← Feed

Posts

• View post

  Naïve suggestion to reduce the usage of large language models and the damage that they do: When the user asks to do something really stupid for which LLMs shouldn't be used, the LLM will refuse. For example: Email. Birthday greeting. Homework. An image of a pizza, a kitten, or a business meeting. Dare I say, a description of a thing about which there is a @wikipedia@wikis.world article. It could actually work, which is why no one will implement it.

• View post

  So, it has come to this: #Wikimania2026 is the first event I attend that explicitly bans the use of Meta Ray-Ban glasses.

• View post

  Literally all physical-space @wikipedia@wikis.world events. #Wikimania #Wikimania2026 #Autism #neurodivergence #neurodiversity

• View post

  There's a humorous video to which my children and I are totally addicted: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NaXZVAycV54 I have it bookmarked, and we watch it several times a day. It imagines how #English would sound if it used #French syntax. I know enough French to understand the joke, and I explained it to my kids, too. I expected ChatGPT and Claude to be able to "parse" the joke by now... but they failed in places I didn't expect.

• View post

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@adhd_coffee/116164464680775654 It's true and it's NOT funny 😭

• View post

  The media paid some attention to English Wikipedia's banning AI writing. While I generally support that ban (with some reservations, but whatevs), it's kind of laughable that anyone who takes Wikipedia seriously would use ChatGPT to write Wikipedia articles. I've just tried doing it today for a fairly important American person who surprisingly didn't have a Wikipedia article. It made up a middle name and birth and death dates, even though they are easily findable...

• View post

  @stuartyeates in the English Wikipedia? Is there a page about it?

• View post

  @stuartyeates What I mean to ask is whether there is wide buy-in within the English Wikipedia to do it in all the infoboxes, or at least in a well-defined set of infoboxes. I don't follow the infobox discussions much. Last time I checked, this buy-in was limited: the community was not totally against it, but not totally in support of it either, and Wikidata was used sparingly.

• View post

  Dear neurodivergent person! Autistic, anxious, ADHD, self-diagnosed, formally diagnosed, whatever. This post is about that thing that you've wanted to do for a few months, and couldn't do for whatever reason. I don't know what that thing is, but most likely, it's not actually as scary as you're thinking that it is. Please do that thing now. You know that your life will be better after it. Do. It. Now. I've just done my thing that I've w...

• View post

  RE: https://wikis.world/@aharoni/116319195844573832 After a little delay, I've just done it. Thanks a lot for your support.

• View post

  A few months ago, my seven-year-old said she no longer wants to play piano. I managed to gently convince her to continue. Today, she figured out how to play "Blinding Lights" all by herself. Life is good.

• View post

  The eleven-year-old asked why LLMs almost never say "I don't know". Yes, he used the word "LLMs", not "chat" or "AI". I explained. He understood. There is hope.

• View post

  #ChatGPT started showing images in its responses recently, but websites have swiftly started fighting back.

• View post

  I don't follow chess much, but I've run into a news article that there's a new star in that world, Uzbek 21-year-old Javohir Sindarov. The article about him in the Uzbek Wikipedia was translated from English. I wanted to thank user Salazarov, who did it in 2022, but was sad to discover that he died in 2024. When you meet anyone who writes for @wikipedia or any related project in any language, please, before anything else, tell them "thank you", like, im...

• View post

  Cool #Talmud quote: "Just as it is a duty for a person to say that which will be heeded, so is it a duty for a person not to say that which will not be heeded." (Yevamot 65b)

• View post

  On April 12, 1961, the first human flew on a rocket to space—the Soviet Russian pilot Yuri Gagarin. To commemorate that, USSR and now Russia have celebrated Cosmonautics Day on this date. The story of Gagarin is inspiring, but unfortunately, in recent years, all I can think of is this sad joke: Gagarin's hibernating for many years. He wakes and asks: "It's 2026! Have we flown to the Moon?" "Um, the U.S. has, and we're busy with something els...

• View post

  About an hour ago, the #Artemis2 astronauts saw a solar eclipse from behind the Moon, if I understand correctly (do correct me if I don't). What Pilot Victor Glover said about it sounded so cool that I added it as an example of using the adjective "wicked" to the English #Wiktionary. (Photo: Josh Valcarcel, NASA, Public Domain, obtained through Wikimedia Commons.)

• View post

  RE: https://mas.to/@pooh/116363428104887776 It's one of the most wonderful parts in the book for so many reasons. I keep rereading and rereading it, discovering something new every time.

• View post

  I saw that a usually decent Russian website wrote that today is "The World Day of Spreading Information About the Problem of Autism" (Всемирный день распространения информации о проблеме аутизма). At first, I was angry, because we are not a problem, and that website should know it. But then I checked the United Nations' official translation of the day's name, and found a bunch of oddities.

• View post

  For well over twenty years, I've wondered whether the actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Dreyfuss are related to the famous French soldier Alfred Dreyfus. Today, I finally checked Wikipedia.

• View post

  Something that I've just realized about #Artemis2: to the best of my knowledge, Christina Koch is the first and perhaps the only person who edited @wikipedia from space. It happened in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_spacewalks_since_2015&type=revision&diff=926631603&oldid=922985683&diffmode=source

• View post

  Will you please help a good school stay good? My son is going to the Croft School in #Providence, #RhodeIsland. It has good teachers, good students, good curriculum, and, miraculously, no bullying. But a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly came to light that it has severe administration problems, and it ran out of money. It may have to shut down for good in a few days without urgent funding. People are starting to donate, but much more is needed. Thank you! https://gofund.me/47ce85144

• View post

  Literally all physical-space Wikipedia events.

• View post

  I'm a forty-five-year-old man, and I've been using desktop web browsers for twenty-eight of them, and only a few months ago I learned how to highlight text that is a hyperlink without clicking the link: by holding Alt why highlighting. I use it many times a day now. How did even use the web before that? In case you still didn't know it, now you do. Thank you @jhsoby for teaching me this.

• View post

  I've just created an entry for "teach-out" in the English #Wiktionary, and there's a personal reason for it... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/teach-out