241–250 of 670 posts
The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you. EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for t…
We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception. Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere…
Did Ars respond in any way after the conviction of their ex-writer? Better vetting of their hires might have been a response. Apparently there was a record of some questionable opinions held by the ex-writer. I don't know, personally, if any of their policies changed.
The current suspected bad behavior involved the possibility that the journalists were lacking integrity in their jobs. So if this possibility is confirmed I expect to see publicly announced structural changes in the editorial process at Ars Technica if I am to continue to be a subscriber and reader.
1 https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ex-ars-writer-sentence...
Edit: Fixed italics issue
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you tried this shit in a real engineering principle, you'd end up either homeless or in prison in very short order.
You might notice that these real engineering jobs also don't have a way to verify the product via tests like that though, which was my point. And that's ignoring that your statement technically isn't even true, because the engineers actually working in such fields are very few (i.e. designing bridges, airplanes etc). The majority of them design products where safety isn't nearly as high stakes as that... And they fre…
Are you sure? Simulators and prototypes abound. By the time you’re building the real, it’s more like rehearsal and solving a fe problems instead of every intricacy in the formula.
The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
> Still a very good website
These are indeed quite controversial opinions on ars.
The story is credited to Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. I've filtered out Edwards from my RSS reader a long time ago, his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic. No surprise he's behind an AI-generated story.
Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ashley Belanger
Jon Brodkin
I wonder how soon I will be forced to whitelist only a handful of seasoned authors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be d…
I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…
What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.