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Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.
by xemoka 9mo ago
Oh. Wow. I had no idea Jimmy Wales was like that. Enlightening.
- rvnx 9mo agoWikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. From that point on, where it came from or who founded it is not so important. The question is how it acts today. It is a highly-political organization supporting lot of “progressive” ideas, California-style. So if you like reading politically biased media it may be for you. If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject. EDIT: a couple downvotes denying the influence of specific “Wikipedia ideology” and politics. Take a chance to edit articles and you will see how tedious it is. There is also a lot of legal censorship. Celebrities putting pressure on removing info, or lobbies, or say things that are illegal or very frowned upon (for example questioning homosexuality, or the impact of certain wars). Sometime it is legality, ideology, politics, funding, pressure, etc. This is why you need to use different sources.
- jamespo 9mo agoYes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.
- rvnx 9mo agoLLMs have their issues too. In everyday life, you cannot read 20 books about a topic about everything you are curious about, but you can ask 5 subject-experts (“the LLMs”) in 20 seconds some of them who are going to check on some news websites (most are also biased) Then you can ask for summaries of pros and cons, and make your own opinions. Are they hallucinating ? Could be. Are they lying ? Could be. Have they been trained on what their masters said to say ? Could be. But multiplying the amount of LLMs reduce the risk. For example, if you ask DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, Claude, GLM-4.7 or some models that have no guardrails, what they think about XXX, then perhaps there are interesting insights.
- jamespo 9mo agoThis may shock you, but wikipedia provides multiple sources, it even links to them. Where do you think the LLMs are getting their data from?
- dfxm12 9mo agoTo further this, articles also have an edit history and talk page. Even if one disagrees with consensus building or suspects foul play and they're really trying to get to the bottom of something, all the info is there on Wikipedia! If one just wants a friendly black box to tell them something they want to hear, AI is known to do that.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoLLMs disclose sources now.
- tux3 9mo agoRight. Try clicking those sources, half the time there is zero relation to the sentence. LLMs just output what they want to say, and then sprinkle in what the web search found on random sentences. And not just bottom of the barrel LLMs. Ask Claude about Intel PIN tools, it will merrily tell you that it "Has thread-safe APIs but performance issues were noted with multi-threaded tools like ThreadSanitizer" and then cite the Disney Pins blog and the DropoutStore "2025 Pin of the Month Bundle" as an inline source. Enamel pins. That's the level of trust you should have when LLMs pretend to be citing a source.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoDid I say not to check the sources? Or is that something you made up?
- jamespo 9mo agoAh so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...
- CamperBob2 9mo agoOnly the first couple of time derivatives matter. The models are better than they were. Are you?
- browningstreet 9mo agoThe LLMs I use all supply references.
- onraglanroad 9mo agoIndeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist! I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
- tialaramex 9mo agoYup, there's a wonderful, presumably LLM generated, response to somebody explaining how trademark law actually works, the LLM response insists that explanation was all wrong and cites several US law cases. Most of the cases don't exist, the rest aren't about trademark law or anywhere close. But the LLM isn't supposed to say truths, it's a stochastic parrot, it makes what looks most plausible as a response. "Five" is a pretty plausible response to "What is two plus three?" but that's not because it added 2 + 3 = 5
- johnisgood 9mo ago"Five" is not merely "plausible". It is the uniquely correct answer, and it is what the model produces because the training corpus overwhelmingly associates "2 + 3" with "5" in truthful contexts. And the stochastic parrot framing has a real problem here: if the mechanism reliably produces correct outputs for a class of problems, dismissing it as "just plausibility" rather than computation becomes a philosophical stance rather than a technical critique. The model learned patterns that encode the mathematical relationship. Whether you call that "understanding" or "statistical correlation" is a definitional argument, not an empirical one. The legal citation example sounds about right. It is a genuine failure mode. But arithmetic is precisely where LLMs tend to succeed (at small scales) because there is no ambiguity in the training signal.
- whynotmaybe 9mo agoIt is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology. But we now live in a world where people agree that ideology should be able to change facts. > or the impact of certain wars Exactly, like China wanting to completely censor anything regarding the Tiananmen Square protests. > for example questioning homosexuality I don't know what you have to question about this. >If you are seeking for a global view you better ask different LLMs for arguments and counter-arguments on a subject. All the LLM I've tested have a strong tendency to increase your echo chamber and not try to change your opinion on something. >This is why you need to use different sources. Only if deep down, you're ready to change your POV on something, otherwise you're just wasting time and ragebaiting yourself. Although I admit, it can still be entertaining to read some news to discover how they're able to twist reality.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rvnx 9mo agoFor the last part I agree with you, the LLMs tend to say what you like to hear. The echo chamber problem also exists, pushing them to say pros and cons is not perfect, but helps to make an opinion (and also "unaligned" models). Facts are very skewed by the environment: in the case you push too much in one direction that is too controversial or because the politicians disagree too much with you; there can be plenty of negative consequences: - your website gets blocked, or you get publicly under pressure, or you lose donations, you lose grants, your payment providers blocks you, you lose audience, you can get a fine, you can go to jail, etc. Many different options. There is asymmetry here: We disagree, you have one opinion, what happens if both of us fight for 10 months, 24/7 debating "what is the truth ?" on that topic. - You have that energy and time (because it's your own page, or your mission where you are paid by your company, or because this topic is personally important to you, etc) - I don't have time or that topic is not *that* important for me. - Consequence: Your truth is going to win. Sources are naturally going to be curated to support your view. At the end, the path of least resistance is to go with the flow. The tricky part: there are also truths that cannot be sourced properly, but are still facts (ex: famous SV men still offering founders today investment against sex). Add on top of that, legal concerns, and it becomes a very difficult environment to navigate. Even further, it's always doable to find or fabricate facts, and the truth wins based on the amount of energy, power and money that the person has.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago[flagged]
- Propelloni 9mo ago> This is why you need to use different sources. This knife cuts both ways.
