This is just crazy. Lets ask the power company to build some trains for us. They transport electricity, they _must_ know about transporting people. They can power the lines themselves!
If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
To be fair they can, they'll just run 10k agents and some $20k worth of tokens and they will have a slack replacement without any manual coding, Sure it will have missing features like search and permissions, security will be figured out later, and you can't compile it on your machine, but it's 80% done, how hard can that 20% be?
But this is a magic shovel that digs holes and tunnels all by itself exactly as intended. It should be able to do this without any special skill involved in prompting it.
You're thinking post-scarcity. We aren't there yet, but one say well have a magic wand, magic shovel, and magic anything else that is currently scarce.
Sorry, I don't follow how a sarcastic joke about the claims of post-scarcity would make me a ludite or imply that I am saying models today aren't useful for certain tasks.
Can you imagine how well they'd sell their product if they could actually demonstrate it's capabilities by just, at a whim, duplicating a non-trivial software product.
They didn't, no one asked google to do it. It was Paul Buchheit's 20% project. Google saw a good thing, solved by someone who knew what they were doing and where they wanted it to go, and fostered it. Hell, it is what built AdWords and ultimately made google the advertising behemoth it is today. I don't think this is the same thing...
I see what you are saying though, a business can expand beyond it's initial constraints, but I'm not sure that chasing prospects like what is described in the OP is really all that successful.
Why does it seem like everyone is having trouble grasping an analogy? GP was saying that as it doesn't make sense for a power company to solve trains (because it is out of their area of expertise) it doesn't make sense for Anthropic to solve Slack (because it is out of their area of expertise). My response is that a surprising number of things can fall in the area of expertise of a technology company, and this has been proven by Google in the past.
Getting hung up over the "asked" phrasing is irrelevant to the discussion.
People look for something to disagree with, and make posts that "engage". I agree with you and see this a lot, an analogy clearly makes point A but people get hung up on detail B.
Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.
Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.
I think everyone at the time was hoping that Google was going to take on their pet project; my friends and I certainly were. But I don't think that has to do with my comment, which is around a more metaphorical use of the word 'ask'.
Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch.
When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack.
I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds.
Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.
That’s a funny analogy because some electric railway companies owned power generation. The one in my town also sold electricity to consumers for some time, though most of the history I can find online focuses on the rail aspect, which makes sense, as they started and ended in the rail business, but at some point in the 1890s to 1930s appended “and light” to their name.
It is funny isn't it? I believe it was the opposite direction mostly though, as you say, "railway... and light"; to solve their own problems of powering their infrastructure to move people, they got into power generation at a time when there weren't as many players doing what they needed to run their primary business. I'm not sure that power generation getting into trains would be as effective. Nor do I think an LLM/AI company getting into chat and discussions would be valuable. It feels wrong. But hey, "happy" to move on to yet another chat program in my life if it's better than what we got...
> If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
I think all of the big tools are drowning in complexity by trying to be hugely scalable, integrate with a whole bunch of different tools and so on.
What most of us need is SimpleSlack or SimpleDiscord - something you can deploy on a cheap VPS as a single instance for your community/company of 10-200 members. No complex federation, no enterprise crap, just channels, media, voice and video calls with screen sharing and search, probably an API. Single Go binary for the RESTful API and SSE, PostgreSQL and Garage/SeaweedFS for object storage, maybe an additional binary for handling calls/video cause the hardware requirements of that use case kick everyone's butt and that thin will inevitably crash. Docker containers for resource limits and management.
Something a bit like phpBB back in the day, but more instant messaging, although one could imagine supporting the forum format too. Network effect be damned.
Mattermost is pretty close to that, though they place a bunch of restrictions on you in regards to calls, last I checked. Stoat looks pretty cool, though, hadn't seen much of it before! Maybe Zulip for the people that need something with fewer restrictions (though the mobile app push notification limitations are weird, still hate how mobile OSes handle that per-app).
What is wrong with this line of thinking? Anthropic is the power company that has a 3D printer to make a faster Maglev than anyone.
If Enterprise companies are restrictive to make your own data their only moat, that moat can be broken. Have you tried building any AI agent or using an AI product with Slack MCP? This is one of the hardest problems in SaaS data access and Slack tries to literally block any form of API or OAuth based access. Even Google workspace is not that restrictive and has opened up a cli for the workspace.
No. This is a CEO expressing righteous indignation about a company that provides (seemingly) little value and has almost no competition.
Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful. And Slack costs way too much. If there were any competitors, the price would drop significantly. It's not like chat is a hard problem. And Slack's app is an absolute bear.
