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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

kiwiziti.com

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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#131

Post by BlueTemplar »

ack210 wrote: post #86

Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a knowledge panel. If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first refere…

This all reminds me of Stephen Colbert having a field day with "truthiness" already 17 (!) years ago. And "wikiality", when the population of elephants suddenly tripled thanks to his Wikipedia-editing efforts. (And much later, "Trumpiness".)

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#132

Post by cobertos »

bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though…

There are companies that scrape Twitter and have human adjudicators who try to find buried but impactful trending news gems. I wonder if this stems from them...

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#133

Post by Nasrudith »

kibwen wrote: post #52
bastawhiz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile don't get my sympathy.

Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. These days I know that humans are too gullible to be able to understand obvious satire, and the consequences are deleterious for society. As someone who has long appreciated The Onion, I am now of the opinion that they should not legally be allowed to call themselves a news source, in the same way that someone cannot legally claim to be an expert in an accredited field. We…

Talk about self-fuffilling prophecy. It is like saying that because your legs are a little scrawny you should stay in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.

Exposing the failings of the sources of information is always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your dog all As in premed and med school he will become a capable doctor.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#134

Post by xwdv »

This joke got me thinking, is there a way to calculate the number of times events of a certain improbability could have possibly occurred in the current time the universe has existed? What do the odds look like for an event so improbable it could have possibly only occurred once so far??

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#135

Post by Nasrudith »

blowski wrote: post #96
jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they are reporting may be true or not. If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally. Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephon…

I don’t know how true that is. I look at old news from the Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too. The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.

Yep. People confuse detection related correlations with causation all of the time.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#136

Post by Nasrudith »

Nition wrote: post #95
politelemon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by looking for just the '9', and that would have caused applications to break. There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and ev…

Another similar one was the "Nuclear Gandhi" thing[1]. Just believable enough for programmers to think it must be true. My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence: - Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStat…

The nuclear Gandhi think makes sense as naturally occuring from people trying to extrapolate hidden mechanics and false pattern detection. Pokemon had the "Press/hold B increases catch chance" illusion despite being pure RNG in the code.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#137

Post by whoisthemachine »

politelemon wrote: post #23
bastawhiz wrote: post #14

This has been a problem for a long time. Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though…

There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by looking for just the '9', and that would have caused applications to break. There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and ev…

I worked on code where we had to be careful about this - but this was even before Windows 10. It was an issue with XP, Vista, 7, etc., because they didn't follow the "year" convention, so you couldn't check the version (which you might do with old enough software to be sure that it was running on an OS that your small team could support) by just using the marketing version and some clever `version >= 98` logic.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#138

Post by earleybird »

chrisseaton wrote: post #64
bitcharmer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me you also regard stand-up comedy as harmful.

Nobody confuses a stand-up club as news - people do confuse Twitter as news.

And I knew folks who thought Spinal Tap was a real band. Satire is therapeutic when the crap around us gets too deep.

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#139

Post by earleybird »

dzikimarian wrote: post #118
derekp7 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all works of fiction.

Most works of fiction is labeled as such. I don't see anything against them in this comment.

Can't wait for the return of Tipper Gore and labelling anything that offends. /s

Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle

#140

Post by Dylan16807 »

> If someone reports about the most improbable thing in the universe happening, then you ought to check on sources.

Except that part was clearly an exaggeration and it's very easy for a few bytes to overlap, or for many many byte sequences to cause a reboot.

Even if the post wasn't meant to be plausible, it is a plausible off-the-cuff explanation, and I wish the author would realize that before making criticisms like this.

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