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busyant commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words   forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane
wombatpm · 10 days ago
If you took fencing at an Ivy League school for you PR requirement you would know all about foil, saber, and epee fencing. Not everyone gets to row crew.
busyant · 6 days ago
I'm not sure if this is a humble-brag and/or if it's a subtle dig at the out-of-touch lives of NYT crossword players.

Don't forget sailing and equestrian.

busyant commented on Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025   wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/... · Posted by u/ColinWright
mikkupikku · 11 days ago
True, but humans got a 20 year head start and I am willing to wager the overwhelming majority of extant flagrant errors are due to humans making shit up and no other human noticing and correcting it.

My go too example was the SDI page saying that brilliant pebble interceptors were to be made out of tungsten (completely illogical hogwash that doesn't even pass a basic sniff test.) This claim was added to the page in February of 2012 by a new wikipedia user, with no edit note accompanying the change nor any change to the sources and references. It stayed in the article until October 29th, 2025. And of course this misinformation was copied by other people and you can still find it being quoted, uncited, in other online publications. With an established track record of fact checking this poor, I honestly think LLMs are just pissing into the ocean.

busyant · 10 days ago
> I am willing to wager the overwhelming majority of extant flagrant errors are due to humans making shit up

In general, I agree, but I wouldn't want to ascribe malfeasance ("making shit up") as the dominant problem.

I've seen two types of problems with references.

1. The reference is dead, which means I can't verify or refute the statement in the Wikipedia article. If I see that, I simply remove both the assertion and the reference from the wiki article.

2. The reference is live, but it almost confirms the statement in the wikipedia article, but whoever put it there over-interpreted the information in the reference. In that case, I correct the statement in the article, but I keep the ref.

Those are the two types of reference errors that I've come across.

And, yes, I've come across these types of errors long before LLMs.

busyant commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words   forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane
gretch · 10 days ago
> The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.

Not my experience at all.

Ask me how I know what an EPEE is

busyant · 10 days ago
> EPEE

They love that one.

busyant commented on Man shot and killed by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning   startribune.com/ice-raids... · Posted by u/oceansky
password54321 · 18 days ago
Why is the focus on Minneapolis? Is it really the training ground for ICE?

Edit: "Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US, according to NBC. The community has been subject to widespread criticism from Mr Trump, who has called them "garbage"."

busyant · 18 days ago
> Why is the focus on Minneapolis? Is it really the training ground for ICE?

Somalis and Ilhan Omar.

Was talking to a Unitarian Universalist minister recently. He says his life is pretty much dealing with immigration issues for the past year.

He said there is considerable 'chatter' that the next significant target will be Maine because there is a large-ish Somali community there.

I have no idea how reliable that chatter is, so take it as a piece of gossip on the internet.

busyant commented on Scott Adams has died   youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_Jr... · Posted by u/ekianjo
mock-possum · a month ago
> a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower score

Were these people trustworthy? Because that sounds exactly like the kind of urban legend that people like to parrot, or like a pretty standard way to cope with not getting hired. I heard a bit of very similar chatter about college admissions back in the day. “Maybe I would have had a shot if I was Asian.” Etc.

busyant · a month ago
> Were these people trustworthy?

It was a long time ago (obviously). In general, yes, they were trustworthy, but they themselves could have been victims of misinformation--I don't really know is the short answer. But this is true for just about any bit of "news." Unless you have direct knowledge of a piece of information, you evaluate the information (and the person relating the info) and you make your best guess as to its "truth/falsity."

These days, I find it extremely difficult to trust a lot of federal "truth", so I get your overall point. :-(

busyant commented on Scott Adams has died   youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_Jr... · Posted by u/ekianjo
kcplate · a month ago
Well, I can’t speak to that with enough confidence to say it was “not a thing”, but I never saw that sort of thing in the eighties. Although, it would not necessarily be unusual for a manager to be that blunt and open at that time without fear of lawsuits, so that part tracks as possibly true for me if there was some sort of effort within his company.

However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.

busyant · a month ago
Just to throw my anecdote in ... In the 1980s, I met a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower scores.

So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.

Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")

busyant commented on Statement from Jerome Powell   federalreserve.gov/newsev... · Posted by u/0xedb
class3shock · a month ago
When I first watched a bunch of Adam Curtis stuff I thought it a long winded way of stating bad things have happened and have resulted in these bigger, overarching, bad things.

Thinking about it now 10 years later it feels alot different. The pervasiveness of tolerance of lies and fakeness has gone so far past anything I could have imagined being a big contributor to that.

busyant · a month ago
I have to say, I'd never heard of Adam Curtis or the HyperNormalisation documentary.

I just watched the first ~30 min and I'm not seeing the "bit picture". Hopefully, it won't take me another 10 years to achieve enlightenment.

busyant commented on Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S.   nytimes.com/2025/12/26/bu... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
busyant · a month ago
Since we're reminiscing, I remember Sears sold a "Sears-version" of the Atari 2600. I forget what it was called, but it was identical to the 2600.

My 9 year old brain was convinced that it was somehow inferior to the Atari-branded version of the 2600 and I was sad when my parents got me the Sears version for Christmas (it was probably cheaper than the Atari, I can't remember).

It didn't take me long, however, to realize it was the same thing with a different logo.

busyant commented on Google is dead. Where do we go now?   circusscientist.com/2025/... · Posted by u/tomjuggler
fairity · a month ago
Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.

As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.

Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.

busyant · a month ago
> seven figures every month on Google ads

What are you advertising?

busyant commented on What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)   straightdope.com/21341789... · Posted by u/titaniumtown
hecanjog · 2 months ago
Fair enough, but I disagree that it's a good question. "Explain it to me like I'm 5" (not even written out in words, just the abbreviation we all know) is not a curious place to come from, it is a desire for the quickest path to the end/payoff.
busyant · 2 months ago
I think you're taking the comment too literally.

I took it to mean something like, "I won't understand an abstruse Ph.D.-level explanation of what happened. I need an explanation geared toward the layperson."

In fact, I think that's closer to the essence of ELI5--as opposed to literally explaining something at the 5 year old level.

I suppose you can quibble about using the initialism, ELI, but only if you're advocating for people who might be unfamiliar with its use. Otherwise, I don't understand your complaint.

u/busyant

KarmaCake day2813July 20, 2008
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