Its not hard. Its capital intensive with a low profit margin. So it doesn't attract a lot of competition because you can make more money in other ways that have moats. There are at least a dozen other chat apps, some of which are decades old.
To have a successful chat business, you need the network effect of lots of users (big marketing spend), you need lots of capital for operations (big spend on disks and compute) and after all that you get only a few dollars per user. Its just not a great business on the balance sheet. Notice that quality software doesn't even get a mention in this niche.
You can offload the cost of operations to the end user if you’re B2B. Sell the software as licenses the old school way and offload the cost by allowing users to run their own instances either on prem or on cloud.
You’re saying it’s an easy problem with an expensive solution and yet there’s no competition? Seems there must be more to it because that makes little sense to me.
> Slack won't open up their data moat to AI, which is shameful.
Ah yes. It's shameful that Slack won't open data moat to AI. You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
> You know, those millions of chats (including private data) by people who didn't give consent to this
I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born. Breathing in the air molecules that come from other people's bodies. Looking at ugly things. Hearing annoying sounds. It'll be okay.
Could there ever exist anything that wouldn't be okay? What's the difference between something that will be okay and something that won't? I'm guessing the things that will be okay are the things that might pose an obstacle for AI "progress".
The company in the very article this thread is about wants this.
Lots of companies want this.
Companies should have the option. Right now they're completely locked out of taking advantage of AI with their business data locked away in Slack.
Slack is a graveyard.
I would be a customer of this. It's a pain in the ass that I can't just ask a question to an LLM about knowledge that I know is locked away in past conversations. I have to go bug that person and sync up with them. Latency, annoying context switches for everyone, ... these things have a simple solution. Let AI have the data.
> I'm pretty sure the company you work for owns your work chat, and that what you say on company slack constitutes business information.
It does. And a lot of this information is highly sensitive. Imagine my company's surprise if Slack would not be shameful and would just open up its data moat to AI.
> There are a lot of things people don't consent to. Being born.
Demagoguery and non sequiturs are not arguments.
But I guess that's what passes for "arguments" for AI maximalists.
Slack is monopolizing data access and not giving companies access to their own data.
Companies want to hook up their chat BI to LLMs so it can be instantly and richly queried. Slack search sucks, and an LLM could increase employee efficiency by an order of magnitude. It could also make a lot of requests self serve rather than having employees interrupting each other constantly.
Slack is prohibiting companies from surfacing their own data to AI. They're perhaps worried this will erode their leverage.
That's the entire point here.
Companies should have the option to leverage their chat data for AI rather than having no option at all.
In general the companies are the ones showing reluctance, much more than their employees. There's still a morass of security, privacy, and legal unanswered questions about LLM use in general. Not to mention the huge unknown of total lifecycle costs
And a whole lot of companies will dump Slack if their data policies loosen (they specifically don't want their people feeding proprietary info to an LLM through any channel)
I operate with the assumption that the company can access my private DMs on enterprise slack if they want to. With that, users are still allowed to be concerned if the company is going to use that information for AI use cases. I’d prefer that all AI stay away from my private DMs.
It might be extremely expensive to build Claude into every group chat.
A better option is to have Claude as an assistant or bot in every group chat and triggered when needed. That is just a different interface for Claude or Cowork chat with the group chat context.
Leaving aside the implementation details, the call for action here is valid since Slack is a black hole of your enterprise data and tribal knowledge and Slack is extremely restrictive. Try using Slack MCP in Claude Chat or any AI product
But group chat is chat. Even the chat interface with Claude is chat. You can also say the same for any sort of commenting system. Posts and comments, tweets and comments, etc.
I’ve built such system many times. They’re basically all the same, especially if you introduce real time updates. Channels and threads are just organization strategies.
GE and others also had marketing campaigns that pushed electric appliances [0]. Yes, GE did make consumer appliances but they also made many production and supply components so it was clearly in their interest to promote this new wonder to build demand and a customer base.
It's almost shocking that these AI companies aren't "magicking" up open source replacements for things like Slack, even as just a proof-of-concept. And if not the providers directly, this seems like an easy win for agencies/organizations that build crap to show off "how good they are at AI".
Lastly, where's the one-person start up that's putting Slack, JIRA, and Photoshop out of business? I believe in the value of these tools but there's clearly more progress required before we can type in "replace slack and generate me a million dollars, make no mistakes".
Why sell the output single time. When you can sell the tool that makes output to nearly unlimited times. Competing with your own customers is bad move as it limits number of those hopeful fools.
