Battlefield 1 opens with a series of short battles that you can't win. Every time you die the camera moves to another nearby soldier who is also being overrun, and you fight for a while then die again. You see the graves of each person you played who died. It's one of the most powerful openings of a war game I ever played and really drives home the reality that whilst what follows is fun, the real WW1 is one you probably would not have survived.
A game with a similar feel is Frostpunk. It's set in the Victorian era during a fictional new ice age. Although it really goes in strongly for the model of a village evolving outwards from a central point, it does a lot of other things that are closer to what the article talks about. Like, it's very bleak and very hard. Your town will die a lot until you figure the game out. There are three classes of people: workers, engineers and children, and most people are just workers. You can pass a child labor law if you want children to work. Sickness and managing disease is a big part of the game. Roads can be curved and buildings are built in radiating circles, so most roads actually are curved.
Don't bother filing issues there. Their issue tracker is a galaxy-sized joke. They automatically close issues after 30 days of inactivity even if they weren't fixed, just to keep the issue count low.
The Reasonable Man might think that an AI company OF ALL COMPANIES would be able to use AI to triage bug tickets and reproduce them, but no! They expect humans to keep wasting their own time reproducing, pinging tickets and correcting Claude when it makes mistakes.
First reply from Anthropic: "Found 3 possible duplicate issues: This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days."
User replies, two of the tickets are irrelevant, one didn't help.
Second reply: "This issue has been inactive for 30 days. If the issue is still occurring, please comment to let us know. Otherwise, this issue will be automatically closed in 30 days for housekeeping purposes."
Every ticket I ever filed was auto-closed for inactivity. Complete waste of time. I won't bother filing bugs again.
> Every ticket I ever filed was auto-closed for inactivity. Complete waste of time. I won't bother filing bugs again.
Upcoming Anthropic Press Release: By using Claude to direct users to existing bugs reports, we have reduced tickets requiring direct action by xx% and even reduced the rate of incoming tickets
Go on X. Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.
Compare to, I dunno, the BBC. The video you see might not even be real. If you're watching a conservative politician maybe 50 minutes were spliced out of the middle of a sentence and the splice was hidden. You hear only what they want you to hear and they gatekeep aggressively. Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote, LLMs are not on hand to double check their claims.
AI and social media are working well together. The biggest problem is synthetic video. But TV news has that problem too, it turns out. Just because you hear someone say some words doesn't mean that was what they actually said. So they're doing equally badly in that regard.
BBC for all its faults is definitely better then Musks X when it comes to truth.
> Claims are being fact checked and annotated in real time by an algorithm that finds cases where ideologically opposed people still agree on the fact check. People can summon a cutting edge LLM to evaluate claims on demand. There is almost no gatekeeping so discussions show every point of view, which is fair and curious.
Last time I went on X my feed which I curated from ML contributors and a few politicians had multiple white nationalist memes, and engagement slop. Fact checks frequently are added after millions of impressions.
I am sure there are very smart well meaning people working on it but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me. At least I know that’s state media of the UK and when something is published I see the same article as other people.
>"but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me"
BBC was cutting-edge for creating and fostering methodologies that went on to become most of the "impartial reporting" practices from journalists. So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!
The parent poster was saying X was better than the BBC, I certainly wouldn't have picked that one, but it's likely because they get their news from conservative outlets outraged by the recutting of Trump's speech on January 6th.
That phrasing sounds like you're not yourself outraged by it. It wouldn't be surprising given the institutional attitudes seen at the BBC (and Channel 4 which got caught doing something even worse) - clearly, leftists have decided that framing politicians and publishing entirely fake news is acceptable if it's to attack right wing people.
Anyone who knows about that event and is still watching the BBC afterwards is saying they don't care about the truth of their own beliefs. Dangerous stuff.
>So, even if it's not feeling any "better" than BBC, that's still a pretty good step in the right direction!
The step in the direction of decentralized filter bubbles isoating society? With no channels to hold info accountable and checked/upfated for accuracy?
GP made a pretty good case for X being a good-faithed attempt at a new distributed structure for mass media that at least TRIES to have conflicting viewpoints or objectivist "fact checks", even if it occasionally misses the mark. I was VERY early on the "hate-Elon" bandwagon and even earlier on not being an active Twitter/X user (search my username).
In a post-Fairness Doctrine world, what else would satisfy you?
