I’m really disappointed not to see Okular there. It’s FOSS, and it’s very cozy and useful.

To be fair, though, this experiment was stupid as all fuck. It was run on /r/changemyview to see if users would recognize that the comments were created by bots. The study’s authors conclude that the users didn’t recognize this. [EDIT: To clarify, the study was seeing if it could persuade the OP, but they did this in a subreddit where you aren’t allowed to call out AI. If an LLM bot gets called out as such, its persuasiveness inherently falls off a cliff.]

Except, you know, Rule 3 of commenting in that subreddit is: “Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, of using ChatGPT or other AI to generate text, [emphasis not even mine] or of arguing in bad faith.”

It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.

My dad: “The plain peanut butter sandwiches will continue until morale improves.”

This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting attacks against Wikipedia. (Incidentally, they just deleted one from this very community because they got called out for it). This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it. This user doesn’t give a single shit about gender equality; they simply aim to discredit a resource standing in the way of their agenda.

A gender gap is a longstanding and severe issue on the English Wikipedia, but there’s a lot this article leaves out about its monumental and ongoing efforts to increase its coverage of women and to welcome more women into the project. This especially includes WikiProject Women in Red, far and away Wikipedia’s largest collaborative project whose entire purpose is to create new biographies about women. A large part of this biographical underrepresentation stems less from a bias in the editors themselves and more from the way that historical women have often been left out of published, reliable sources, and it’s taking scholars enormous efforts to bring those women to the surface today. It also says: “just 10-15% of its editors are female.” What this fails to acknowledge is that there’s an option simply not to declare your gender at all. To be clear, the ratio is atrocious, but 10–15% is likely an underrepresentation: women may be substantially less likely to self-declare their gender on the Internet than men. The Wikimedia Foundation has outreach, activism, etc. focused specifically on recruiting women to the project and has for well over a decade now. Wikipedia really is trying, and its experienced editors are constantly aware of this.

The article does put forth three hypotheses for why this gap exists, but I don’t think they put forth compelling evidence for the hypothesis that it exists because of the culture on Wikipedia or that it’s – in general – Wikipedia’s “fault”.

This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting demonstrably false, bad-faith attacks against Wikipedia. I have no idea how this post has a ratio of 28–0 when the article’s premise is that the ADL of all organizations is a good arbiter of what is antisemitic when it comes to coverage of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The article starts with “This past March, researchers from the Anti-Defamation League accused Wikipedia of biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Newsflash: it isn’t. The ADL consistently treats anyone who dares to challenge Israel’s genocide as antisemitic. This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it.

Edit: I’d like to point out that when the article says “propagandists” (i.e. people opposed to Israel’s genocide) and arbitrarily delineates them from “editors”, what it’s failing to point out (likely because a) its author doesn’t understand shit about fuck or b) its author doesn’t care) is that any article related to a conflict between Israel and Arab countries is extended protected by default (on top of other heavy editing restrictions). This means that it can only be edited 1) on a registered account 2) which is at least 30 days old and 3) which has made at least 500 edits. This isn’t 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 typing “Izreel sux lololol” or even just some random sockpuppet account trying to insert anti-Israel bias. You have to be an experienced editor to make changes to these articles. Every single one of these even remotely controversial public changes is put under a microscope and discussed ad nauseum by other experienced editors on the corresponding talk page – not just to make sure that it’s covered without bias per NPOV but that its claims are suitably backed by reliable, independent sources.

A link to the original study so you don’t have to take Gizmodo’s word on anything related to science.

• I think the Associated Press is in the clear here.
• Seems Reuters so far is good too.
• And The Guardian
• Mother Jones
• ProPublica
• Ars Technica for tech news
• The Conversation (always written by subject-matter experts)
• Deutsche Welle
• Etc.

Thankfully there are still a lot of amazing news sources that have held onto their integrity. Click here to see even more. Number 17 will surprise you!

Seems like it’s the most active one too.

Every first-world country that has tight regulation shows an astronomical decrease in gun deaths from the US. It’s not more complicated; regulation works, and the more regulated guns are, proportionally the fewer deaths.

… What? I’m taking the piss out of your argument that the tool isn’t relevant. You tried to bring “fists” into this as a comparison. Unless you’re willing to say that I could go out right now into a crowd of people and kill eleven and wound twenty with my bare hands like I’m the Internet badass from the Navy SEALs copypasta, then you’re absolutely full of it and are just running with the recently popularized bad-faith argumentation strategy of “never play defense”.