- dpark 9mo ago> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. What? If Bomis was a porn company then Reddit is a porn company. Edit: I take it back. It looks like Bomis was more directly pushing soft core porn than I realized.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mpalmer 9mo agoYou make your slant against Wikipedia immediately obvious by attempting to smear it. You lazily link it with porn, but you're not making an actual point.
- rvnx 9mo agoIt's more to show that it doesn't matter much in the end where the project comes from, but rather where the project is going
- msla 9mo ago> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company. Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
- rvnx 9mo agoIt gave me an idea, a tool to analyze history of Hackernews user comments and determine what they are up to, what ideas they are pushing, etc. Would be cool and horrible at the same time (so if anyone wants to be on the first page of HN and has a couple of LLM credits somewhere)
- tchasnyk 9mo agolooks like interviewer asks question not in a good faith
- johnisgood 9mo agoIt is a fair question, IMO. His reaction was childish.
- dpark 9mo agoAfter watching this I kind of disagree. Wales said he didn’t care multiple times. Calling it the “dumbest question” is childish, yes. Walking out of an interview that was going nowhere is not childish. I personally think writing Sanger out of Wikipedia history (as in this 25 year celebration montage thing) is quite lame. But I also think pressing Wales on this when he says “you can say whatever you want” is also quite lame. No one is obligated to sit with an interviewer while the interviewer tries to pick a fight.
- hitekker 9mo agoYou missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion". Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it." Instead he immediately became defensive, even angry. The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!) I don't see this as a political victim issue: I can see Sanger as an asshole while also seeing Wales as weak.
- dpark 9mo ago> You missed the part where Wales called a fact an "opinion". Has Wales actually disputed the objective facts of the matter? I did not take his comment to mean “it’s an opinion whether Sanger worked on Wikipedia from the beginning” but “it’s an opinion whether that qualifies him as a cofounder”. > Wales could have said "I don't dispute the facts of that case. I see myself as the founder, but I won't argue against other interpretations. Lets move past it." That is essentially what he said. He called himself the founder, then when the interviewer probed, said it’s a dumb question, then said he doesn’t care, then said the interviewer can frame it however he wants, then said again that he doesn’t care. He said what you think he should’ve said. He just didn’t use your exact words. > The interviewer is right to press on the basic facts and Wales was wrong to ragequit, especially since the exchange lasted less than 45 seconds(!) What “basic facts” did he press on? I heard no facts or questions about facts. He used the word “facts” while pressing Wales specifically about calling himself the founder.
- an_ko 9mo agoThere's context. Hank Green talked about it in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA, but in short, paraphrasing, and adding my own thoughts: Jimmy Wales has been poked at with the question of whether he should call himself a founder or specifically co-founder for a long time, by right-wingers who think Wikipedia is too woke, and want to irritate and discredit him as much as possible, and instead raise up his co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has right-wing views and a habit of accusing any article as biased that doesn't praise Trump and fundamentalist Christian values, and takes these as proof that Wikipedia has a left lean. The interview Wales walked out of was for his book tour. I imagine it's the umpteenth interview that week with the same question asked for the same transparently bad-faith reasons, trying to bend the interview away from his book and into right-wing conspiracy theory land.
- rolfsen 9mo agoOk, but Tilo Jung is the absolute opposite of right wing
- deknos 9mo agoyes, but question can be done in different ways. and tilo jung always at least, not cared, if his questions are offensive... or trying to up the interviewed person a group of people seems to think, that journalists should trip up people, like in interrogations, instead of being hard in the topic but nice in the tone.
- rand846633 9mo agoYeah, that sentiment surely exist that PR and journalism is not the same. Some would even argue that journalism should try to find facts and that being particularly pleasant and nice with doing so is secondary to the goal of fact finding, it’s not PR after all. One could even go as far as to speculate that a journalist being “nice” is not genuine but just a method to gain information. I know I am biased here as this is how I want it to be. The case if Tilo is quite specific, his interview style uses methods that are effective and uncommon and in part extremely unpleasant, but super effective in making people a accidentally confess to him whilst forgetting all their media training.