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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#391

Post by guiambros »

herodoturtle wrote: post #385
BruceEel wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tragedy, yes. I can't be the only old fart around here with fond memories of John Siracusa's macOS ("OS X") reviews & Jon "Hannibal" Stokes' deep dives in CPU microarchitectures...

Certainly not the only old fart ‘round these parts. Your comment reminded me of Dr Dobbs Journal for some reason.

Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.

Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#392

Post by mortsnort »

g947o wrote: post #281

I am finding less value in reading Ars: * They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale * There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recent…

They also have a strange obsession with stories about vaccines, rare scary ailments, and child porn. I suppose these topics get them good engagement, but not something I want to read about (constantly) on a tech blog.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#393

Post by acdha »

everdrive wrote: post #241
lukan wrote: post #238

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.

The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.

Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.

Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#394

Post by [deleted] »

lokar wrote: post #377
dylan604 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the other side of at what point into ending capitalism in favor of socialism should that stop? Yes, I enjoy "both sides" coverage when it's done in earnest. What passes for that today is two people representing the extremes of either spectrum looking for gotcha moments as an "owning" moment. We haven't seen a good "both sides" in decades

I see the capitalism vs socialism as a spectrum with valid debate all along it. I don't see how one honestly argues in favor of an authoritarian government

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#395

Post by GlacierFox »

gdulli wrote: post #303
lexicality wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.

"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.

For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#396

Post by Zambyte »

gnarlouse wrote: post #325
raincole wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. Can you give examples? I've never heard that people started a blog to attack StackOverflow's founders just because their questions got closed.

Stackoverflow is dead because it was this toxic gate keeping community that sat on its laurels and clutched its pearls. Most developers I know are savoring its downfall. The Zig lead is notably bombastic. And there was the recent Zigbook drama. Rust is a little older, I can’t recall the specifics but I remember some very toxic discourse back in the day. And then just from my own two eyes. I’ve maintained an open sour…

> The Zig lead is notably bombastic.

This doesn't feel fair to say to me. I've interacted with Andrew a bunch on the Zig forums, and he has always been patient and helpful. Maybe it looks that way from outside the Zig community, but it does not match my experience at all.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#397

Post by acdha »

g947o wrote: post #287
kethinov wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hard agree. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself. I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in genera…

Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#398

Post by lukev »

devin wrote: post #293

Take a look at the number of people who think vibe coding without reading the output is fine if it passes the tests who but are absolutely aghast at this.

"You are responsible for what you ship" is actually a pretty universally agreed-upon principle...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#400

Post by dylan604 »

Kwpolska wrote: post #255
dylan604 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, any site that is posting multiple articles within a day is pretty safe to assume it is LLM content. The sites with actual journalists will have a much lower post count per day. There's no way a site staffed by intern level people writing that much content had time to investigate and write with editorial revisions. It's all first to post, details be damned.

You realise that those sites posted multiple articles per day ten years ago, long before LLMs were invented?

Yup. Now they do it with a fraction of the staff and use LLMs. What's your point?
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