Do you or do you not believe that it is possible for me to go out into a crowd of people of some description unarmed, then kill eleven people and wound twenty with – your words, not mine – “my fists”. Are you actually that deluded, or were you mistaken in comparing a car attack to a fist attack?

Boats, trains, subways, light rail, trams, buses, cable cars, micro electric vehicles, bikes, velomobiles, scooters, skateboards, rollerblades, feet, and sensible urban planning where the nearest grocery store isn’t an hour’s walk from my house don’t exist. If it’s not a car, I don’t wanna hear about it.

ITT: people who don’t realize that none of us are supporting guns. We’re drawing a comparison between the same ridiculous-ass logic that right-wingers apply to guns to try to stall and misdirect from concrete regulation and the exact same rhetoric people in this thread are making in defense of car culture and lack of regulation and safeguards around cars. Strict gun regulation is good; strict car regulation is good. Strict gun regulation would deter many mass-shootings in the US. Strict car regulation (including even basic considerations for pedestrian safety at the slight expense of cars) would deter car-ramming attacks.

“Why are you talking about guns cars at a time like this? I can’t believe you’re using this tragic mass-shooting mass-ramming to soapbox about gun car regulation. This isn’t the time to talk about how we let guns cars be so dangerous and how the direct result was this shooting ramming. The real cause of this was a mental health crisis. Society needs guns cars to protect ourselves get around. What do you mean, ‘Do I ever bring up this mental health crisis outside of mass-shootings mass-rammings?’ Uhh…”

So “never play defense” then? On the concept of an analogy and the “fists” thing, right? Everyone is Kiryu Kazuma going around, killing nine eleven and injuring twenty with their fists?

Can you acknowledge that you were wrong about the analogy? And can you acknowledge that comparing a fist attack to an attack perpetrated by a car driver is asinine?

Okay, let’s see here. If we put aside the climate change killing untold trillions of animals on top of the mass-extinction event, the untold number of humans that have died and will die from climate change, the number of people displaced by climate change, the over a million people killed annually, the few million injured annually (many permanently and debilitatingly), the billions of dollars in annual property damage, the regions destabilized and the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced over oil wars, the lung issues from air pollution and the brain damage from when it was leaded, the neighborhoods destroyed to make way for roads, the poverty in the inner city caused in large part by unsustainable suburban sprawl, the people bankrupted by the need to own a car, the opportunity cost from the money wasted on overpriced car infrastructure, the amount of hours wasted driving because of said sprawl, the contribution to the obesity epidemic by making people more sedentary, the disenfranchisement of the elderly, young, and disabled who can’t drive or would have a much easier time on public transit, that many of those emergency vehicles are responding to car crashes, that lower traffic and less sprawl via public transit and micromobility lowers response times for emergency vehicles (thus saving more lives), and if we totally disregard that emergency vehicles are more than capable of existing in a city built around public transit and micromobility (and much more that I’m forgetting)…

A rounding error in comparison. That your answer was “emergency vehicles” shows that you don’t understand the scope and scale of how badly car-centric infrastructure damages everything it touches. It isn’t on the same order of magnitude; it isn’t even within a few orders of magnitude. If anything, emergency vehicles have been hampered by the rampant proliferation and deregulation of cars, because it makes it harder for them to get to their destination quickly and safely.

So you do or do not understand that when I was talking about guns, I was drawing a direct comparison between your misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health and right-wingers’ misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health? Not actually assuming what your stance on gun regulation is? That is our common understanding now, right? You can amend your comment to acknowledge that you misunderstood this basic rhetorical device? Or acknowledge it in some form? You’re not going to “never play defense” me here, right?

I like how they’ve so far completely failed to defend or even address what they said about “fists” because they know it’s a heap of bullshit. They apparently want us to think that the everyman on the street is Kiryu Kazuma who can roll up to a crowded festival and kill nine eleven people with their bare fists then injure like ten twenty more before being restrained and brought into custody.

They clearly weren’t educated enough to understand the basic rhetorical device of analogy – that I was comparing excuses for mass-shootings to excuses for car rammings as functionally the same – so I feel pretty secure in posting definitions.

Middle-school behavior for middle-school concepts, I guess?

Edit: sorry, I forgot that they also think this person could’ve killed nine eleven people and injured twenty with their bare fists, so maybe middle-school behavior was too sophisticated.

