61–70 of 200 posts
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FYI: non-Western countries exist.
People who are from those countries that can nag on HN and know whant HN is are most likely still better off than most of their fellow countrymen.
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we did that and still do. people just don't buy encyclopedias that much nowadays
Imagine taking the whole Web, removing spam, duplicates, bad explanations It will be the free new Wikipedia+ to learn anything in the best way possible, with the best graphs, interactive widgets, etc What LLMs have for free but humans for some reason don’t In some places it is possible to use copyrighted materials to educate if not directly for profit
Uh huh. Now imagine the collective amount of work this would require above and beyond the already overwhelmed number of volunteer staff at Wikipedia. Curation is ALWAYS the bugbear of these kinds of ambitious projects.
Interactivity aside, it sounds like you want the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
What made it so incredible for its time was the staggeringly impressive roster of authors behind the articles. In older editions, you could find the entry on magic written by Harry Houdini, the physics section definitively penned by Einstein himself, etc.
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An unreliable computer treated as a god by a pre-information-age society sounds like a Star Trek episode.
Definitely sounds like a plausible and fun episode. On the other hand, real history if filled with all sorts of things being treated as a god that were much worse than "unreliable computer". For example, a lot of times it's just a human with malice. So how bad could it really get
I don't know. How about we ask some of the peoples who have been destroyed on the word of a single infallible malicious leader.
Oh wait, we can't. They're dead.
Any other questions?
Wikipedia, arXiv dumps, open-source code you download, etc. have code that runs and information that, whatever its flaws, is usually not guessed. It's also cheap to search, and often ready-made for something--FOSS apps are runnable, wiki will introduce or survey a topic, and so on.
LLMs, smaller ones especially, will make stuff up, but can try to take questions that aren't clean keyword searches, and theoretically make some tasks qualitatively easier: one could read through a mountain of raw info for the response to a question, say.
The scenario in the original quote is too ambitious for me to really think about now, but just thinking about coding offline for a spell, I imagine having a better time calling into existing libraries for whatever I can rather than trying to rebuild them, even assuming a good coding assistant. Maybe there's an analogy with non-coding tasks?
A blind spot: I have no real experience with local models; I don't have any hardware that can run 'em well. Just going by public benchmarks like Aider's it appears ones like Qwen3 32B can handle some coding, so figure I should assume there's some use there.
1. LLM understands the vague query from human, connects necessary dots, and gives user an overview, and furnishes them with a list of topic names/local file links to actual Wikipedia articles 2. User can then go on to read the precise information from the listed Wikipedia articles directly.
This is a sensible comparison. My "help reboot society with the help of my little USB stick" thing was a throwaway remark to the journalist at a random point in the interview, I didn't anticipate them using it in the article! https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/17/1120391/how-to-r... A bunch of people have pointed out that downloading Wikipedia itself onto a USB stick is sensible, and I agree with them. Wikipedi…
One important distinction is that the strength of LLMs isn't just in storing or retrieving knowledge like Wikipedia, it’s in comprehension. LLMs will return faulty or imprecise information at times, but what they can do is understand vague or poorly formed questions and help guide a user toward an answer. They can explain complex ideas in simpler terms, adapt responses based on the user's level of understanding, and…
An unreliable computer treated as a god by a pre-information-age society sounds like a Star Trek episode.
Wikipedia-snapshots without the most important meta layers, i. e. a) the article's discussion pages and related archives, as well as b) the version history, would be useless to me as critical contexts might be/are missing... especially with regards to LLM-augmented text analysis. Even when just focusing on the standout-lemmata.
The edit history or talk pages certainly provide additional context that in some cases could prove useful, but in terms of bang for the buck I suspect sourcing from different language snapshots would be a more economical choice.
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Try any article on a controversial issue.
I guess if I know it’s controversial then I don’t need the talk page, and if I don’t then I wouldn’t think to check
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An unreliable computer treated as a god by a pre-information-age society sounds like a Star Trek episode.
Definitely sounds like a plausible and fun episode. On the other hand, real history if filled with all sorts of things being treated as a god that were much worse than "unreliable computer". For example, a lot of times it's just a human with malice. So how bad could it really get