My account was also randomly suspended recently, but I regained access after submitting an appeal to X support. [1]

An acquaintance of mine was also suspended due to “inauthentic behavior.” probably still suspended even now. [2]

[1] https://rtnf.substack.com/p/altilunium-chronoo

[2] https://x.com/i/status/2043104069259268335

I got one beetle at first, then the rest of them were all nematodes.

Last time I did that, I got pointed out as an ESL and got insulted and laughed at.

Honestly that's a sign you shouldn't stay around those people. If you're financially dependent on it and can't leave, okay, exception granted, but that kind of behavior isn't ok.

Sounds like terrible people. I’ve worked with plenty of people who didn’t start with English and if you give them time they usually excel

I use my own text editor too.

Sometimes I get surprise questions from my friends whenever they see my screen. “What’s that?” “That’s my own text editor!”

I’m currently writing my own text editor (it’s basically a markdown equivalent of Jupyter notebooks).

I’ve also written my own terminal emulator and my own shell. The shell does actually see other contributors and users these days too.

You can perform a legitimate muscle-flex when saying that too.

Here’s a similar case, but she handled it differently : https://teletype.in/@cyllchuesnconii/TSwR1AAfffT

I made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2]

[1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/

[2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem

That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)

What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.

The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.

I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)

Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.

Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.

The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).

The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.

You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.

Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.

SO was supposed to be much the same, though. I guess you really do have to get directly funded by users for the model to work.

If we kill all the platforms where content for training LLMs comes from, what do LLMs train on?

This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?

Newspapers, scientific papers and soon, real-world interactions.

News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information

You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.

This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.

I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.

Most people went to SO because they had to for their job. Most people go to Wikipedia because they want to, for curiosity and learning.

LLMs will use Wikipedia the same way humans use it

since i actually love the act of solving real-world problems by building programs (and not the act of programming itself), writing specs and shepherding robot monkeys with typewriters is an acceptable means to an end

To each their own.