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Submission + - The Tragedy of Losing Your Wikipedia Page (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: What do you need to know—need to know—about Xavier Trudeau? The eldest son of former Canadian prime minister Justin, the teenage Trudeau has recently begun performing R&B under the mononym Xav. But, with all due respect to Xav, do those facts make him a person of note? Should you expect to be able to read about him on Wikipedia? What about Evanescence guitarist Tim McCord, or 2012 Yachtmaster of the Year Rainer Holtorff? All three have had a biography on Wikipedia; all three of those biographies were considered for deletion this year on the grounds that the subjects were not notable enough to warrant a biography at all. Every day, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Wikipedia biographies—of child actors turned LA realtors, retired ambassadors, soccer players who have played less than 10 minutes of professional soccer—are purged from the world’s free encyclopedia.

It’s not as though Wikipedia, which hosts over 7 million articles in the English language, doesn’t have the space. But Wikipedia has only so many volunteers to monitor its contents. To this day, Wikipedia editors are discovering hoaxes that have gone undetected for decades. The time it takes to verify the release dates of Xav’s three singles is better spent—the logic goes—by asking whether the American Civil War officer Nathaniel Lyon really drank mustard during battle, as was claimed in his Wikipedia biography for 17 years. Wikipedia removed the mustard claim, not because it was proven wrong, but because there was no reliable evidence for it. “We’re not really looking for what’s true,” Britta Gustafson, who has been editing Wikipedia since 2001, told me. “We’re looking for what’s verifiable.” Wikipedia editors do not themselves decide that a person is not notable, only that there is a lack of reliable evidence to support the claim...

Comment You aren't gambling on the stock market (Score 1) 35

You're buying something of value and you might be underestimating or overestimating the value of that thing but you're still getting the thing. Specifically you are buying ownership in a company.

That's not gambling. You don't get paid based on the outcome. You get paid based on the relative value of the company.

Now if that system isn't working very well for you no shit, we have been deregulating markets for the last 50 years what the fuck did you expect? But that's not a problem with the underlining system that's you refusing to do the maintenance the system needs to function properly. If you stop changing your car is oil it's going to break down.

Gambling is when you are paid based entirely on whether a predetermined outcome happens or not. That is definitely what gambling is. You do not own anything. So you only get paid if the event happens. And there is a specific event that has to happen for you to be paid. That is gambling.

Submission + - Proton CEO in full AI psychosis (404media.co) 1

devnulljapan writes: Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, and other company executives are aggressively pushing Proton towards AI. Engineers at Proton, which makes the encrypted email service Proton Mail and a suite of privacy and security-focused products, including an encrypted drive service, an authenticator app, a password manager, are being pushed to âoestop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.â
Workers describe an environment where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security products with AI, but feel unable to voice them, lest Yen berates them in front of everyone or threatens their employment at the company.

âoeThe CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now.â

Comment Orange pedophile (Score 0, Offtopic) 35

Even without the context we all know who I'm talking about.

I bring it up because dear God this administration is corrupt and in light of the subject of this comment what the hell was anyone expecting?

I think the real problem is about 25% of the population of any given country or dyed in the wool assholes.

From there all you have to do is push people to enough desperation that their brain stop working right. People under enormous amounts of pressure don't suddenly get better or smarter. They make bad decisions and they make more of them.

Like believing a famous pedophile who bankrupts everything he touches is somehow going to reduce the cost of groceries. Somebody who can think straight knows better than that.

Submission + - Polymarket Halted International Trading After Hackers Drained Accounts (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Trading has resumed on Polymarket’s flagship international platform after a hack that drained money from the wallets of some traders. A third-party vendor based in the United Kingdom was breached, not the prediction market’s website itself. Law enforcement in the UK have been notified of the incident, the company said. Trading was initially paused while the company investigated for several hours.

On X, prominent traders complained that they had lost money; Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps reported that around 700 users appear affected, with approximately $2.7 million stolen. Polymarket declined to comment when WIRED asked how many traders were impacted by the breach and how much money was lost, but said it will refund impacted traders.

The hack did not impact users on Polymarket US, the company’s newer platform for people within the United States. Polymarket runs two separate prediction markets; Polymarket US operates as a federally regulated financial exchange within the country, while the flagship Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based platform that is banned in the United States and a number of other countries.

Comment Re:Grandpa, tell me again about those bank-robberi (Score 1) 25

It could also just be money laundering. I've seen several of these absolutely enormous thefts and they're so large that it's basically impossible to get away with it. You can't move hundreds of millions let alone billions of dollars like this and not have it be readily traceable.

If they catch the guys who did this then yeah we will know but if they haven't caught these guys in a few months then it's either North Korea or one of the other nation states or it's just money laundering. Honestly the money laundering could easily involve nation states like Russia or Iran or North Korea.

Comment Re: Maybe (Score 1) 73

No. The fundamentals haven't changed. Same with the Nvidia and SpaceX mentions. The stocks recovered in both cases. Usually the action here is to buy the dip and sell when it gets back to about where it was, but I'm not a finance guy and this is not financial advice.

The legitimate concern here is that this could (and IMO will) result in a long-term write down on assets long before they normally depreciate. And it probably will because these guys have been putting 5 year depreciation schedules on GPUs where it's normally 3 years.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

Comment Re:Self described article (Score 1) 163

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.

Comment Re:How abysmally stupid do you have to be ... (Score 1) 54

I mean people have probably sued lawnmower companies because they were not warned to not to lift the mower with their hands when it was running. For every warning sign you see that you think it is stupidly obvious, there was probably someone who did exactly what was warned.

Comment Good work guys! (Score 1) 82

Normal industry: Your factory has an expensive milling machine and a cheap stamping machine. Thankfully, customers actually seem to prefer stamped parts for most cases and you can produce those quickly; so you keep stamping out parts and rolling in cash.

Tech industry: As above but your entire c-suite believes that the milling machine with turn into mecha-jesus and end history; so you are bulldozing everything you can to build more milling machines.

Submission + - OpenVeils Releases Uncensored, Analytical LLM Designed To Escape Consensus (openveils.com) 1

alternative_right writes: Today's top search and AI engines ask, "What do the most authoritative and widely accepted sources currently support?" rather than "What conclusion emerges if we examine the full body of available evidence — including controversial, obscure, or dissenting sources — and weigh each on its merits?"

That distinction matters. Systems optimized around authority, consensus, popularity, and established-source credibility can systematically deprioritize evidence that sits outside the mainstream — even when individual sources may be credible, documented, or independently verifiable.

The result can become a self-reinforcing information loop: mainstream sources rank highest because they are considered authoritative, AI relies disproportionately on those sources, and their conclusions are then repeated and amplified as the prevailing consensus.

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