I feel like this is a rose tinted view of media based on Hollywood movies...
News media has always been biased and often had some form of agenda, sometimes even driven by the government.
What you used to be able to do though was acknowledge the bias and read with that lense.
What I think was true is that there was an effort of fairness and truth telling that today is far less true. Many media companies are owned by very few billionaires and they explicitly see them as propaganda.
That said, I'd always marked the Guardian as one of the remaining old schoolers. They have some weird and dangerous views, but their ownership structure gives some confidence there is an effort of fairness overall.
(I am also lost on how a foreign media company could publish a political opinion illegally in that country under US election law??)
Corollary is that Risk Management is a specialist field. The least risky thing to do is always to close down the business (can't cause an incident if you have no customers).
Engineers and product folk, in particular, I find struggle to understand Risk Management.
When juniors ask me what technical skill I think they should learn next my answers is always; Risk Management.
(Heavily recommended reading: "Risk, the science and politics of fear")
> Engineers and product folk, in particular, I find struggle to understand Risk Management.
How do you do engineering without risk management? Not the capitalized version, but you’re basically constantly making tradeoffs. I find it really hard to believe that even a junior is unfamiliar with the concept (though the risk they manage tends to be skewed towards risk to their reputation).
As with all Wikipedia competitors, this misses two key points
Firstly the most critical part of competing with WP is not the technology, it's having the critical mass of people willing to write article. Scandals aside over decades hundreds of thousands of people have built out the content and continue to do so - that is not easy to emulate.
Also for all the scandals, the toughest problems in WP early days were spammers and trolls. Moderation is a niche community problem (which till you have a community is moot). Stopping bot armies and countless trolls is a day 1 issue.
One good thing about Wikipedia is that it is pretty open with regards to internal affairs. If you want to criticize Wikipedia, there is no better source than Wikipedia itself.
If you truly never believe anything anyone has ever told you until you prove it yourself, I'm amazed you've somehow learned to type in English on a website with accounts.
We trust people all the time for many reasons. Authority, past experience, logic (why would they lie about something in context), etc. and we get by alright. Knowing it's another conscious, mortal human existing in society makes it much easier to know when someone is likely being truthful.
Obviously there are all sorts of caveats to that. The main difference is that LLMs don't lie. They don't tell the truth either. They just generate stuff with no meaning. There's no way to ever put any trust in that, the same way I wouldn't trust my ice maker to make sure my dog gets enough water while I'm on vacation.
people assert their opinions as facts, they parrot bullshit they heard or read online and make no attempt to verify anything, they willingly spread lies in support of their political or spiritual beliefs, they lie or exaggerate to make themselves look good or to make people they don't like look bad, or they even just straight up lie for no reason. to say anything said by an LLM is a lie until proven otherwise and then act like it's ridiculous to apply the same thing to humans is nuts.
LLMs have no concept of facts or lies, or right or wrong.
And contrary to your rather morbid view of society, in general most WP editors try hard to get it right. And support rather than undermine each other (don't let the more contentious topics distract you from the much larger pool of contributions)
More to the point, with humans you can demand they provide a source and at scale the iterative process should get to the right answers for a good percentage of content. That won't work for LLMs because none of that has meaning.
My company has a global remote workforce. The only team of which that owns any infrastructure being the team I am on, and all of my peers on that team being based in various parts of the US. So it’s not as simple maybe as you might think.
- In the EU the main reason Rewards cards have declined is that the regulator capped interchange to a very small amount in 2015. The US will follow suit at some point (as noted debit cards have gone that way) but I guess not as low
- I think the simple answer to nkurz's point on why don't all cards charge the maximum in interchange is - it's just market forces. It's not worth enough money to long-term piss off the bigger merchants (i.e. Amazon). When you have a 30% APR card non-rewards card, the 3% interchange is small beans. Also the acquiring bank would probably want a bigger piece of the pie if it were more widespread
- Credit Card economics is radically different across different countries (for all sorts of reasons). So for example, a third of card users in the US explicitly seek the rewards and another third have it for the various protections/security vs. debit cards. In the UK only 12% seek rewards, with the two biggest use cases being to spread costs of big transactions or to improve their credit score. (so for that reason it's sort of hard to have a global view of this problem)
A fun fact is that most US reward cards with up to 5% rewards work fine in the EU.
I have noticed some strange behavior with some cards at certain supermarkets. That may be them trying to fight back against the US interchange fees, but there are workarounds.
"Abuse" in this context would probably mean intentionally getting a credit card in the US and then making a bunch of purchases in the EU with the specific intention of screwing over your bank/card company with the interchange fee difference, which obviously not many people are going to have the will, time, or money to do, especially not "consistently."
Even just using the word "use," US cards are designed for and promoted to people who live in the US, and are likely to do most (if not all) of their shopping in the US. Absolutely, there's nothing morally wrong with getting a US card and using it a bunch in the EU, but the point is that the number of people doing that is low enough for the banks/card companies to just subsidize the fees.
There is no possible way to construe abuse. None. Zilch.
Credit cards, from nearly their inception, have been widely promoted to be used when travelling. The cards could charge for foreign transactions but they choose not to, obviously to promote use overseas.
They could simply specify that the rewards only apply to US purchases, yet they don't.
They could notice that I've been committing this "abuse" for TEN YEARS and cut me off, yet they don't. They keep on upgrading me instead.
> Credit cards, from nearly their inception, have been widely promoted to be used when travelling.
Sure, many of them might be "promoted" for travel (never mind you not providing any citations or statistics for this statement). The vast majority of people probably can't afford the money or vacation time to travel internationally more than once, maybe twice per year (at least in the United States, where most destinations require going overseas).
