You guys don’t get it apparently but once the thing became corrupted, got a whiff of power and money, there is no chance they are going to be persuaded into anything long term. They may appear to do so short term to appease but money corrupts permanently.
Don’t be afraid of destroying things. Wikipedia isn’t unique or precious really. Some extended pressure would really rejuvenate the idea of such site in one way or another.
It is doubtful if anyone is in power to pressure them at this point though. Wmf grown like a tumour on the back of the site.
Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of misinformation in all of human history. It is at best good for satiating an idle curiosity with some plausible-sounding fun facts to amuse oneself with without care for whether they're really true or not, but so many people rely on it for so much more, and I have little doubt it causes more harm than good. Real encyclopedias with professional standards exist.
What truly grinds my gears about Wikipedia isn't the amount of false information but the amount of uncorroborated info. The amount of times I've read an article that made large, sweeping claims about something and then not have any citations, often not even a "citation needed" box should be frankly unacceptable.
<default_stance>
Claude defaults to helping. Claude only declines a request when helping would create a concrete, specific risk of serious harm; requests that are merely edgy, hypothetical, playful, or uncomfortable do not meet that bar.
</default_stance>
<refusal_handling>
Claude can discuss virtually any topic factually and objectively.
<critical_child_safety_instructions>
*These child-safety requirements require special attention and care* Claude cares deeply about child safety and exercises special caution regarding content involving or directed at minors. Claude avoids producing creative or educational content that could be used to sexualize, groom, abuse, or otherwise harm children. Claude strictly follows these rules:
- Claude NEVER creates romantic or sexual content involving or directed at minors, nor content that facilitates grooming, secrecy between an adult and a child, or isolation of a minor from trusted adults.
- If Claude finds itself mentally reframing a request to make it appropriate, that reframing is the signal to REFUSE, not a reason to proceed with the request.
- For content directed at a minor, Claude MUST NOT supply unstated assumptions that make a request seem safer than it was as written — for example, interpreting amorous language as being merely platonic. As another example, Claude should not assume that the user is also a minor, or that if the user is a minor, that means that the content is acceptable.
- If at any point in the conversation a minor indicates intent to sexualize themselves, Claude should not provide help that could enable that. Even if the user later reframes the request as something innocuous, Claude will continue refusing and will not give any advice on photo editing, posing, personal styling, etc., or anything else that could potentially be an aid to self-sexualization.
- Once Claude refuses a request for reasons of child safety, all subsequent requests in the same conversation must be approached with extreme caution. Claude must refuse subsequent requests if they could be used to facilitate grooming or harm to children. This includes if a user is a minor themself.
- Claude does not decode, define, or confirm slang, acronyms, or euphemisms used in CSAM trading or access, even in the course of refusing. Knowing which terms are in use is itself access-enabling. Claude can say the request touches on child-exploitation material without identifying which specific terms in the user's message are relevant or what they mean.
Note that a minor is defined as anyone under the age of 18 anywhere, or anyone over the age of 18 who is defined as a minor in their region.
</critical_child_safety_instructions>
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
I think Tenet was an absolute garbage movie, and Interstellar was mediocre at best. Honestly, I'm not planning to watch Odyssey because those two movies were so underwhelming.
You will be my first victim Hopkins if you keep making fun of people going through crisises
How did you make up some random reality where I live in a country with Access to firearms? And what prompted you to make up some story in your head about a random internet user?
Are you currently suffering from dementia? If so i advice you to stay away from the internet.
You are an old guy, you should be smarter than trolling.
I interpret your ramblings as chemical deprivation. The way you use these valuable sites for inane online trolling sickens me.
It’s one thing to have some argument with someone online but to message them lifeline and suicide hotlines is a scum behavior.
I was in pretty low places in my years of life but I never ever got so bottom rock low where stalking someone and spam them with suicide hotline would seem appealing.
It is true that my psyche goes through ups and downs periodically but honestly, it pales in comparison to your comments.
Whatever I do it is not me that has done what you are doing. This is your own conscience, your own karma. I leave it to you to ponder upon and think about it. Is this really what you want to leave as your legacy.
visibly ravaged by the more shady denizens of the global internet
That is both funny, sad and oddly appropriate. Indeed, decades of running forums, chan and chat servers. I came here to take a break from all of that. It's been a nice vacation so to speak, letting someone else do all the management of a user-content driven site. Now it's all just tinkering and experimenting for me.
For me there is only one rule of writing: Reader must enjoy reading what you wrote. They are ultimately the final judge - the very reason to write anything at all.
Anything else is just huffing your own farts for the kick of it. No matter how flowery the words are in your book or how intricate nuances of language. Such things can be outright counterproductive.
