Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org

Yesterday: finished rereading Red Plenty, a book about how at the height of the cold war, the Soviet Union was an autocracy whose technocrats were trying to invent a new future, and how that went just great for them.

Today: "Eric Schmidt [said] that China was unlike the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, because it was "an autocratic competitor that is run by technocrats that is very capable of inventing a new future"." https://www.reuters.com/world/aukus-needs-pool-tech-resources-us-edge-erodes-australian-intelligence-chief-2023-04-04/

No notes.

I know I shouldn't be, but I am deeply amused by this #wikipedia story: people editing an article in order to improve their chances of winning a contest by sabotaging the other entrants https://mothership.sg/2023/03/cathay-pacific-wiki-page-edit-giveaway/

Turns out if you idly flatten out foil wrappers, you can reuse them on things

(an oatcake)

Checked this with different samples of the same article: lead alone is likely entirely AI, some early sections possibly AI, some late sections likely entirely human. Very messy.

(Interestingly the later sections are the ones noting some kind of critical commentary, which might be relevant?)

@afamiglietti79 I knew there was a little of it burbling round, I just hadn't realised how much of it had turned up! Argh. Enough to drive you to drink.

Having said that I plugged in one of my own articles, and I am not wildly sold on the ability of the public tools to distinguish AI-generated content from "human-written in neutral style".

Unless there's something no-one told me until now. Hell of a way to find out...

@mrtinto and let us now flash forward four years, when we trace the original source of the newest catastrophic ssh bug discovery

@jpanzer hopefully it is not, however

Looking into it a bit more, the first user also "heavily expanded" a couple of dozen mainspace articles. Is any of this true? Who knows!

It is rather telling that anything about a place sounds like it was written by a tourist site or an estate agent, though.

84 more sitting in the draft queue at the moment. Goodness knows how many quietly deleted. Really not wild about this...

Spotted something a bit concerning on #wikipedia today: a user with 23x nonsensical-but-plausible-looking chatGPT created articles (all now deleted), and another with six. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Suspected_hoax_content_and_LLM_use_by_User:Gyan.Know - we didn't have the immediate rush of nonsense we were expecting, but there's definitely some seeping in

How could I have missed:

1973 - VAT

Things this country has decided are a good thing to introduce on April Fool's Day, a short list:

1918 - the RAF
1964 - the Ministry of Defence
1974 - the modern English county structure
1989 - the poll tax (Scotland)
1990 - the poll tax (England, because it went down so well first time round)
1999 - the national minimum wage

This is also tucked away at the end: intriguingly the minutes indicate four committee members voted against including it. Very curious as to why.

(It absolutely does need review)

"In arriving at the decision on sanction, the Committee has had to take account of the effect of the Recall of MPs Act 2015. The recommended sanction, if approved by the House, will trigger the possibility of recall. We believe the operation of the Act requires review."

Reading the Ferrier report (it's all go here this morning) and this bit has just leapt out at me:

"On 1 October 2020, Ms Ferrier was suspended by the SNP for breaching COVID-19 rules and remains an independent Member.[39]"

"(39) Margaret Ferrier - Wikipedia"

I mean, delighted we can be of service, but you'd have thought the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards would have access to a more robust source...

@mia can't help but keep thinking of these posters for some reason

A detail the author didn't mention, but a similar thought: my goodness, looks how perfect all those teeth are. There's something that stands out.

Interesting piece on some of the odd bits of cultural homogenisation that image generators are producing https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf