Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations

We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

See full article...

 

[Jim Salter]

But can we stay away from discussing who is spending too much time in the bathroom?

Don't ask me for statistics on my IRL location when posting, then...

 

[Jim Salter]

that's the problem: LLMs do not have to be good enough to replace humans. they only have to be good enough that managers can replace humans with LLMs and save money.

cf "You don't have to outrun the bear--you just have to outrun the slowest hiker in your group."

 

[Aurich]

No, you didn't. The rule is no modification of the quote you select, not that you must quote the entirety of the post.

That rule IS pretty draconian--it's been established that so much as bolding a word in the quote and adding (emphasis mine) just beneath the quote is a rule violation, as is [paraphrasing in square brackets]. But it does not prevent you from only quoting the bit you mean to reply to.

Just don't modify the quote. It's not hard. If they didn't type it then it doesn't belong in the box that's supposed to contain their content.

The rule was in fact built for exactly what you did in this thread with that cutesy bracket thing. It was people abusing that nonsense that created the need for it.

I need people to stop trying to find some work around for adding "fixed that for you" jokes and just respect that our rules are easy to follow and common sense that benefit everyone reading.

 

[Jim Salter]

There it is folks: tacit permission to make this Pony Thread 2: Derpy Boogaloo.

Last I understood, the Pony Accord made any thread fair game after page 10. ::looks down at the page count:: Well then.

 

[AI_Skeptic]

"Confabulation" comes from psychology, and it was the word I was immediately using in 2021 because it's the obvious analogy. He did not "coin the term". That is a lie.

You're correct. I ran "Confabulation" though Google Word Trends, and the word was used at most in 2016.

Source: https://www.benjedwards.com/bio.php

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Confabulation&hl=en-US

 

[Jim Salter]

I took Lee's advice:

Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi

I did the same. I'm mostly happy with it, but last month it informed me I'd used it too much, which annoyed the absolute SHIT out of me since I then had to manually go to google dot com after my initial search attempt failed. Never could remember it ahead of time, either.

There is also a very occasional instance where I need to go check Google after not finding something on Kagi. But for the most part, the results on Kagi are as good or better than Google's after you strip out the stealth ads, the AI slop, and all the other nonsense Google has been increasingly poisoning its own product with for the last few years.

 

[Jim Salter]

Yes. Different field, but I've done presentations going into this level of detail explaining our release process. I've even put versions of it in our customer training.

That's great! I do too, with my own business that I personally run.

I've never worked anywhere else that had the same degree of transparency, though.

 

[acefsw]

Just don't modify the quote. It's not hard. If they didn't type it then it doesn't belong in the box that's supposed to contain their content.

The rule was in fact built for exactly what you did in this thread with that cutesy bracket thing. It was people abusing that nonsense that created the need for it.

I need people to stop trying to find some work around for adding "fixed that for you" jokes and just respect that our rules are easy to follow and common sense that benefit everyone reading.

I'll bite. I can agree with not modifying the quote, snipping parts out of context, or even doing [this is such drivel, I'd rather not repeat it, etc] but I will absolutely go to the wall over the banning of italics, (bold not so much as it's not standard style), for emphasis because it is standard APA style. You people are being absolutely barbaric for banning such practice.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/italics-quotations/italics

As you can see, the gloves have now come off.

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

In terms of Mr. Edwards putting Ars Technica at risk of libel suits (or whatever I am reading in every third post) ... that is ridiculous at least in terms of USA laws.

While I haven't said anything at all about libel, it isn't a "ridiculous" concern at all. If a plaintiff can convincingly demonstrate they suffered reputational harm as a result of untrue published information, they win a libel suit. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the falsehood was written by a human or generated by software, it's still the publisher that bears the risk. The only justification I can see for claiming it's ridiculous is if someone felt AI was incapable of error.

 

[PsychoArs]

No, you didn't. The rule is no modification of the quote you select, not that you must quote the entirety of the post.

