Here's the thing, I tend to believe that sufficiently intelligent and original people will always have something to offer others; its irrelevant if you imagine the others as the current consumer public, our corporate overlords, or the ai owners of the future.
There may be people who have nothing to offer others, once technology advances, but I dont think that anyone in current top % role would find themselves there.
Awkward headline, since its not really much of a milestone. The first couple in a region are interesting, hitting significant proportions a year is interesting, a cumulative (relatively) small number is not that interesting.
Since when is 5k a couple? Volvo is selling these while companies like Tesla are cough asleep at the wheel. I think the article mentioned 140 Tesla semis sold.
...what is "obscene" and what is "justifiable" are about morality.
I mean, I agree with your conclusion, but I don't think trying to paint this as some kind of purely rational act is either necessary or helpful.
It is moral to try to redress past wrongs—especially when those past wrongs have created massive current wrongs and inequities.
It is moral to take from those who have built their wealth on the backs of the suffering of the many, and to give to those who suffered to make it possible.
Morality doesn't need to be a dirty word, nor does it need to be something we're not allowed to look to to guide our collective actions.
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.
I made a small edit to fix a mistake once and it didn’t get called vandalism but I sort of got a harsh message telling I did it wrong and didn’t follow processes
There must be some admin-level expectations of how things should be done but the editor flow gives you zero warning or indication. This was a while back so maybe they changed the flow
If there's a dispute and the person you're having a dispute with never materialises to argue their side of the argument, you're fine to just revert the banner.
But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem.
> The base rules are actually not very complicated.
> But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction.
I think this a feature/bug of a (litigious) society that works on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
I've had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.
Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”
I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.
Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.
Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.
I think the ongoing hosting cost of any given article is incredibly close to zero with the exception of a very tiny fraction of popular articles. The popular ones obviously deserve to be there as evidenced by their popularity alone. Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.
> Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.
The thing you're not taking into account is that every article that exists takes up some amount of editor time, which is why it's good when more people participate in Wikipedia. You are correct that the server/bandwidth cost of almost all articles rounds off to zero. That leaves just the cost in "an actual human looked at this and okayed it," which has different scaling characteristics.
If that's the intention, fine. But don't be surprised when no one but the most committed politicians want to bother trying to contribute to the project.
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.
I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.
> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
In fairness, this does mean the system is working.
Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?
Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.
There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.
Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.
It will unnerve you to know, that this is the state of the art, and the information environment we run in, is incredibly fragile at the speeds at which it is moving.
It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.
Control theory (among others) says that a more rapid cycle actually often improves reliability and accuracy of a system. (If on average an iteration will converge on a set point/objective, then more/faster iterations will converge more rapidly, or become stable past some threshold). People keep trying to slow Wikipedia down though. They do succeed somewhat, and that actually hurts accuracy and engagement.
Perhaps we should trust it more because it is fluid and that fluidity is documented (see the history and talk tabs for any given article). Historically, reputable sources depended upon, to a very large degree, the authority of the author. The reader typically had little to no insight into what was generally agreed upon and where there was some debate. How the Wikipedia exposes that may be imperfect, but it is better than nothing.
Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer.
Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes.
For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.
It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.
But a review process can make it both harder to change and more correct. A delay in impacting the official version makes it harder for people to vandalize.
We do this in software all the time.
In software if there's a critical bug sometimes we accelerate a fix. We can have a process like that for "wrong information". But you'd think most articles about established topics should not see a lot of churn. Yes- Sometimes they find a new fossil that calls some preexisting science into question, but these are relatively rare events and we can deal with that e.g. by putting a note on the relevant topic while the new article gets worked on.
Basically every other complaint in this thread is that editing is impossible because everything is reverted. Your issue seems like an impossible one to cleanly solve
Not everything meets Wikipedia editorial goals, but you still have a lot more of latitude in Wikibooks and Wikiversity, the latter also admitting original researches.
I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects but they block Tor, e-mailing admins to get an account manually created always results in them telling you to follow some other process, but that process is only for "established editors", so it seems there's no realistic way for me to contribute.
It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.
Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.
Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!
Why should an individual landlord have to subsidize an individual tenant? Its a scale of social interaction that doesnt make any sense.
This can have lots of issues. Imagine something like a good school zone changing, an event that may not be accounted for by the index. Insurance and taxes are determined by current value, that is partially determined by market rent, but the landlord cant adjust.
This also hurts a specific landlord when it comes time to sell, making a tenanted property potentially less valuable (and reducing the incentive to take on a tenant at all). This does not impact the general property value mind, as the tenant only benefits and creates this problem if the index is below the market.
If you want a fair balance, "its mine as long as I pay market rent" is pretty good. "its mine as long as I pay indexed rent" is not great, as it removes the financial benefit of capital investment from the landlord.
Burn out is hard to manage; its something that happens in the cruisy 20-something hour a week job as well as the 80+ hour pressure cooker. Probably not to the same degree sure, but its not the only thing going on here.
