddit for over 4 hours a day, every day, for close to a decade. Heavy handed pro israeli censorship and propaganda has seen me pick up and leave, as i know many others have done. I was already wavering, over reddit's support of astroturfing and shill bots which were obvious, detectable, and reddit refused to do anything about it. Even actively supported it. So with the whole denying /actively supporting genocide thing, it was time to hang it up and leave.
If wikipedia is shutting off avenues for community input, maybe that is running it's course as well.
Its been nice internet, I loved you, and I will never forgive google for what they put into motion.
Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.
Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.
Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:
"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."
If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!
But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.
Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.
At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.
The complete omittance of even acknowledging we have invented modern animal horrors far worse to work on first makes it sound like we just need to do better than other animals. Willfully ignoring that to act like doing so is a form of agreement between the statements is a bit gruesome itself.
I'm glad you want to handle some of the problem, but let's not act like we just need to do better than other animals is all to discuss. It's easy enough to agree with the full problem unless you're fine with the other parts.
Factory farming refers to a wide set of practices that range from loathsome to banal.
I don't see how the use of this technology makes factory farming any worse than it already is. Maybe it saves male chicks from the shredder, making it slightly less loathsome.
That's just incredible. People used to be so much better at programming, or at least great programmers had it easier to get funded. Most of what I see today is exceptionally low quality and just getting worse with time.
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