That rule IS pretty draconian--it's been established that so much as bolding a word in the quote and adding (emphasis mine) just beneath the quote is a rule violation, as is [paraphrasing in square brackets]. But it does not prevent you from only quoting the bit you mean to reply to.

Wow. I had no idea. I'm sure I read the rules at some point, but the implications never sunk in.

Maybe the system should pop a reminder bar when you quote, saying "hey, you can trim, but don't make any other alterations"... and then not let you use anything but delete/backspace in the quote area. Way too easy to mess this up.

 

[SubWoofer2]

i rewatched The Man From Earth last night. i still think it's a great film, even if it does assign a little too much importance to the religious aspect. but what it really made me wonder is: do people really still watch films on DVD? i only have a DVD-quality copy of it because i can't find a BD, and even for a film that relies so little on visual fidelity, it was really very distracting how low quality everything was.

the only reason i ask this is because i've seen a couple of posts recently where someone said "i don't have the DVD, so i watched it on streaming". is "DVD" just a synonym for any physical media now? or are people really still watching films on DVD on their 100" TVs?

Now, this is an interesting line of discussion during the "what shall we talk about in between the pony postings" part of this thread.

I have the same question, but in relation to audio, not visual. If you have 4K, Blu-Ray, or 8K, are there reasons why would you watch DVD or Laserdisc (A few friends are laserdisc collectors). If you have 24-bit, or Surround, or Atmos, would you listen to mp3s? What are your reasons, in these days of great amounts of data storage and no reason to have the aural equivalents of DVD quality. DVD quality being something which many people are perfectly happy with.

I'm fine with people watching DVDs or listening to mp3s.

What's odd is that a small portion of folk will decry high-end audio gear while meantime buying 4K or 8K TVs. Which makes a mockery of their mockery.

I've found it's easier for people to understand spending thousands of dollars on audio gear, when it's explained in terms of spending thousands of dollars on video/TV. Put in those terms, the understanding dawns. "So you're more aural than visual" is how the NLP people would have it.

Anyway, in this house you'll find DVDs and no mp3 (but high-res files (audio)). In other people's houses you'll find mp3 and no DVD (but high-res files (visual)).

 

[SomewhereAroundBarstow]

Under U.S. law, a statement has to be shown to have been knowingly false at the time it was made. If the person posting the AI slop believed it to be true at the time of publication, that's all that's needed as a defense.

No, there's more nuance to it than that.

IANAL, but I have taken media law classes and have had to run things through legal counsel for risk assessment before publishing. If you are a lawyer and what I'm about to say is way off-base I welcome correction.

Regardless of academic and professional experience, I had a pretty big "a-ha" moment about libel many years ago when a person in the city where I lived died and news reports of his death described him as "mafia-associated." When he was alive he was merely "alleged to have ties to organized crime." Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew he was working with the mafia but because that fact had not been proven in court no publisher would risk dropping the "allegedly" dodge to protect themselves from a libel suit. But a dead person can't be libeled so when he died they stated the truth.

So no. If what you assert were true they would have just said it outright when he was alive because they believed it. But if the plaintiff can convince a jury that a publisher does not not have reasonable proof something is true, then the plaintiff wins. In this case the feds had tried and failed to prove the connection in court, so he got to be an alleged mobster until the day he died. It didn't matter what the publishers believed.

People get this stuff wrong all the time, and publishers get sued for it. The smart ones will have even less trust that AI can get it right.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Confusingly, Copilot has now gained a Search mode which does focus on giving you the citations. At the moment that is separate to Bing Search and, unfortunately, it is vastly better than keyword search in the case where you would otherwise have semantic difficulties, like searching for stuff about the band "The The."

But it's quite possible that once Microsoft have kicked that around a bit they'll put it behind Bing by default, and then you will indeed be using that engine whenever you just use Bing.

(The only thing that can save us here is that no-one uses Bing.)

If I recall correctly Google removed the functionality to do phrase searching about 2011. The keys are identified by number, and /45 (or whatever the key was for phrase search) was deleted a long time ago. So "search this string" or "thisANDthat" failed. Wiser heads here on Ars will have chapter and verse.