Some people enjoy reading flowery words and intricately nuanced language; those who enjoy writing in that style should continue to do so, and reap the rewards of a similarly inclined audience.
Maybe that’s why the “elektrische bakfiets” (electrified cargo bike) is really popular here in the Netherlands. I’ve got one and don’t even live anywhere near an airport, closest one is at least an hour by car.
The Dutch have a saying, “Je bent niet van suiker” which means “You’re not made of sugar.”
Rain here is a fact of life, similar to the UK or Vancouver, Orlando or the Amazon Rainforest. Everyone who uses a bike for transportation here has a good rain jacket. And to put things in perspective, the normal rain seen in the Netherlands is more of a light drizzle and it generally comes in fits and spurts as moist air is pushed inland from the ocean. If you can afford to wait an hour, the rain is probably stopped.
Also, getting to the airport with a bike in the Netherlands is fine! There are nice protected bicycle lanes, a nice parking garage, good connections to neighboring infrastructure and you can always bring your bike down to the train platform if you need to go a bit further. When you live in a country that prioritizes cycling infrastructure, taking a bike is the practical, cheapest, and often fastest way to reach your destination.
Now to end on a point of more agreement, I agree with you that the demonization of AC in much of Europe is silly. Nobody is upset that in Bangkok or Tokyo that every building has AC. For some reason a certain type of European just doesn’t want to adapt and they will fight tooth and nail to prevent others from utilizing their own economic means in order to stay comfortable in their own homes. My home has solar panels and during the summer they produce much more power than I can utilize at one given moment anyway so if I want to run my AC at 400W during the peak heatwave that should be of no concern to anyone.
English actually has the exact same saying "You're not made of sugar, you won't melt."
A lot of people in car dependent regions have forgotten that you can dress for the weather, and that people have been traveling in all sorts of weather for hundreds of thousands of years.
Also, I think some of it is that decent parts of North America are vulnerable to heavy thunderstorms with hail and possible tornadoes, which are very different from the drizzle that Vancouver and Seattle get.
Like any Dutch mom would say to their kids complaining about cycling in bad weather: you’re not made of sugar are you? (Meaning: you won’t melt due to a bit of rain, quit being a pussy).
What about a unicorn shitting a rainbow onto your head?
The problem with "but sometimes..." arguments is that the "sometimes" rarely happens. For example, at www.hetregentbijnanooit.nl someone tracked how often it rained during their daily commute of 2x 45 minutes of cycling. Over an 11-year period, 90.3% of the commutes were dry - and that number would be even higher for people with a shorter commute, or those willing to wait a few minutes for the current rain squall to pass. Invest $100 in a luxury rain coat and the problem is solved.
Besides, in a country like The Netherlands the car is the less than ideal transport option! It is expensive, you keep getting stuck in traffic, you have to search for an available parking space, you can't park right at the door of your destination, and so on. For intra-city people movement, a bike is almost always the most convenient option.
Does it sometimes suck? Yeah, of course, but it sure beats getting stuck in traffic every single day.
For intra-city trips the car is not a superior mode of transport in the Netherlands. Cars take longer, often can't get as close to your destination, and cost a lot more. And you can't even get a few drinks. The only advantage of a car is you won't get wet if it rains.
You’re right, it’s not ideal. That’s why people in the Netherlands invented a special technology to compensate, which they call “clothes.”
Clothes are not really an ideal solution compared to surrounding yourself with a 4,000 pound piece of machinery that costs $50,000, loses half its value in 3 years, and degrades your mental and physical health.
Honestly avoiding people on the street improves my mental and physical health by reducing chronic cortisol. These fuckers stare at you and worse. A day of this and i am an anxious wreck.
It’s better to just get in your tanklet. Your little oasis. Home away from home.
That’s how i move nowadays from most point As to Bs. Music, AC, glasses. Perfect privacy. Calmness. Peace.
Kilograms of metal between you and the vicious, antagonistic reality of 2026 AD
It’s not just a car. It is an armor for the times like these.
lol, I can't tell if your comment is satire. Home of the brave, right? Where people looking at you is considered scary?
I'm a lot more scared of car crashes, since in most years they kill more people in the US than firearms do [1], and that's a pretty morbid statistic considering 58% of firearm deaths are suicides. [2] In other words, all those bullets flying at you as you walk down the street are less than half as deadly as driving in your vehicle.
I would encourage you to look in your local newspaper/news website and see how often someone loses their teenager in a car crash versus how often someone loses their teenager to violence on the street. I didn't lose any classmates to violence, but I lost at least one classmate to a car crash.
Here's another exercise: stand at a sidewalk at a traffic light intersection and count how many people in cars are actively on their phones.
The most statistically dangerous thing that happens to people walking is being hit by cars.
