4 ms·

Wikipedia 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

by rvnx 10mo ago

Wikipedia 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 10mo ago
Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.
- rvnx 10mo ago
  LLMs 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 10mo ago
    This 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 10mo ago
      To 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 10mo ago
  LLMs disclose sources now.
  - tux3 10mo ago
    Right. 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 10mo ago
      Did I say not to check the sources? Or is that something you made up?
      - jamespo 10mo ago
        Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...
        CamperBob2 10mo ago
        Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. The models are better than they were. Are you?
- browningstreet 10mo ago
  The LLMs I use all supply references.
  - onraglanroad 10mo ago
    Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist! I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
    - tialaramex 10mo ago
      Yup, 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
It 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 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- rvnx 10mo ago
  For 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 10mo ago
[flagged]
Propelloni 10mo ago
> This is why you need to use different sources. This knife cuts both ways.
dpark 10mo 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 10mo ago
  [deleted]
mpalmer 10mo ago
You 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 10mo ago
  It'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 10mo 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 10mo ago
  It 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)

by rvnx 10mo ago

jamespo 10mo ago

Yes LLMs that don't disclose sources are much better.

rvnx 10mo ago
LLMs 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 10mo ago
  This 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 10mo ago
    To 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 10mo ago
LLMs disclose sources now.
- tux3 10mo ago
  Right. 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 10mo ago
    Did I say not to check the sources? Or is that something you made up?
    - jamespo 10mo ago
      Ah so irrelevant / invalid sources are OK...
      - CamperBob2 10mo ago
        Only the first couple of time derivatives matter. The models are better than they were. Are you?
browningstreet 10mo ago
The LLMs I use all supply references.
- onraglanroad 10mo ago
  Indeed! Sometimes even more than actually exist! I don't think LLMs can be faulted on their enthusiasm for supplying references.
  - tialaramex 10mo ago
    Yup, 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 10mo 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 10mo ago

It 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 10mo ago
[deleted]
rvnx 10mo ago
For 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 10mo ago

[flagged]

Propelloni 10mo ago

> This is why you need to use different sources. This knife cuts both ways.

dpark 10mo 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 10mo ago
[deleted]

mpalmer 10mo ago

You 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 10mo ago
It'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 10mo 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 10mo ago
It 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)