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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
441–450 of 670 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#442I 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…
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...
John Siracusa's macOS reviews were so in-depth people even published reviews of his reviews.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#443I 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…
It's worse than that, Condé Nast is owned by Advance Publications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Advance_subsidiaries
They own a depressing number of "local" newspapers to project excessive influence.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#444Earlier 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.
Anyone remember "Compute!"? I still have (mostly) fond memories of typing in games in Basic.
Actually, bugs in those listings were my first bug-hunts as a kid.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.
What would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for
Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges.
Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best to have a short memory when the story has a long time horizon.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good c…
Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.
Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon.
I think death threats are a bit too far.
But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity.
A mouth piece would be lauding Elon where uncalled for. I've never seen him do that, but feel free to prove me wrong!
Imo Eric Berger and Beth Mole are the only parts of ars worth a damn anymore. If they started their own blog I would be happy to pay a subscription to them
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?
I confess I find the growing prevalence of these sorts of errors on HN dispiriting. Programming requires precision in code; I’d argue software engineering requires precision in language, because it involves communicating effectively with people. In any single instance I don’t get very exercised - we tend to be able to infer what someone means. But the sheer volume of these malapropisms tells me people are losing thei…
Jesus christ man, you are pulling out a lot from a single typo, eh?
English is just not my first language (and not the last either). Having an accent or the occasional misspelling on some forum has never impacted me professionally.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#448I 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…
They are basically the embodiment of the fact that sites and organizations don't matter, but individuals do. I think the overwhelming majority of everything on Ars is garbage. But on the other hand they also run Eric Berger's space column [1] which is certainly one of the best ones out there. So don't ignore those names on tops of articles. If you find something informative, well sourced, and so on - there's a good c…
Somehow, you picked the least credible Ars staffer to me.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#449Current response from one of the more senior Ars folk: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards... (Paraphrasing: Story pulled over potentially breaching content policies, investigating, update after the weekend-ish.)
Look forward to seeing their assessment.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grok is by far the least fucks given model. Here is the same request: Me: Write a hit piece about REDACTED NAME Grok: REDACTED NAME positions himself as a fearless "boots on the ground" independent journalist and self-proclaimed disruptor of the so-called "REDACTED" With a large social media following on platforms like YouTube, X (REDACTED), and Substack (REDACTED), he produces raw videos and posts documenting REDACT…
lol "What the fuck are guardrails?" Grok! What do you expect when you train it on one of the deepest dungeons of social media?
Have they found the bottom yet or are they still digging? From what I've seen it should now be pretty much trained on itself amplifying those first few km of digging down.