141–150 of 177 posts
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Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.
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.
> 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…
The amount of “news” reporting that is simply reporting that something was said on Twitter or Reddit is getting out of co trol.
The worst are the articles that consist almost entirely a series of tweets with 3-12 likes each, just repeating a headline that aligns perfectly with the editorial slant of the outlet.
Or perhaps reporting has been in decline for decades and were just finally seeing it.
> 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…
You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsensical after the first cursory glance. That's a very... ineffective way to assess plausibility.
And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences.
It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
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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.
I find a lot of "Reddit knowledge" in areas where I need accurate information to do my job (vintage console repair especially) is complete bullshit, but it makes you look smart if you repeat it.
Almost always it requires an understanding of some sort of niche knowledge/art, like metal fatigue, heat transfer or potentiometers. At the same time, it's usually irrelevant to the problem at hand.
In this case, the statement is nothing more than a vehicle for showing off that you understand what integer overflow is, and therefore signalling to others how smart you are.
And that said, I've probably repeated the "Nuclear Gandhi" myth to a dozen other people, complete with a short explanation of unsigned integer overflow.
Truth and fiction are indistinguishable on social media. The medium itself encourages this. Falsehood is built-in and inseparable. Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first , and the internet amplifies them on its own. To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible…
Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
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You're picking one little detail that might in some sort of circumstances be plausible from a story in which almost all of the details are implausible or nonsensical after the first cursory glance. That's a very... ineffective way to assess plausibility.
What parts are implausible? The port is obviously fine. Lan communication between rokus makes sense. And it might have updates or other things, but it's just a reboot so that doesn't even matter. "exact same bytes" sounds harder than it is. Then a silly probability joke. And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences. It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is,…
Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no.
Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked.
Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical.
We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks.
Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.
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…