I've encountered AI contributions on Wikipedia, and, although I wonder how they'll enforce such a rule, I think this is the proper stance to take.
I think readers take for granted how concise Wikipedia's prose tends to be. AI, in comparison, seems built to ramble, being overly specific where it doesn't need to be and lacking specificity where it ought to have it.
When you think about it, "what should go on a thing's Wikipedia page?" is an interesting question; the answer certainly isn't "anything and everything." AI just doesn't have a good sense for what belongs, I feel.
I use the history function from time to time and sometimes catch AI bloat.
I don’t do this systematically, just sometimes out of curiosity.
But it is always the same pattern: bloat, bloat, bloat.
What I very critically witness is the so called gender neutrality movement where large bodies of text get rewritten to fulfill a political agenda.
This is a major loss of quality. Hundreds of years of using language and getting results by using it as a means and if you compare recent downfalls in connection with gender politics you should be very worried of not already.
Even if some admins drive such agendas, why not use a new mode like a new language for those who want it? This would have been the old skill Wikipedia way and the actual edit wars that aren’t sadly made Wikipedia lose massive credibility for me.
I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to jump in and do something if I were a bystander. I'm not the sort to throw hands, I don't carry, and these disruptive types are already a bit feral.
I'm not sure it's contempt they're expressing, or if they're expressing anything at all. There really are people who enjoy and defend it, too; "it's just a guy playing music, mind your own business." Truly alien.
I've found that looking the person in the eye and giving a quick "hey, forget your headphones?" sometimes does the trick, and has yet to start a fight. Everyone has to act in ways they are comfortable with - but mass inaction is what creates space for this shitty behavior in the first place.
Yes exactly. If they are blasting ethnic music while in an ethnic hood it is usually because they are repping their hood, and sometimes in a way to intentionally bait someone to say something. If you ask them to stop they will pretend it is a challenge on their hood/race (no matter that they will play it so loud everyone's ears are splitting and all they want is not to get hearing damage). I watched a guy pull out a knife and start slashing as soon as he was asked to stop.
If you ask such person to stop it is implied they expect you to back that up with violence and you've already consented to a battle.
> Rural states and colonies become the new Indias and Philippines for outsourcing companies, depressing labor costs.
Depressing labor costs, but only to a point, no? They would be subject to American minimum wages; and, presumably, American labor, even at its cheapest, is more expensive than the offshore alternative.
And, assume there is no price differential... Would Americans not be better off if companies outsourced to other American (i.e., not foreign) companies? Thereby keeping currency within the U.S.? I've been hearing that remittances represent a substantial outward cash flow nationally.
I've never heard of such "Data Sovereignty Schemes," but they seem like far and away the best option. And thanks for writing this up, btw.
> we write the color associated with a spectral distribution as C[S] where C is the function that takes a distribution and outputs the corresponding color.
Unrelated, but can anyone tell me the purpose of using the square bracket notation here, instead of the usual parentheses?
Square brackets are often used in contexts where the function is "higher-order" in some sense, with the type of the parameter itself being a function, distribution, or a similar object with richer structure. I think in this case C[S] is particularly supposed to evoke the expected-value notation E[X], because that's what C[S] essentially is – it gives the expected value of S if you interpret S as a random variable with that distribution.
It still looks like a big computer screen, I'm afraid. Although, making it seamless with the dash is a step up, you're right. That tiny paddle gear shift looks horrendous, though.
I would really like to have analog features back, buttons and all that, in an EV.
Yeah essentially this. In my mental model, tariffs give an advantage to domestic suppliers / penalize foreign suppliers, and thus encourage domestic production by making it more viable. And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.
The implementation matters a lot. When fiscal policy is hand-wavy and unreliable, manufacturers can't risk huge domestic capital investment. They're trying to strategize on the order of decades, this administration is more so acting on the order of weeks.
> And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.
Which is comical since the US is the #2 manufacturer in the world behind China. And that makes sense given the absolute size of China. The US manufacturing output continues to increase every year. What's not increasing are the manufacturing jobs because of automation.
If there are strategic industries the US wants bolster, like microchips, there are ways to handle that through long term incentives. The CHIPS act did this, but was killed by Trump because Biden put it in place.
> (...) Donald Trump (...) asked (...) to "get rid" of the (...) act. (...) However, as of October 2025 the Trump administration has instead preserved the Act, even adding an additional 10 percentage points to the advanced semiconductor manufacturing tax credit. (...)
Also in my opinion it's more about removing dependency than just job count (which is just nice to have side effect).
US/Trump doesn't want China to have any levers that control US economy, ie. they want situation where any China decisions that can be made to be immaterial to US economy.
If you look at it from this perspective then things like Greenland also do start to make sense as it is indeed long term investment into independency (minerals, rare earth elements). It's not about military presence, they already have it through NATO, it's more about setting up industry around resources – military advantages do exist as well of course but imho that's lower on the list, it just sells better to plebs.
I think the freemasons are still around. Kinda awesome that it shares continuity with the freemasonry of some prominent figures, like Washington. Can't imagine joining now without it feeling like a massive larp, though.
Huh, that's neat. I've suspected that our political fervor is one of those things that we take to be uniquely NOW, of the present moment, but has actually been a staple. (Like how every generation believes its successors to be dumber, less respectful, ...) But, maybe that's not so!
> Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder
Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers. I can't imagine an interview not addressing a question that is so pertinent to Wales' notoriety. They literally cannot properly introduce him without confronting it! To say those interviewers are acting in "transparently bad-faith" comes across to me as plainly biased.
Sanger's politics don't change this, either. It might be the case that you have to concede on this to people you politically disagree with.
He himself admits it's a complicated situation, and argues both his own and Sanger's position.
Combined with the context provided by all the parent comments here, it's quite difficult to argue good faith given the interview was also specifically on the book tour. There are many different and actually productive ways the interview could have talked about the conflict between Wales and Sanger.
> Not surprising! Are we setting aside how deceitful his answer his? Claiming all credit for a collaborative accomplishment -- which he does by adopting the "founder" title -- would rightfully provoke "poking" by interviewers.
I went down the rabbit hole on this a while back and came away with the impression that it's complicated. And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words. Should Wales be referred to as "a founder", "co-founder", or "one of the founders"? It's not as if he's titling himself "sole founder". And Sanger is still list on his Wiki page and the Wikipedia pages as a Founder.
It should also be noted that Sanger was hired by Wales to manage Nupedia, and that Wikipedia was created as a side-project of Nupedia for the purpose to generating content for Nupedia. Does the fact that Sanger was an employee of Wales, and that Wikipedia only exists because Sanger was tasked with generating content for Nupedia impact his status as a founder? Would Sanger or Wales have gone on to create a wiki without the other?
Can Steve Jobs claim to be the creator of the iPhone since he was CEO at the time it was created at Apple?
At the end of the day Sanger was present at the ground breaking of Wikipedia but was laid off and stopped participating in the project entirely after a year. He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation. He did however try to sabotage or subvert the project 5 years later when it was clear that it was a success. Interestingly he tried to fork it to a project that had strong editorial oversight from experts like Nupedia which flies in the face of the ethos of Wikipedia.
> And whether or not Wales is being deceitful hinges on pedantic arguments and mincing of words.
A big piece of this is that “founder” is actually a very unusual title to use here. Normally someone would “create a product” and “found a company”. Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
It’s kind of like Steve Jobs saying he founded the iPhone.
> He didn't spend 25 years fostering and growing the foundation.
Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
> Wikipedia is not a company. It’s not even the name of the foundation. It’s a product.
I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
> Which isn’t however relevant to the title “founder”.
I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
The core arguments are "you shouldn't claim to be founder of a product" and "claiming to be founder implies sole founder". This is why I say it breaks down to mincing words.
> I'm inclined to agree with you but there are plenty of examples of founders of products: Matt Mullenweg, Dries Buytaert
Fair, but I do think the distinction between the company and the product is relevant. Wales’s claim to be the sole founder of Wikipedia relies specifically on muddying these two notions.
My recollection is that Wales has claimed that Sanger doesn’t qualify as a founder because he was an employee. OK, except Wikipedia is not an employer. If Jimmy Wales qualifies as the founder of Wikipedia specifically because of his ownership in the company that initially funded it, then the other founders of Bomis would seem to also be Wikipedia cofounders.
On the other hand, if being a founder of Wikipedia actually means being instrumental in the creation of the product, then Sanger seems clearly a founder.
Mixing and matching across two different definitions to uniquely identify Wales alone seems very self-serving and inconsistent.
To be clear, I’m not really disputing anything you said here. Just kind of griping about Wales’s self serving definition of founder.
> I think it establishes credence for the claim. If Sanger's contributions warrant being called Co-Founder, then so too do Jimmy Wales.
I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
> I don’t know if anyone has claimed Wales should not be considered a cofounder. I think the general question is specifically whether he is the only founder. In this interview, he introduced himself as “the” founder.
I don't think that he was claiming to be sole-founder and I don't think claiming to be founder implies you're the sole founder. The choice of "the" over "a" though does have some implication, and his intentional choice to use "the" might have been to avoid broaching the subject of Sanger. It's clearly a touchy subject for him.
And at the same time if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were introduced as the founders of their respective companies I personally wouldn't think much of it.
At the end of the day, the Wikipeida pages on Wikipedia and Sanger credit Sanger appropriately so the it's not as if Wales is exerting his will to erase Sanger or his contribution. He just gets pissy when you bring it up.
In the specific case, this is a long running thing. Historically Wales has in fact dismissed Sanger as being a founder and presented himself as the sole founder. That’s why the interviewer poked at this immediately. It’s also why Wales got so annoyed, because he’s had probably this exact same conversation a million times and didn’t want to do it again.
If Bill Gates called himself “the founder” of Microsoft, people would probably dismiss it as a slip of the tongue. For Wales, I don’t think it was a slip of the tongue at all. It’s an intentional choice. I don’t agree with his interpretation, but I also don’t think he’s obligated to rehash the topic in every single interview.
What an interview!
I had never seen this clip before, it's really something. Facts and context are important for sure, but as someone who isn't clued in on the Sanger drama, Wales could not possibly have made himself look worse. And in under a minute!
As you said, the interviewer is in the right, carrying out the job of interviewing, by pushing Wales as he did. To call him a "jerk" is silly, I think.
I think readers take for granted how concise Wikipedia's prose tends to be. AI, in comparison, seems built to ramble, being overly specific where it doesn't need to be and lacking specificity where it ought to have it.
When you think about it, "what should go on a thing's Wikipedia page?" is an interesting question; the answer certainly isn't "anything and everything." AI just doesn't have a good sense for what belongs, I feel.
reply