Its a whole lot more sustainable if you can build an identity around "here is my team, we are building {___}", and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
Genuinely clear objectives can also be a great asset here; but I find that clarity doesnt scale. When Ive been a contractor working on projects measured in weeks or months with small teams, full remote is easy. At corporate gigs where the thing you are doing might be several abstraction layers from a customer; its harder to answer "why are we doing this?". In the second case being able to share in person is important; because its not just the work its the context and other people doing it thats grounding.
That motivation brings efficiency; at least for myself.
> Burn out is hard to manage; its something that happens in the cruisy 20-something hour a week job
Usually burn out is also caused by bad management. For instance, noisy open plan office where developers are mixed with sales and other departments to "cross pollinate" and have "creative juices flowing". Most people can't really focus on work and then are blamed for poor performance. If you have bills to pay, you often actually work after work, when you go home, to meet deadlines. Other instance I saw - "busy" meetings throughout the week, repetitive stuff, so certain people can be seen as they are "managing", also peppered throughout the day so you don't get more than an hour of uninterrupted work. Then again blame "why this and that is not delivered?".
> and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
I accept that some people struggle to adapt to online asynchronous communication, but in person meetings are inefficient from creative point of view. They disrupt flow and don't give opportunity for everyone to be heard. Some people can give answers or ideas instantly (not necessarily a good ones) others need information to simmer in their heads for a while. You of course get a sense of achieving something, but this won't be optimal. Basically just cheap dopamine.
> its harder to answer "why are we doing this?"
Answer is actually simple. To pay the bills, have roof over one's head, to have kids in good school, to enjoy life outside of work. If you are employee or contractor, you are not building your own thing. It's good to always remember that and keep a healthy distance.
Its not really about building your own thing, its about identity... You are what you do.
If you dont understand the impact what you are doing has once its out of sight, how can you understand yourself as part of society?
Contracting is simpler in a way, "I made a tool for Steve so that he can better do his job" is an easy to understand story, and doing that 10 times a year makes your connections to the world fairly clear (Not to mention it builds on itself, as more people know you as someone who can make things for them).
Big corporate jobs, especially highly distributed remote ones, can make it nearly impossible to clearly draw a line like that. The narrow context of "I improved a tool that the Widget team uses to support the Tools team who build visualizations for the Documentation team" thirty layers down before you get to a thing customers touch. In person becomes important, because it lets you better understand the context of your work as "Part of the institution that makes fighter jets".
There's actually a fair amount of research on burnout. (Disclaimer: while I have read a bunch of this in the past, I do not have any links handy.)
From what I've read—and my first- and second-hand experience bears this out—some of the most important factors in whether someone burns out on their work (besides straight-up overwork, which should be painfully obvious) are
1. Feeling like their work is meaningful (as opposed to just shuffling numbers from one spreadsheet to another or something)
2. A sense of autonomy and ownership over their work (as opposed to being micromanaged and ordered to do a bunch of work that they don't understand the purpose of—see #1—or actively disagree with)
3. Feeling like they themselves are valued, in the ways that actually matter to them (as opposed to being given "participation prizes", told thank you for your 4-week 100-hour crunch sessions, here's a $10 gift certificate, etc).
(Note that #3 can be the trickiest, because what feels validating for one person might not for another. In particular, from my own experience, one of the things the division someone I know was in liked to do as a "reward" at the end of a particular period of work was to host a social gathering or party...but the person I know working there was introverted and shy, and this felt more like a chore than a reward. For others, though, it was meaningful and fulfilling.)
From everything I've seen, it's true that it's often easier to build these things with an in-person team, but a lot of that is just because that's what most of us are used to and have experience working with. I firmly believe that as we move forward with more remote work, we will, as a society, get much, much better at building the kind of camaraderie and bonding over the Internet that we have well-understood methods of doing in person now.
The distinction that i think is important to make when talking about "the bitter lesson" is that improving the compute and training infrastructure and tricks in the abstract wins over intelligent model and system design.
Its more about the information about the specific problem you are solving having less impact than techniques that target the compute. So in this case, breaking down how to parse a PDF in stages for your domain is involving specific expert knowledge of the domain, but training with attention is about efficient use of compute in general; with no domain expertise.
We have global commerce; you are not only working on the creation part of something new, but also competing with similarly skilled people working with different more advantageous start conditions.
Nobody is talking about the difference between 1 and 2 billion, they are talking about the difference between 50 and 100 thousand, while competing.
Personally I use google more/just as much for product searches; stores selling X, finding comparison sites, going to the manufacturers page for a product.
That and restaurants from maps.
I use it less for information based searches, but that almost seems to be a win from an advertiser perspective.
I dont think you can create a high trust society deliberately; It takes multi-generation level time-spans, and in a low trust environment there is no mechanism to guarantee your plans will be carried forward; even if you currently have dictator level control over society.
Creating highly trustworthy technology is the best we can do, and reliable transportation is a big part of this.
I also suspect targeting and removing the worst interactions people have with strangers (and for many this is the random nature of a human driver, either from a taxi or other drivers) would create a higher trust society overall, as there is less cause to be wary.
There may be people who have nothing to offer others, once technology advances, but I dont think that anyone in current top % role would find themselves there.