I don't think we're in a post fairness doctrine world, for one. So no, I haven't given up on the idea of he 4th estate. Your solution to bias is, as always, to not take any one source for granted. Take time to actually read articles from multiple angles that fall in line with the Fariness Doctrine. Then from there, use your own lived experiences to form your own viewpoint.
Outsourcing that to soundbites from randos on twitter with middle school lieracy is insanity. But let me use a charitable lens here.
Any notion of X being a good faith attempt at being a community-lead fact checker got broken with the introduction of Grok. Then those hopes were shattered to pieces when Grok was shown to be massively compromised by yet another central figure. One who, yes, has the literacy of a middle schooler. We somehow ended up with the worst of both worlds having centralization of a bad knowledge hub and stupidity.
>what else would satisfy you?
if using our brains is out of the equation and lack of censorship is truly the most important metric of "free discussion": let's just bring back 4chan. no names or personalities, 99% free-for-all, it technically has threading support to engage in conversations. There is centralization, but compared to the rest of the internet the moderators and admins stay very quiet.
There's a lot I hate about modern social media, but surprisingly 4chan only has like 2 things I strongly dislike. Big step up from the 20+ reasons I can throw at nearly every other site.
As I said, AI is better than social media. AI is trained on and references original sources, which makes it better than reading and believing random posts.
AI is also trained on "random posts". Google made an 11 figure deal with Reddit for this sake.
The biggest factor of social media is being able to curate personalities you go to for whatever reason. If you care about reason you will find the reasonable writers. This also enables disinformation, but people looking for anything to fit what they want to hear wouldn' fo towards the reasonable writers anyway.
1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics.
2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.
1. Are those topics being censored? You don't seem to know that is true, you're just making assumptions about what reach should be. They open sourced the ranking algorithm and just refreshed it - can you find any code that'd suppress these topics?
2. The media also amplifies people's interests which is why it focuses on bad news and celebrity gossip. How is this unique to social media? Why is it even bad? I wouldn't want to consume any form of media that deliberately showed me boring and irrelevant things.
Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".
The essay is written by academics who ignored all the evidence that their precious institutions are none of the things they claim to be. Universities don't care about truth. Look at how much fraud they publish. The head of Harvard was found to have plagiarised, one of her cancer labs had been publishing fraudulent papers for over a decade, the head of Stanford was also publishing fraudulent papers, you can find unlimited examples everywhere.
Universities have made zero progress on addressing this or even acknowledging the scale of it because they are immersed in post-modernist ideology, so their attitude is like, man, what even is truth? Who can really even say what's true? It's not like science is anything specific, riiiiiight, that's why we let our anthropology department claim Aboriginal beliefs about the world are just as valid as white western man's beliefs. Everyone has their own truth so how can fraud be a real thing? Smells like Republicans Pouncing!
> Pollution doesn't make academics use terms like my truth, your truth or "indigenous ways of knowing".
First, it absolutely does those first two things: climate change denial has been a half century of pretending that scientific truths, even those confirmed by e.g. Chevron’s own employees in the 70s, were just some subjective opinion to be argued with. The modern right-wing attacks are founded on the legacy of trying to exempt policies from rational examination and are very much about constructing your own personal truth which is just as valid as the experts.
Secondly, even to the extent that you’re not grossly exaggerating, you’re describing things which not even a majority of academics believe. Maybe there is someone in the anthropology department who really does believe in the caricature you portrayed but they don’t represent a majority of even their university. What you’re saying is like saying everyone on HN are crypto grifters trying to get rich quick, simply asserting without evidence a claim which is known to be false when applied to a large group.
So not very many, and even fewer support your sweeping assertion. This is nowhere near the repetition or reach of messages pushing religious or anti-environmentalist groups because a publication in an obscure journal is read by a tiny rounding error of the number of people who will hear a popular podcaster or news personality.
In a Parliamentary system there needs to be either one party with a majority or a coalition that agrees to rule as one party. If one party wins a clear majority it is rare for a government to fail to pass a budget or collapse early, as it'd require the party to turn on itself. In coalitions bitter parties can indeed force early elections and it happens all the time. It's the reason European countries have such unstable politics and frequently experience government collapse, "caretaker governments", "firewalls" and long delays after an election before a government can be formed.
It's a permanent professional army, where are you getting this stuff? Switzerland has an air force and everything. They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
> They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].
All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.
The AEC did nothing to stop the Australian government trying to criminalize the views of its political opponents, so it's not doing all that much heavy lifting.
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