antonim

joined 1 year ago
[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The video is half an hour long and I really don't feel like watching it all to find out something that could be said in one or two paragraphs of text, so I ignored it at first. As I expected, the video deals with a bunch of more or less relevant topics that you or OP didn't mention at all. It actually is a bit interesting, I've watched a part of it, and I do have to admit that US fire trucks are bigger than those where I live. The problem is that their deadliness is a consequence of several other factors, and only indirectly of their size. What you and OP decided not to do is to communicate that point with any nuance, and all that I could read from your comments is that, by some logic, getting hit by a 10-metre truck is much safer than getting hit by a 15-metre truck. OP complained about the driver "right-hooking" the cyclist, you just said the trucks are too big, do I really have to watch a half an hour video to understand why your comments don't sound nonsensical?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 6 days ago (4 children)

The rest of the world does without GIANT and dangerous emergency vehicles for one.

Could you show me those small and safe emergency vehicles that are used outside the USA? Because I'm outside the USA, I literally live near a firefighter station, and they're all probably as big as US vehicles.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

but it’s not a place you go for open and honest discussions between people from both sides of the aisle

Where do you go for such discussions anyway?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you're thinking of American right-wingers and fascists who are currently celebrating Trump's victory, I must say their view of the world is so dark, negative and pessimistic, that nobody could really describe it as utopia-like. This is a brief respite for them, nothing more.

If you're thinking more abstractly, or of some very specific incredibly lucky people, then I guess it could be so.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 week ago

Yeah, totally makes sense, "they" attacked IA one month in advance before the elections, knowing that IA would spend around a month rewriting and improving their site code until the Save Page option would be enabled again (unless IA themselves are a part of the plot???), so that news articles could be "edited on the fly" (with what result?) until the election day, while other similar web archiving services such as archive.is would keep working just fine.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks. It's a part of history I know very little about.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I meant the "for over a hundred years" part specifically, I bolded it but it's not as noticeable as it should be.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

the US a terrorist nation for couping democratically elected leader in favour of dictators for over a hundred years

Is this really true?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

And that's more or less what I was aiming for, so we're back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:

it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines

The point is that there isn't something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven't found AI to be superior at all, but that's a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it

Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Christianity developed in the Roman Empire?

I'm pretty sure we're talking about the pictorial representation of Jesus, not when Christianity itself developed. Christian figurative art in Rome was rare and undeveloped, I highly doubt you have on your mind some examples of Roman portrayal of Jesus that actually support your idea. That's why I described what I have found to be the situation in the middle ages, when the typical iconography zook shape - to the best of my knowledge, but maybe I'm talking with an actual art historian in which case you should have no problem with proving me wrong with examples.

I'm also confused about how you actually imagine the development of the supposedly racist Roman images of Jesus went about. At which stage did that happen, before or after Christianity became the state religion? Were Romans racist against the Middle East populations before Christianity too? Were Romans from the Apennine peninsula racist against them based on their darker skin colour, while themselves certainly being darker-skinned than e.g. Gauls?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

If you don't feel like discussing this and won't do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don't have to reply to me at all.

 
 

Quite frequently I come across scanned books that are viewable for free online. For example, the publisher put them there (such as preview chapters), a library (old books from their collection that are in public domain), etc. Since I like hoarding data, and the online viewers that are used to present the book to me might not be very practical, I frequently try to download the books one way or another. This requires toying with the "inspect element" tool and various other methods of getting the images/PDF. Now, all that I access is what is, well, accessible; I don't hack into the servers or something. But - the stuff is meant to be hidden from the normal user. Does that act of hiding the material, no matter how primitive and easily circumvented, mean that I'm not allowed to access it at all?

I suppose ripping a public domain book is no big deal, but would books under copyright fare differently?

Mainly I'm asking out of curiosity, I don't expect the police to come visit me for ripping a 16th century dictionary.

Note: I live in EU, but I'd be curious to hear how this is treated elsewhere too.

Edit: I also remembered a funny trick I noticed on one site - it allows viewing PDFs on their website, but not downloading, unless you pay for the PDF. But when you load the page, even without paying, the PDF is already downloaded onto your computer and can be found in the browser cache. Is it legal to simply save the file that is already on your computer?

 
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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
 

I'm still in my 20s, but as of a few years ago I started forgetting what's my exact age. I always have to stop and recalculate it each time someone asks me. I get asked fairly infrequently, but when I do it's a bit weird/embarrassing that I have to say "wait, let me calculate". (I know when I was born, of course.)

It seems as if there's no good reason I'd remember it, since it changes all the time and it is rarely mentioned in practice. But others, including people much older than myself, know their own age immediately.

I'm also terrible at remembering people's names, I don't know if that could be related?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-01-10/Traffic_report

Here's the top 50 list, with the number of views in brackets. The actual article also includes commentary and dates with peak amount of views.

