The pure ChatGPT output would probably be garbage. The dataset will be full of all manner of sources (together with their inherent biases) together with spin, untruths and outright parody and it’s not apparent that there is any kind of curation or quality assurance on the dataset (please correct me if I’m wrong).

I don’t think it’s a good tool for extracting factual information from. It does seem to be good at synthesising prose and helping with writing ideas.

I am quite interested in things like this where the output from a “knowledge engine” is paired with something like ChatGPT - but it would be for eg writing a science paper rather than news.

Exactly. The data harvest has had years in the making.

Enshittification intensifies.

Every day is a school day; I had no idea.

For those who like me are wondering why folk are sucking sand out of the sea in the first place - the TL;DR bot missed this bit:

"Sand and gravel makes up half of all the materials mined in the world. Globally, 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel are used every year – the equivalent of a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide stretching round the equator. It is the key ingredient of concrete and asphalt.

“Our entire society is built on sand, the floor of your building is probably concrete, the glass on the windows, the asphalt on roads is made of sand,” said Peduzzi. “We can’t stop doing it because we need lots of concrete for the green transition, for wind turbines and other things.”"

Agree.

Even on sites with an algorithm (eg Reddit and Twitter) my experience was severely improved by trimming down the follow list and then always sorting by new.

I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.

Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.

Let it be. The duplication problem is all over the Fediverse. Over time some of those communities will die out and some will become more distinctive or specialised, attracting specific engagement in their own right; the problem will solve itself.

Why don’t we take a look at how the plastics industry handled the public? Here’s Climate Town (YouTube link).

Hmmm.

Sega is a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings. Sammy is a major developer of pachinko machines.

I wonder where this is going?

Problem is they even with paying the third party app gets an inferior experience (no polls, nothing marked NSFW).

The last and only printer that I bought from HP worked well and didn’t pull any shenanigans, it was a Laserjet 5L.

Since then, feedback from colleagues and what I’ve seen from reviews and tech communities put me off buying HP again. Between their cloud printing, their inkjet cartridge verification and the USB ports covered in stickers and now this…

The printer scene: https://youtu.be/N9wsjroVlu8

Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.

If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.

There is some variation across disciplines; I do think that in general the process does catch a lot of frank rubbish (and discourages submission of obvious rubbish), but from time to time I do come across inherently flawed work in so-called “high impact factor” and allegedly “prestigious” journals.

In the end, even after peer review, you need to have a good understanding of the field and to have developed and applied your critical appraisal skills.

Yes. A senior colleague sometimes tongue-in-cheek referred to it as Pee Review.

I thought Captcha tests were being used to train image recognition systems no?

Good bot. Do we do that here?

That crab mentality (crabs in a bucket) can be hard to shake but it’s got to go. The Boondocks explained it nicely (short SFW extract from an otherwise NSFW TV programme here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipg4EL_JUyE)

Yes. Why go to all the trouble of doing very technical things when you can instead do moderately technical but very cunning things?

An old episode of the defunct Reply All podcast comes to mind: “what kind of idiot gets phished?”

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/rnhoww/