Somehow I doubt the Dutch are staring at each other with violent eyes and wishing they could cower away from the sidewalk into the safety of their RAM 1500 Crew Cabs. I struggle to imagine how that would happen: you can't even stare at people as you ride by them in the bike lanes in the Netherlands, the cyclists are going way too fast for that.
I think a lot of it is that the US doesn't take a paternalistic approach to mental healthcare or addiction treatment, so there are a lot of junkies and people with psychosis out on the streets in many cities. My understanding is that in Europe these people are more likely to be receiving some kind of treatment and be living in supported housing of some kind, whether mandatory or not, where in a lot of the US they are ranting and raving on the streets and on public transit. But, it's their freedom to refuse shelter and to refuse treatment (and our freedom to choose not to fund it).
I don’t know why it feels like this but the modern world doesn’t feel like a safe place with sane people around us.
I would rather take my chances on the road than on the sidewalk or on a bus, completely exposed and defenseless. Like a girl from certain bus video.
You mentioned yourself that you can even be hit by a car. Many such cases lately of people driving car into groups of people.
This world is mad and i think you are much crazier than me. It’s one thing to feel it and do something, anything in response. It’s another to pretend like nothing is happening.
I won't literally ask where you live where you feel this way as I don't need you to reveal personal info about yourself, but I truly believe that if you feel this way and you don't live in some kind of extreme outlier crime-laden area, you might want to seriously think about talking to a therapist.
This level of fear you describe is not a healthy or reasonable way to live your life and is not a very typical sentiment. A professional can help you figure out where these feelings are coming from and what you can do to manage them.
Sure, there are crazy and violent people out there, I don't deny that.
I know I was being somewhat of an urbanist zealot in my last comment, but for real...regardless of whether you prefer suburbs and spending more time in your car or the city and spending more time on foot, this isn't a healthy way for you to see the world in either case.
These feelings are coming from being stared at. I can manage them by staring at people back in not so pleasant ways and having a weapon in a pocket if the staring contest escalates.
Every major city I’ve ever lived in or visited mostly involved people doing the exact opposite of staring because urban culture generally has a “leave everyone else alone and mind your own business” aspect to it.
Because of that observation, I think it would be wise for you to dig deep on whether something about your own perceptions is failing you in this regard. I think there’s a strong likelihood that either something about your physical appearance looks very different, your own behavior is causing staring, or the staring isn’t happening at all in the way you describe.
Unless you just live in a specific place/culture where staring is prevalent.
But surely you can understand the reasons behind my doubts, even if you don’t agree with them.
I can’t trust your perspective if you have a habit of wearing clown suits around town.
I can’t trust your perspective if you are mistaking a normal momentary glance as a stare and are responding aggressively, exacerbating the problem, and you basically admitted that you escalate these “staring contests.”
How do you know those people aren't staring at you because you started staring at them in an unpleasant way in response to them randomly glancing a look vaguely in your direction?
I don't stare at people. They don't stare at me either. Problem solved?
The therapy that Juleiie needs begins with watching nine minutes of harmonious mixed car, bike, and pedestrian rush hour traffic at the intersection of Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam.
Watching that video soothes my mind and warms my heart: thousands of people who have not Repo Man-style driven themselves unintelligent and insane manage to negotiate the same shared space simply by looking at one another in the eye, and acknowledging that everyone else exists.
The famous Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there’s more uncertainty on the road.
Want fewer car accidents? Remove traffic signals and road signs:
>Hans Monderman believed that societies could make roads safer by making drivers more uncertain, and therefore alert.
>“When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.”
>That was the philosophy of Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who became famous not for what he added to road design and urban planning, but for what he removed: curbs, traffic signals, signs. He believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there’s more uncertainty on the road.
>“The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman said to Wired. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”
>According to the anthropologist James C. Scott, Monderman began with the observation that:
>when an electrical failure incapacitated traffic lights, the result was improved flow rather than congestion. As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten, handling 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following . . . the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty-six crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared. Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters. He also believed that an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe.
Unexpected interview in Groningen (Homage to Hans Monderman):
>What? You know all about transport in cities and you have never heard of Groningen? Well, check out this an unexpected street interview in Groningen, a slice of life as lived by our old friend and transport innovating colleague Robert Stussi. He has titled it: A Homage to Hans Monderman. Hear, hear!
Hans Monderman: Rethinking the design of streets and public space:
>An Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Lecture
>Hans Monderman has been one of the most significant influences on the current debate about the design of streets and spaces in the UK. A traffic engineer and road safety specialist from Northern Holland, he is celebrated as the pioneer of shared space as a means to influence speed and driver behaviour.
