The facts that Wikipedia has content and community problems (such as biases in Israel-Palestine topic area and systemic powertripping by admins) and that Elon Musk is a far-right kook are not mutually exclusive, just in case everyone here is confused.
The p(doom) by deepfakes against epistemic reality is a nightmare fuel. This is one of the very few things that should be uninvented and chucked into either the abyss of an ocean or into a volcano.
If you think that's bad, wait until you hear about Photoshop. You can actually control the presentation of the image. This dispicable company also supplies criminals with the popular industry-grade deepfake software "After Effects" that has been used to composite fabricated evidence against real life footage.
I think the threat deepfakes pose to the current legal system has been solved since computers became a household item. You're being hyperbolic.
Comparing the utter scale of the problem this time around to things such as photoshop shows just how little you understand the sheer magnitude of this problem. That's even worse than simply comparing apples to oranges.
Photoshop and similar applications did allow misinformation to be made. But not even 0.01% as much as AI-powered deepfakes as we see today. Photoshop took time, skill and had limitations. The worst someone could really do before was photoshop your head onto the body of someone else.
Now videos that look 100% real can be generated at lightning speed with no effort. Think of a celebrity, or a politician. Half a decade ago if you saw a photo of them you could be pretty certain it actually was them. Now you can’t. Half a decade if you heard an audio clip of a particular person confessing to something you could be almost certain it was them. Now you can’t. Videos and audio used to be pretty reliable before. Now they’re useless. AI deepfakes makes misinformation 1000X worse then Photoshop ever did.
It's sensible to think that it is possibly one of the reasons of the Great Filter.
If anything, it would seem to make convicting actual criminals much harder since the ubiquitous use of AI renders all photo and video evidence useless to prove a crime “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Previously, of course, those things could be faked but because of the skill required to do so, it would make it less plausible to question their legitimacy “beyond the reasonable doubt.” There’s also the fact of that would have required a human to do so.
Now, images can be modified at their source programmatically which throws questionable chain of custody into the mix as well.
Aaron Bandler of Jewish Journal also wrote many articles criticizing Wikipedia's antisemitic problems in the wake of October 7 attacks too. Not to mention "The Wikipedia Flood" blog which is posting more reports on Wikipedia.
> A lot of critical coverages against Wikipedia have indeed appeared lately.
Which is good, because irrespective of any particular political controversy, Wikipedia has way more goodwill than it deserves. People should look at it way, way more critically, and stop with the hagiographic praise.
Completely agree. In the long term though it's not surprising if the US Congress eventually set up a special committee to open investigations against Wikipedia and possibly other websites, because as can be seen below, some Wikipedia admins have been implicated in serial harassments against women and even actual employees of the USG.
Israel Palestine war aside, there's been a lot of controversies about Wikipedia lately. Two of them were the presumably still unfixed content distortion and bias incidents on Native American topics and the Holocaust in Poland.
Sure, I don't doubt that there's genuine ideology-driven misinformation campaigns on Wikipedia (who wouldn't try it on the central source of trusted information?)
But the author's focus on the Zionism thing is just plain weird.
It's up for debate regarding the author's focus, but one thing remain clear is that Wikipedia is overrated for some time and many choose not to see the nuances or issues that come with it. Just look at this one where one even accused me of "unhealthy obsession" against Wikipedia.
I suspect that those crazy fans of Elizabeth Holmes may have used the same aspersions against critics when John Carreyou published the article back then.
Totally! Same problem existed on Google as well whose systems have penchants to arbitarily lock users out of their accounts if they ever detected flimsy "suspicious activity" in these.
A lot of major platforms are declining or otherwise having problems now and which could lead to the reshaping of the Internet.
Google is cutting its operating costs and having an inactive account policy which some described as "harsh" because it entails the summary deletion of those accounts, while having some scandals with antitrust and incognito browser which saw them sued. Twitter is in steady decline due to the antics of Elon Musk which scared away a lot of financial backers. Reddit's API pricing are described as "expensive" and "harsh" as well which made a lot of users to jump ship to Lemmy et al.
But they are all far from being climaxes because Wikipedia, once the "purest" place of the Internet, had been getting increasingly negative coverage where the distortions in topic areas related to the Holocaust and Israel were reported, and according to credible rumors on an online forum populated with former Wikipedia editors, there are 20+ sexual harassment scandals against females committed by sysops and users which could be published on mainstream publications as a long form feature story next year.
Yeah, I thought the webpage was broken when I saw it! :D
I can understand that things like SSH and Funnel cost more, since they actually interact with their server infrastructure… but the removal of features and ACLs from Starter wasn't well communicated.
Yeah. I had a feeling of dread when I saw the "Changes to your Tailscale plan" email subject, but then was positively surprised by many of the changes. For smaller companies, getting the first three users for free will also be nice.
Previously almost all features were available [0] on all plans, though with certain restrictions that made sense (and some that didn't). I was hitting those limits and wanted to get approval for us to purchase the Team plan.
But now I see that features have been stripped out of the "new" Team plan — and was also frustrated that I couldn't find any information on this. I guess overall the pricing structure makes sense for them, but it's frustrating to not have this clearer in their article.
I suppose I can live without things like Funnel and SSH, and don't need Okta etc., but paying the new ACL tax for Starter to Premium (a $12 jump per user) is more painful.
Overall a positive, but with rough edges which unfortunately hurt me. But perhaps there'll be some tweaks in future, and perhaps again the opportunity to pay for individual feature upgrades.