I mean, the idea itself (of having <insert your AI minion here> inside Slack) has crossed my mind multiple times, and I have successfully extract some data using AI from it and it's actually really useful.
But I agree, having Anthropic building this is like having DJI building planes because they know how to create things that fly.
The thing lags a few seconds while typing a message on a 20 core 128g ram machine. That's with their desktop (electron) app. Mercifully, the web app works better.
Still, CC blows it out of water. Slack is that bad.
Something important must be different about our Slack environments. Maybe it's the number of users, or possibly the OS?
We're a small company (about 150 Slack users), and I've run the Slack (Electron) app on a 16GB M2 (macOS) and a 4GB Chromebook (running a non-ChromeOS Linux), and it has never had any noteworthy performance issues.
It's a terminal wrapper for Anthropic API. It somehow baloons to 68 gigabytes when all it needs to do is call an APi and slowly draw a few hundred characters on screen. And they can't even do that without flickering. Oh yes, and until very recently it would also consume a significant percentage of CPU just waiting for input to a slash command.
Yes, on that same 20 core 128g RAM machine.
You surely must be kidding. Slack is an amazing cutting edge high performance tech in comparison as it has about two orders of magnitude more features that a TUI API wrapper.
Yeah, I have so much less patience for "this should exist" posts. In 2026, you could argue that this blog post should have come with a link to the repo.
I don't want everybody with an idea making a repo. It's already hard enough to filter out the slop in github that I'm reluctant about using anything built in the past year.
It might not have been. But it's not hard to see that whatever productivity coefficient multiplier llms brings, it's being dwarfed by how much easier it is to publish projects that only look good on the surface.
While it's a great tool in the hands of capable and well intentioned people, there's not a world out there where the average quality of software goes up.
Even if AI with autonomous agentic development made something that worked at the average of code quality, I wonder if the code might be a little more sturdy, predictable, and the compromise is a little more verbose for the level that works for the AI to manage it.
Humans would then help oversee the input, insight, and extension and improvement above and below that.
I think this person is asking the most effective entity they can find. Anthropic's offerings are better than the competition. CC and MCP came out of of their labs, and everybody scrambled to copy or adopt them. Their models consistently work better than the competition. Whenever a feature seems inevitable, they release a subtly polished version.
For years I struggled to answer "what company is Apple's equivalent in software?" and I think it might be Anthropic.
After 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.
You 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The inability of wealthy people to take responsibility for themselves and instead blame their own bad behavior on the mere existence of Trump is getting exceptionally thin.
Credit your co-founders. Even if you don't agree with them anymore. There's no excuse not to.
If you've been asked the question a lot then you should be _very good_ at answering it by now.
yes, 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.
Yeah, 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.
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.
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.
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.
According to an American poll that surveyed 416 people residing across Greenland on their support for joining the United States.
57.3% wants to join the US.
A "fabricated fact" (or "alternative fact" if you prefer) is an oxymoron. Actual truth, as opposed to a vibe or what people are basing their decisions on these days, is orthogonal to "the amount of energy, power and money that the person has." Deriving or identifying actual facts and truth is hard (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method) and always subject to change based on new data, so lots of people don't do it -- it's much easier to just make shit up and confirms biases.
If I ask 10 people what they think of something and 60% says "no" and if I ask another 10 people and 90% says "yes" there's no relation between the 60% and the 90%, like at all.
Or as Homer said it "Anybody can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of people know that."
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Not just because you must edit with facts. If your opposition outnumbers you and/or they have more energy to spend than you, they can grind you down with bad-faith arguments and questions for clarification.
The way this goes is that they edit an article to insert their POV. You edit/revert it. They open a talk page discussion about the subject. Suppose their edit is "marine animals are generally considered cute throughout the world" with a reference to a paper by an organization in favor of seals. You revert it by saying this is NPOV. They open a talk page question asking where the organization has been declared to be partisan. Suppose you do research and find some such third-party statement that "the Foundation for Animal Aesthetics is organized by proponents of marine animals". Then they ask how this third party is accurate, or whether "organized by proponents" necessarily implies that they're biased.
This can go on more or less forever until someone gives up. The attack even has a name on Wikipedia itself: "civil POV pushing". It works because few Wikipedia admins are subject matter experts, so they police behavior (conduct) more than they police subject accuracy.
Civil POV pushers can thus keep their surface conduct unobjectionable while waiting for the one they are actioning against to either give up or to get angry enough to make a heated moment's conduct violation. It's essentially the wiki version of sealioning.