Right here, right now, they can be compared to guns assuming this was an attack. Were it not for car-centric infrastructure, a car couldn’t even have reached this crowded festival. There would’ve been trivial safety measures like bollards in place, but because we as a society collectively value vroom vroom over human lives, they weren’t in place. With nine eleven killed and twenty injured, it was comparable in devastation to a mass-shooting. Just like when the US values pew pew over human lives, there are mass-shootings.

But you’re right: they aren’t the same.

• Cars kill over one million people per year, and they injure and maim many, many more than guns do.
• Cars are unnecessary in the vast majority of cases, but they’re shoehorned into cities thanks to the enormous lobbying power of the auto industry combined with the widespread, entrenched propaganda that said lobbying has spent the last century producing. We’ll rip out safe and affordable transit to make room for these financial black holes, but even the most tepid attempt to push back on this takes decades of activism only to be met with a ridiculous half-measure in favor of cars or nothing at all. (Actually, this last bit does kind of sound like guns in the US.)
• We willingly subsidize cars (tax credits on EVs, free parking, parking mandates, vast road networks, etc.) instead of building the kinds of infrastructure that largely obsolete cars to begin with.
• Cars are absolutely destroying our planet. They’re one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, and car-centric infrastructure even exacerbates a major effect of climate change by destroying greenery that absorbs some of the heat (which consequently makes people more likely to drive in air-conditioned cars; rinse and repeat). They additionally spread particulate matter into the air that puts (especially poorer) people who live near major roadways at substantially increased risk of health issues. They divide populations of wildlife, and I could just go on forever.
• Cars are heavily indoctrinated into children as a rite of passage into adulthood that everybody should own. Almost no consideration is given for those who don’t.
• Guns have an obnoxious culture to see who can own the biggest, loudest, most expensive, most dangerous, most overkill piece of shit, where you’re seen as some kind of sheltered hippie liberal if you choose not to own one. Anyone who barely knows how to use one can own one, and– wait, sorry, that’s also cars again.
• I could go on about their infrastructure being an accessibility nightmare, being vastly more expensive, bankrupting cities, disadvantaging people in the inner cities who have to subsidize the car-centric suburbs and deal with their traffic, and so on, but I’m sure I have a character limit.

By the way, “guns are made for killing” can just as easily be warped into “guns are made for self-protection”, and suddenly you can compare if their utility outweighs their ease of access and rampant deregulation – just like you can with cars.

And I never said guns weren’t a problem, that’s you talking for me because you have no respect for anyone else’s opinion if it might challenge yours.

I hope you’re smart enough to understand what an “analogy” is? If not, here you go. “Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share.” Hope that helps, champ. 🥰

Oh yeah, the old “this isn’t a gun car issue; this is a mental health issue”. “You’re disgusting for trying to make this mass-shooting mass-ramming about guns cars; this isn’t the time™.” It’s such a shame that the US is the only place in the world with a mental health crisis and that’s why first-world gun deaths almost exclusively happen in the US, not in Canada where firearms are heavily reg– checks title Oh wait. It seems like “This isn’t an X issue, it’s a mental health one” curiously always seems to come back to “I want you to solve this nebulous, prolific, and stochastic issue in lieu of addressing the most immediate, concrete problem by regulating X because I really like my privileged position of being able to use X however and wherever I want and fuck anybody who suffers for or questions that privilege.”

Why can’t it be both? Car deaths have concrete, meaningful steps we could immediately take (pedestrianizing roads, adding bollards to pedestrian streets, reducing car dependency so fewer people own and drive cars, etc., and that’s just for incidents where people intentionally use cars to murder people), but it seems like you happen to prefer ignoring the reality that designing cities around cars is horribly dangerous and dysfunctional. “Cars have issues”? Yeah, try reading the title to see one of them.

It’s so obvious this attack was trivial to a point where it’s not even settled that it was intentional. You think this man could’ve killed nine eleven people and injured twenty more with his fists? Seriously?? [Editor’s note: they seriously compare it to being armed with fists in a now-removed comment.] Even a knife attack is considerably more difficult, and it has at least some minimum barrier that you need to be in some kind of physical condition to perpetrate one, that there’s a minimal chance of escaping the scene, that there’s more chance of stopping it early, and that a car attack can be done much more impulsively. Plus there’s the matter that regulating cars is massively easier than regulating knives. A goddamn infirm 90-year-old has the capacity to perpetrate this attack. And what would’ve prevented it completely? A few slabs of concrete or steel that any decent pedestrian street would have. Make psychological and psychiatric care free under Canada’s Medicare? Absolutely, do it. Do it right now; why haven’t we already? Do I think that’d be as effective at preventing this attack as literally just some slabs on the street? No.