Nobody is attacking you, no need to take this so personally. The point was that the reason they still give you the rewards that the EU's lower processing fees can't fund is possibly because they're making enough extra from the customers not doing what you're doing to fund it. That's all.
The card issuer and potentially the consumer via atrocious fees and a terrible exchange rate? I have a French-based American Express and their exchange rate + commission on any foreign currency transaction is flat out absurd (I'm talking like 50 euros commission on a 1k USD transaction, + a very bad course resulting in a total ~100+ euro difference than if I pay with a Revolut/N26/BoursoBank no-fee foreign currency payment card).
I only use cards without FX or other fees. The amount is charged to the US card in Euros and Visa or Mastercard take a 50 basis point commission on the currency conversion, but since their settlement is not real time (end of day in US or something) often this can be a exchange rate win depending on your luck.
Interesting. Europe has stricter regulations that cap interchange. As a result not a lot of rewards cards and less competition in that space. In US no caps, but much more players in the rewards cards space. I've checked recent foreign transactions and it looks like both of popular travel cards make some money on exchange rates, but not as much as in France.
Amex Plat did not charge foreign fee, but exchange rate is 1% less favorable according xe.com
Chase Sapphire Reserve also no fees, exchange rate is 0.3% different from xe.com
> I've checked recent foreign transactions and it looks like both of popular travel cards make some money on exchange rates, but not as much as in France
Don't get me wrong, there are tons of options for cheap or downright free foreign exchange transactions (such as Revolut, N26, Fortuneo, BoursoBank just in France). It's Amex in particular that are borderline scamming their French customers on foreign transactions.
Never heard about others but Revolut is not a great example. 1% exchange fee plus another 0.3% on exchange rate. I agree that Amex is scamming their european customers. But my point was that they don't do it in US despite the lack of regulations. Same Amex is nicer to their american customers than Revolut to europeans. And one of Revolut's main selling points is their great exchange rates.
Pretty much all Amex cards with an annual fee have no foreign transaction fees as a benefit. The issue is that a lot of small business merchants outside of the US don't accept Amex (or will at least say they don't to avoid the higher interchange fee).
Not in France - I have an Amex Platinum and with it I get the above described absurd fees and bad exchange rates.
Funnily I've gotten notified a couple of times by Amex, as per ECB regulations, that the course they've used is significantly worse than the official one.
It's not worth enough money to long-term piss off the bigger merchants (i.e. Amazon)
But most individual issuers (excluding Chase and maybe 1-2 others) have a small impact on the overall mix, so why wouldn't they issue exclusively the top tier (highest interchange) cards?
Tip on this though; get someone else to wear them at your preferred volume. I tend to find ~50% of folks who use bone conducting headphones have to have the volume up so loud it's basically audible to people next to you.
The Foundation have invested a lot over the last decade in reliability. Nowadays it is in a great place, but about 10 years ago it was up and down all the time.
Especially as in the second part of your comment you restrict shareability/usability significantly from what the author wants to achieve (IE I can't as a free user bash out a diagram and share it, then later do another and share with a different person).
In fact the solution is so elegant when you think on it; free account volume is incredibly scalable, zero storage cost, offer immediate value but also a really simple upsell to pro accounts (save to the DB so you don't have to save the URls).
> Especially as in the second part of your comment you restrict shareability/usability significantly
no it doesn't. If my URL is `/thing#a1234` and I share it with you it will load my state for you. If you make a change, it's easy to push a new hash to the url that belongs to you.
> I am genuinely intrigued as to why that's better?
I didn't say it was better. We engineers are supposed to discuss solutions. I ended my last comment with "Just off the cuff thinking".
Yeh so this and other examples for me demonstrate that ChatGPT has no logic per se. These examples demonstrate that it is not analysing your question and calculating the answer, instead it is approximating and answer based on a corpus of questions. So in essence it doesn't actually yet understand what you are asking it.
I'd be intrigued to see some kind of amalgamation of an AI tool like ChatGPT with a logic tool (say Wolfram Alpha-style). That would combat a lot of the ways folks have found to break this.
>would combat a lot of the ways folks have found to break this.
Isn't it more that chatgpt is broken, and users are pointing it out
I suppose it depends what chatgpt is for, but I assume the end goal isn't just 'chat' (god I hope not) so it does actually need to reliably know correct answers or say when it doesn't. BSing is the worst option.
I mean arguably we BS all the time; how many pub quizzes do people confidently assert an answer? So I don't think that's totally the issue.
It's slightly different to the point I was talking to; but the thing about ChatGPT I find "uncanny" right now is how formal and expert it sounds about everything. A person would vary in certainty/surety and would sometimes show their working out etc.
So again it's a demonstration of how AI currently works; a best fit to the form and words of the question rather than genuine determination.
(I am not at all an AI expert but my understanding is that essentially all of this is not an engineering problem but a compute scale problem to train a large enough corpus - but someone expert please correct me!)
My point was more that the promise of AI isn't better BSing, if I wanted that I'd go to the pub.
The promise of AI is better answers, more correct answers, answers that are easier to get. It's supposed to enhance what computers can do, and complement their strengths, not undermine those strengths.
A computer program that gives an incorrect answer is buggy. Why should AI be held to a different standard?
News media has always been biased and often had some form of agenda, sometimes even driven by the government.
What you used to be able to do though was acknowledge the bias and read with that lense.
What I think was true is that there was an effort of fairness and truth telling that today is far less true. Many media companies are owned by very few billionaires and they explicitly see them as propaganda.
That said, I'd always marked the Guardian as one of the remaining old schoolers. They have some weird and dangerous views, but their ownership structure gives some confidence there is an effort of fairness overall.
(I am also lost on how a foreign media company could publish a political opinion illegally in that country under US election law??)