In short, a thousand "but is really two plus two equal to four?" will overcome a single "You bastard, it is four and you're deliberately trolling me", because the latter is a personal insult.
> It is tedious because you must edit with facts, not ideology.
Wikipedia is ideological. Even when the articles stick to the facts (which they often don't), editors will selectively omit inconvenient (but factually true) information to push their ideology.
There are many examples of edit wars between people fighting political battles, but I don’t think your link is one of them. I think how he treated his dog was cruel and I believe how he responded by lying and gaslighting his audience was disgusting, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on Wikipedia. In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity, I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits. It was frustrating to read people bringing up the same Forbes article and not reading the reason why it wasn’t suitable. Again, I dislike Hasan in general and especially for this, but if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it? You may disagree about what does and doesn’t belong on Wikipedia, and I have my own objections, but I truly don’t believe the rules were designed by a left leaning cabal to make their favorite Twitch streamer avoid egg on their face.
I appreciate your reasoned comment and think that it's thoughtful, but I respectfully disagree with some of your claims.
> In your link I don’t see Hasan white knights protecting their master from bad publicity
Yes, because it's not overt. Nobody says that when they're doing it. What's happening is claiming that the story is not notable so it can be removed because it's bad publicity for him:
> This is a nothing story and not encyclopedic.
> it seems to be "drama" amongst the terminally online
Then it turns out that it's notable because some sources are reporting it, but the editors make every effort to discount all of those sources:
> The Australian is noted as a center-right newssheet. I think there has been no rfc on it, but it seems an opinionated source.
> WP:NEWSWEEK has been noted to have had some quality decline according to RSP.
> WP:DEXERTO states not to use it for BLP and that its very tabloidy.
> WP:DAILYDOT also states its highly biased and opinionated. It seems rather tabloidy as well.
> See WP:TIMESOFINDIA but its not reliable enough for this
...and this is used as a reason to not even put a single-paragraph summary at the end of his article, despite the fact that the event is extremely notable as part of his career, and is exactly the information that someone reading the Wikipedia page would want to know.
> I see Hasan haters trying to bludgeon the change into the article by ignoring any objection and just reverting edits.
Yes, I see some of those people too. But, in response, the editors are reverting the changes and locking out the topic. An impartial editor concerned about the truth and curating a useful encyclopedia would not do that - they'd create new changes to remove specifically only the offending unsourced material and rewrite sourced material to be neutral.
> if this was so important then why hasn’t any major news outlet written about it
Along with the other sources listed in the talk page that the editors did their best to discount, The Guardian wrote about it - that certainly counts as a "major news outlet".
Nobody wants a ton of drama on Wikipedia, but this clearly surpasses the threshold of "drama" given that (1) it's still being discussed months afterwards (2) it has transcended the cultural circles around Hasan (which is the main metric for "drama") and (3) it's received reporting from many news outlets, including large and reliable ones like The Guardian.
I want to make sure I understand -- In The Guardian article you linked, the author is making no claim about what happened to Kaya, he is only giving Hasan's statement about the incident. The claim presented in the article essentially boils down to: Kaya yelped while Hasan was reaching for something unrelated and that it's a "conspiracy theory" to think that Hasan uses a shock collar as he claims he doesn't. You're saying you're in favor of the Wikipedia article being updated to say this?
> 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.
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)
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
If Canada wasn't having it's own immigration and post-secondary issues, this would be great. But no, we already shot ourselves in the foot with that...
In this case, I believe the capitalization is a hold-over from raylib's c library, Odin doesn't appear to put any preference?
In Go it has a specific meaning: starting an identifier with a capital causes it to be exported for use in other packages. Identifiers with a starting lowercase char are package private.
Apologies if this is explaining what you already know...
This. Exactly. Alberta and Saskatchewan did not exist as independent colonies. Treaties were with the federal government. This is a non-starter and will never happen as WEXIT separatists dream it could.
Canada's population grew by over 3 million since the last election. So yes, the parties will get more votes. That combined with the utter collapse of the NDP and Green party votes, meant more vote share goes to the Liberals and Conservatives.
The left wing has been rotting out from under the NDP's guidance for years. They are no longer a grass roots party and are primarily controlled through their central offices (both federally and provincially). Provincially the NDPs have been moving towards the center to govern for years as well, just look at the Alberta and BC NDPs and their policies/actions.
If this was so easy, teams wouldn't suck, matrix would be everywhere, and discord would be replaced already by the furries (as much as stoat is trying).
reply