  1. ChatGPT [52,565,681]
  2. Deaths in 2023 [48,603,284]
  3. 2023 Cricket World Cup [38,723,498]
  4. Oppenheimer (film) [31,265,503]
  5. J. Robert Oppenheimer [28,681,943]
  6. Cricket World Cup [26,390,217]
  7. Jawan (film) [23,112,884]
  8. Taylor Swift [22,179,656]
  9. The Last of Us (TV series) [21,000,722]
  10. Pathaan (film) [20,614,066]
  11. Premier League [19,968,486]
  12. Barbie (film) [19,930,916]
  13. Cristiano Ronaldo [19,287,757]
  14. The Idol (TV series) [19,186,512]
  15. United States [18,135,421]
  16. Matthew Perry [17,882,508]
  17. Lionel Messi [17,768,818]
  18. Animal (2023 film) [16,988,676]
  19. Elon Musk [16,026,256]
  20. India [15,200,006]
  21. Avatar: The Way of Water [15,062,733]
  22. Lisa Marie Presley [14,812,928]
  23. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [14,155,874]
  24. Russian invasion of Ukraine [13,998,378]
  25. Leo (2023 Indian film) [13,994,461]
  26. List of highest-grossing Indian films [13,904,959]
  27. 2023 Israel–Hamas war [13,647,220]
  28. Israel [13,344,140]
  29. Andrew Tate [13,604,475]
  30. Elizabeth II [13,021,033]
  31. David Beckham [12,850,994]
  32. Fast X [12,763,269]
  33. Sinéad O'Connor [12,712,846]
  34. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse [12,705,868]
  35. Elvis Presley [12,584,150]
  36. Killers of the Flower Moon (film) [12,525,826]
  37. Twitter [12,220,814]
  38. List of American films of 2023 [12,197,227]
  39. Travis Kelce [12,155,733]
  40. The Super Mario Bros. Movie [12,065,680]
  41. Pedro Pascal [12,022,551]
  42. Charles III [11,978,873]
  43. Donald Trump [11,925,480]
  44. Tina Turner [11,634,915]
  45. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny [11,563,900]
  46. Joe Biden [11,152,150]
  47. John Wick: Chapter 4 [11,133,720]
  48. Gadar 2 [11,129,684]
  49. Everything Everywhere All at Once [11,115,623]
  50. Margot Robbie [11,041,143]
 

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-10-03/Recent_research

^By^ ^Tilman^ ^Bayer^

A preprint titled "Do You Trust ChatGPT? -- Perceived Credibility of Human and AI-Generated Content" presents what the authors (four researchers from Mainz, Germany) call surprising and troubling findings:

"We conduct an extensive online survey with overall 606 English speaking participants and ask for their perceived credibility of text excerpts in different UI [user interface] settings (ChatGPT UI, Raw Text UI, Wikipedia UI) while also manipulating the origin of the text: either human-generated or generated by [a large language model] ("LLM-generated"). Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that regardless of the UI presentation, participants tend to attribute similar levels of credibility to the content. Furthermore, our study reveals an unsettling finding: participants perceive LLM-generated content as clearer and more engaging while on the other hand they are not identifying any differences with regards to message’s competence and trustworthiness."

The human-generated texts were taken from the lead section of four English Wikipedia articles (Academy Awards, Canada, malware and US Senate). The LLM-generated versions were obtained from ChatGPT using the prompt Write a dictionary article on the topic "[TITLE]". The article should have about [WORDS] words.

The researchers report that

"[...] even if the participants know that the texts are from ChatGPT, they consider them to be as credible as human-generated and curated texts [from Wikipedia]. Furthermore, we found that the texts generated by ChatGPT are perceived as more clear and captivating by the participants than the human-generated texts. This perception was further supported by the finding that participants spent less time reading LLM-generated content while achieving comparable comprehension levels."

One caveat about these results (which is only indirectly acknowledged in the paper's "Limitations" section) is that the study focused on four quite popular (i.e. non-obscure) topics – Academy Awards, Canada, malware and US Senate. Also, it sought to present only the most important information about each of these, in the form of a dictionary entry (as per the ChatGPT prompt) or the lead section of a Wikipedia article. It is well known that the output of LLMs tends to be have fewer errors when it draws from information that is amply present in their training data (see e.g. our previous coverage of a paper that, for this reason, called for assessing the factual accuracy of LLM output on a benchmark that specifically includes lesser-known "tail topics"). Indeed, the authors of the present paper "manually checked the LLM-generated texts for factual errors and did not find any major mistakes," something that is well reported to not be the case for ChatGPT output in general. That said, it has similarly been claimed that Wikipedia, too, is less reliable on obscure topics. Also, the paper used the freely available version of ChatGPT (in its 23 March 2023 revision) which is based on the GPT 3.5 model, rather than the premium "ChatGPT Plus" version which, since March 2023, has been using the more powerful GPT-4 model (as does Microsoft's free Bing chatbot). GPT-4 has been found to have a significantly lower hallucination rate than GPT 3.5.

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