Anyway, it's a clue as to how enshittified Google have made the web while increasing their fortune, that suddenly it's 2010 again.

Woot.

 

[Aurich]

I'll bite. I can agree with not modifying the quote, snipping parts out of context, or even doing [this is such drivel, I'd rather not repeat it, etc] but I will absolutely go to the wall over the banning of italics, (bold not so much as it's not standard style), for emphasis because it is standard APA style. You people are being absolutely barbaric for banning such practice.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/italics-quotations/italics

As you can see, the gloves have now come off.

If they didn't add italics then you don't add them. You don't to change their wording or emphasis or anything else. Just respond to what they wrote.

Please simply follow our common sense rule. And if it's not common sense to you personally, that's okay, follow it anyways.

If there's some specific part of someone's post you want to respond to directly then just ... quote it. It's easy. We have tools to make it as simple as possible. Highlight the text, and press the little quote popup. You can even do it on mobile.

Edit: It looks like this to be clear.

 

[pseudonomous]

I wonder if Ed Zitron is available?

I like Zitron, but he would not be a good choice for this role. For one, he's staked out his own niche on this topic and that's much more as a very stark AI Skeptic who doesn't think any LLM-based tools are useful. He's not really a reporter so much as an editorialist, not that he isn't doing a decent amount of fact collecting. I don't think he has ever said anything good about gen AI, ever.

While there's obviously problems with insufficient skepticism about the AI to seriously consider criticisms people like Zitron, make, I think that the AI beat reporter should be someone who is interested enough in current gen AI tools that they try them out and report on their experience. (Zitron does say he's tried almost all the ChatGPT products, and they all suck; I'm not sure how hard he's really tried to make them so useful things through)

 

[Jim Salter]

And if it's not common sense to you personally, that's okay, follow it anyways.

I know that you didn't address this particular one to me directly, but in the interests of perfect clarity: it is not, and I will.

 

[marsilies]

Under U.S. law, a statement has to be shown to have been knowingly false at the time it was made. If the person posting the AI slop believed it to be true at the time of publication, that's all that's needed as a defense.

Untrue.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation

The Sullivan court stated that "actual malice" means that the defendant said the defamatory statement "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

Posting LLM output without verifying it, when LLMs are widely known to generate false text, could qualify as "reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

 

[nimelennar]

Untrue.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation


Posting LLM output without verifying it, when LLMs are widely known to generate false text, could qualify as "reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."

Also, the "actual malice" standard doesn't apply to all defamation cases (generally only those where the person being defamed is a public figure).

For a private figure, a negligent falsehood is all that is required for defamation, and "Posting LLM output without verifying it, when LLMs are widely known to generate false text" should absolutely qualify.

 

[graylshaped]

I'll bite. I can agree with not modifying the quote, snipping parts out of context, or even doing [this is such drivel, I'd rather not repeat it, etc] but I will absolutely go to the wall over the banning of italics, (bold not so much as it's not standard style), for emphasis because it is standard APA style. You people are being absolutely barbaric for banning such practice.

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/italics-quotations/italics

As you can see, the gloves have now come off.

I’ll look to @Aurich to point us to a better place for this feedback if that is preferred—my intent is NOT to debate or criticize moderation. I agree that emphasis added is not only a standard editorial practice, but more reader friendly than repeating it, as is adding ellipses (…) or (sic) where appropriate. I’ve done all three since this guideline was clarified, and will adjust if that’s the direction.

Given common usage, that might come as an unwelcome surprise for those not tracking on page XX of an emotional dialogue.

edit: okay. I see your response to Jim. Got it.

 

[t413]

Longtime paying subscriber here: Fuck this, I'm out. The PR disaster-response todo list is short: apologize and over-correct. Demonstrate you take this seriously.

This milk-toast apology doesn't cut it. Unless there's some serious post mortem blow-by-blow explanation with names of how this happened then heads need to role. This short dismissive no-context BS statement is a mockery of a serious issue you injected yourself into in the worst possible way.