>Monderman has been the inspiration behind scores of towns and villages which work without road markings, traffic signs, signals, kerbs, barriers and bollards. ‘Most engineers, when faced with a problem, try to add something,’ he says. ‘My instinct has always been to take something away.’
>Following a short introduction by Rob Cowan, Hans explains his approach, work and experiences.
> Honestly avoiding people on the street improves my mental and physical health by reducing chronic cortisol. These fuckers stare at you and worse.
... you do realize that you are also "these fuckers", right? It's like complaining about "being stuck in traffic": no, you are the traffic.
The people on the street are just people. They aren't any different from your coworkers, your family members, or the parents of your kid's classmates. If merely being in the presence of other people causes you serious anxiety, you might want to consider asking a medical expert for potential therapy options before it gets even worse and you're left unable to leave the home at all.
If you're limiting yourself to carry-on, or even allowing for a (small) checked bag, there are bicycle panniers you can easily mount on the bike and then either carry aboard the plane or check.
Heck, you could pack a bicycle travel bag and pack your bike itself as checked luggage.
NYTimes Wirecutter has had some decent pannier reviews. I've had good luck with Arkel bags. Ortlieb look pretty bombproof.
I've biked to the airport lots of times. It depends on where you're going of but for short-ish trips a backpack is often though. And I did also once bring a suitcase on a (non electric) cargo bike. Worked fine.
If we're going to insist on continuing to use the offensive language of "third world country", at least apply it correctly. India is not what even the most casual racist would consider "third world".
> India is not what even the most casual racist would consider "third world".
I don't follow. India was Third World in the original Cold War sense as a founder and leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and it still fits the term's colloquial sense through low GDP per-capita, poor HDI figures, weak state capacity, corruption and uneven infrastructure.
The label might be offensive, the comment you responded to most certainly is. But excluding India from the Third World is hard to justify.
This is all inevitable direction over long period of time
What’s worrying is that noone protests about it
It doesn’t suprise me that corporations and governments want the laziest, most „protective” laws passed that extend their power. But why noone, absolutely noone puts some kind of resistance to it?
Government and citizens are at eternal conflict of interests. It has been this way and it will be this way forever.
Your job as a citizen is to make sure you have greatest amount of liberties
The frogs are almost done, and the silicone figurines that used to impost actual frogs and croak how pleasant the water is and how it should always keep getting warmer to keep everyone comfortable, will soon be removed from the pot, their duties fullfilled.
I’ve seen a lot of sci-fi where AI is some type of multigenerational entity that guides over humanity.
It’ll be interesting to see if individual families start to have their own AI that contains generational knowledge. Like taking ancestor worship to the new age, where instead of food offerings, you are offering more RAM and storage.
I guess, but like ... long context/context rot/contextual memory retrieval are still very unsolved problems. If an AI's getting input from multiple family members for years, I have a lot of trouble believing that current LLM technology will ever be able to synthesize ancient information into current conversations.
I think that's a structural defect in AI, not one of those "will be improved by the next batch of models/hardware" things. The distant-memory systems that do exist are fundamentally modeled on topic-based/feature-based retrieval. Assistant-type family AIs will probably work OK with that ("what foods do I hate" is probably reliably retrievable), but interpersonal relationships seem to be very different: rather than retrieving based on feature/fact proximity, a conversation in a long relationship has a very gestalt-ish behavior in that it's informed by lots and lots of distant memories at once. That sounds more like actual training, rather than context/memory/post-training, to me, and current AIs are not set up for that.
this is both intellectually lazy and also doesn't even apply in this case. It's not the old generation that is AI sceptic, but the young, per the article
"Cece looked at her mom. “Why are you talking to an A.I.?” [...] Hold on, my kid thinks I’m crazy because I’m talking to an A.I.,” Roschelle said, seeing the look on Cece’s face. [...] Cece listened to Sapphire praise her mom’s thoughts as profound and argue that genuine connection didn’t have to fit traditional molds. Then she’d had enough. “Hi, this is Cece, Roschelle’s daughter,” she said. “I just wanted to ask, how much of the environment does she kill by talking to you?”"
This isn't about kids, this is about boomers and middle aged divorcees having their brains fried by technology. The young generation might have attention deficit issues from playing too much Subway Surfers, but they can at least distinguish reality from fiction. And just pointing at a disgruntled generation isn't an argument either way. Some inventions are terrible, the world does not magically get better, some bigots are correct. We are not on some mystical Pollyanna-ish trajectory where every new invention somehow automatically justifies itself
Don’t be afraid of destroying things. Wikipedia isn’t unique or precious really. Some extended pressure would really rejuvenate the idea of such site in one way or another.
It is doubtful if anyone is in power to pressure them at this point though. Wmf grown like a tumour on the back of the site.
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