🎵 It takes a lot to make a stew 🎵

That wasn’t me you were talking to initially; that was TheLeadenSea. You’ll have to ask them, not me.

Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

• Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
• Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
• And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
• And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
• And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
• Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.

Okay, but I literally just expressed how they’re fundamentally, pragmatically different while you keep reaching for the word “semantics”. You can still disagree that it’s wrong to copy – that’s not what I’m trying to litigage. To call it only semantically different from stealing is asinine.

Too bad. Because it’s being redistributed through a third party, you aren’t even stealing a negligible amount of electricity, bandwidth, or CPU time from them. Damn, when you think about it, it’s just not “stealing” in any capacity, is it?

on the basis of semantics

It’s not semantics when “stealing” results in the loss of the original by the owner while “copying” just results in a new one being created.

TL;DR: ✨die mad✨

OP, come the fuck on. Have some integrity and don’t post articles from The Economic Times.

I’m not German and thought “huh, I’m not German; maybe I’m actually wrong, and I’m not going to overstep here”… And then the Germans arrived.

“Let’s nostalgia bait millennials who miss the Aero aesthetic.”

“Are these anti-Nazi protestors holding up a Star of David trying to protect democracy in Germany, or are they just trying to keep their family from being deported?”

🤡

No, they definitely are AI. ChatGPT for example is a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) is a transformer model is a deep learning model is a machine learning model is AI.

It’s just that the general public has no fucking idea what “AI” is due to being swamped in marketing about a field they have zero background in and have been led to believe is some kind of general intellect on the level of a human or smarter. In reality, a perceptron with one weight and one bias is machine learning is AI.

Since the start, what “AI” is has been fairly arbitrary; it’s just the ability for a machine to perform tasks we’d associate with human intelligence. It doesn’t even need to be machine learning; that’s just one branch. The game Video Checkers (1980) for the Atari 2600 running on 128 bytes of RAM has AI that you play against. The bar isn’t high at all.

The difference: Israel is in Syria for imperialist aggression. Ukraine is in Ukraine to protect their homeland from imperialist aggresssion. Combine that with Israel’s pathological need to cover up and deny their extensive, seemingly neverending war crimes in Gaza… Yeah, I don’t have any faith until Israel can prove this was opsec rather than covering up. Israel has destroyed their chance for benefit of the doubt.

Even if it is opsec, they have no right being there, so fuck 'em. I hope their opsec isn’t maintained and their soldiers do die in much the same way I’d hope for a Russian base in Donetsk.

Yeah, and to be clear, I actually really like trivia! The front page of Wikipedia has a section called “Did You Know?” (DYK) that has six or seven pieces of daily trivia. These are also researched and follow a similar format. The key differences are that: 1) the corresponding article is right there if you want to immediately verify what’s been said, and 2) this article lets you understand the full context of the trivia if you want.

In this case, the most egregious part isn’t the trivia itself; it’s the kind of culture around trivia that it foments.

>no source

>“it was thought”? cool weasel wording; who thought it?

>tiny snippet offering zero context

>and then people parrot it uncritically

This is why I hate “le epic trivia!!”-style accounts; even when they’re right (and they’re often not), they’re intellectual junk food designed for mindlessly consuming rather than learning.

Betteridge’s law in shambles

what zero pussy does to a mf

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

Here’s the key:

• The first source I use is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The third source is just a scientific article. That’s it.
• The second source that I use to cite “dozens of extinctions” is quite emotionally charged, but here’s where that’s different: I could find a billion sources more credible than that NYT article about the dozens upon dozens of species who’ve met their end thanks to the domestic cat. These sources would give it an unemotional, academic treatment, yet I like how the NYT piece is narratively engaging rather than dry-ass “X et al. reported…”

I used scientific sources for (1) and (3) because those are claims people might actually think to contest. Moreover, the NYT doesn’t let itself slip into using garbage sources for the sake of its narrative. I could replace this source in two minutes, and then your argument about emotionally charged imagery would dissolve.

The reason I care so much about King’s massive bias in that article is because that bias is reflected in how absolutely egregious her sources are. She seems to genuinely not care how factual what she’s saying is as long as it conforms to her personal feelings, and so she turns it into assembling literally every source she can possibly find no matter how obscenely flimsy. She’s grasping at straws the entire article.

“It was terrible. He would spend hours telling me about how NFTs are the future and I need to get in on the ground floor.”

What you’ve presented is a deeply biased opinion piece, and it wears this immense bias on its sleeve. It fearmongers that thinking about cats as killing wildlife could cause “extremism” (it then cites as its lone example a man who suggested banning cats in New Zealand; soooo scary). It cites some organization called “Alley Cat Allies” who call it extremely biased with ostensibly zero credentials. They cite lobbyist and serial sexual harasser Wayne Pacelle formerly of the Humane Society who questions the methodology but even concedes: “We don’t quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big.” And lastly, King herself does her own analysis on this meta-analysis’ methodology despite being – I emphasize – a professor of anthropology with no background in this field.

So your article has no one familiar with this field who could challenge if these statistical assumptions are actually reasonable. And here, given the authors are experts (and absent some published literature rebutting this in the 12 years since), I have no reason to believe their methodology would be so off as to meaningfully change the idea that “outdoor cats” are severely problematic.