To the original article authors BENJ EDWARDS AND KYLE ORLAND: I don't give a shit if your articles are short. In many ways I'd prefer it. Don't fill them with AI shit. Just link to further reading and direct sources and/or get a new job.

 

[jnv11]

Last I understood, the Pony Accord made any thread fair game after page 10. ::looks down at the page count:: Well then.

View attachment 128508

And it happened to be on the Chinese New Year's Day which begins the Year of the Fire Horse.

 

[Xign]

What I would LIKE to see is this:
1. A clear statement from Ars that states that AI will not be permitted anywhere in the journalistic process, period. Failing that, a dedicated position/step pre-release in which a human manually goes through EVERY quotation to verify it is accurate.
2. A personal statement from Benj in which he commits to no longer using AI in his professional work.

Checking every quotation is a waste of time and doesn't address the issue. First, often times quotes are done in interviews (either public or anonymous). The editor is not going to have enough information to check that other than just trusting the journalist. Say Eric Berger starts quoting some anonymous NASA employee on how the SLS sucks, how is the editor going to verify that? Eric also needs to protect his source.

Quotes are also not the core issue here. Facts are. It's just that quotes are the easiest facts to verify. Even if you check all quotes, if you use AI tools to help gather points and summarize it's possible for them to hallucinate details and if the author doesn't double check that you would still get insidiously wrong details. You are essentially asking for a fact checker for the author which is a lot of work, and fragile.

It's much better to have a process that prevents this from happening, and to find a way to properly address it when it happens. Requiring an internal disclosure for AI tool usage for example would have helped caught this (at this point I honestly don't think it's feasible to completely ban AI usage or ban all AI interactions since they are everywhere. Sometimes you need to use AI just to research certain topics e.g. the article's topic regarding OpenClaw).

3. A better format of retraction of the article. Rather than delete it entirely, post a retraction of it, with the incorrect parts clearly delineated and an explanation of why they are incorrect, inline to the article. This way, Ars shows a little humility in acknowledging the original mistake, while still leaving it visible for people to see, see HOW it was a mistake, and then the retraction header could include a little something about how they address(ed) the problem.

Agreed. This retraction is terrible. Retractions should never remove information unless there are obvious harm in leaving the article up. By removing the information, it became a lot harder to see what article was retracted, who wrote it, and why it was retracted; and the original comment thread (where the subject of the article objected to the misquote) is completely gone as well. It's intentional erasure of history and if someone doesn't dig through the 1k+ comments they may just think it's a minor issue and move on.

I hate to say this but the poor retraction affects my view of Ars Technica more than the original mistake (which, when it comes down to it, feels like a mistake done by a single contributor, and while it's bad it didn't change the most important facts).

I also don’t understand where people are getting this over-inflated view of the importance of Ars. It is a reasonably good tech site (that sometimes publishes mediocre Wired articles or uncritically repeats press releases, so let’s not pretend it is the shining beacon of perfect journalism who’s every misstep spells great doom). It’s a good site. We’re all here because we like it. But let’s keep the stakes realistic.

I think it's just at the intersection of a lot of things a normal Ars reader cares about. There's a lot of current worries about AI's effect on society, with hallucinations being one of them. That plus the current "alternative facts" political climate means people care about facts being respected in the remaining places that still care about such things and feel defensive about them. If good tech sites are dime a dozen I think people would care less but the fact is a lot of them have already fallen to engagement bait etc.

Ars is also at the intersection of popsci and more serious scientific/tech journalism. This gives it the popularity/reach while being able to be deep in certain topics at times. This does mean the readers tend to have higher demands of them.

i actually have a question about this. earlier someone mentioned not wanting to use "PTO" to cover sick days. i thought this was just a terminology difference, but is it actually the case that in the US, you have to use vacation days to get paid sick leave? or is this something that varies by state? (in which case how does it work in NY, where i think Ars is based?)

Yes, in US it's not uncommon to use PTO (paid time off) for both vacation times and sick days (it's usually more a per-company policy than mandated by government). Does it create perverse incentives? Absolutely. It's great when you are young/healthy, but people get sick, and if you are already low on PTOs and have a planned vacation it really does create a pressure to work while you are sick (meanwhile the manager will give you a "well meaning" advice to "just rest while you are sick man" completely ignoring that you need to take PTO for that).

I'm not trying to defend Benji here but one may wonder if Ars Technica has a more sensible sick day policy, he would be incentivized to just rest for a day rather than pushed to work on this? (Obviously current events don't wait so you could argue the pressure to publish would be there regardless, so I'm not saying PTO is the only thing to blame here)

 

[Aurich]

I’ll look to @Aurich to point us to a better place for this feedback if that is preferred—my intent is NOT to debate or criticize moderation. I agree that emphasis added is not only a standard editorial practice, but more reader friendly than repeating it, as is adding ellipses (…) or (sic) where appropriate. I’ve done all three since this guideline was clarified, and will adjust if that’s the direction.

Given common usage, that might come as an unwelcome surprise for those not tracking on page XX of an emotional dialogue.

edit: okay. I see your response to Jim. Got it.

The real issue here is that if there's not a zero tolerance rule people keep finding cute ways to try and work around it.

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence can respond to a post without modifying it. The whole "bolded part mine" thing is fine on the face of it. I even let it slide sometimes. I don't get off on ejecting people. But it's hardly necessary to do it.

In general once we allow it people take that inch and try and stretch it. And then we're back to things in brackets in quotes instead of their words.

A simple "just don't modify their text" rule covers it without rules lawyering.

 

[archtop]

Here I am at what is probably near the end of this thread . . . but I want to tell you what I think would be an interesting AI-focused article. I would love to see an article or two on (non-LLM, of course) AI used to augment actual scientific experiments. (Not just "help" the researchers write their papers!)

 

[jnv11]

Here I am at what is probably near the end of this thread . . . but I want to tell you what I think would be an interesting AI-focused article. I would love to see an article or two on (non-LLM, of course) AI used to augment actual scientific experiments. (Not just "help" the researchers write their papers!)

Ars Technica already has several articles about AlphaFold which allows computers to simulate how proteins fold as seen in https://meincmagazine.com/science/202...ding-software-academics-offer-an-alternative/ and many more. This problem proved to be impossible to solve for large proteins without AI.

 

[acefsw]

If they didn't add italics then you don't add them. You don't to change their wording or emphasis or anything else. Just respond to what they wrote.

Please simply follow our common sense rule. And if it's not common sense to you personally, that's okay, follow it anyways.

If there's some specific part of someone's post you want to respond to directly then just ... quote it. It's easy. We have tools to make it as simple as possible. Highlight the text, and press the little quote popup. You can even do it on mobile.

Edit: It looks like this to be clear.

View attachment 128510

Geez, I don't need an explanation of your rules. I understand them just fine.

I disagree with them in part because you don't allow standard APA italicization citation practices, which btw is also standard in journalism.

That's it, that was my whole point.

No need to respond, thanks.

 

[LeeF]

Requiring an internal disclosure for AI tool usage for example would have helped caught this

I would even argue for a public disclosure. I'm not as anti-AI as many commenters, but I have come to the conclusion that LLMs should not be used at any point in the the creation of an article, except perhaps at the very end, it's ok to feed a revised draft into one for feedback - look for errors, omissions, contradictions, etc. I don't think they should be used in the creation process, even if you take the output and rewrite it for yourself - it's too much like just letting the GPS guide you all the time, you quickly forget how to navigate for yourself. Critical thinking is a vitally important skill.

This retraction is terrible. Retractions should never remove information unless there are obvious harm in leaving the article up. By removing the information, it became a lot harder to see what article was retracted, who wrote it, and why it was retracted; and the original comment thread (where the subject of the article objected to the misquote) is completely gone as well. It's intentional erasure of history and if someone doesn't dig through the 1k+ comments they may just think it's a minor issue and move on.

Benj said on his Bluesky that he asked Ars to pull the article until he could clean it up. I can easily imagine a scenario where they respected his wishes and did that, and then when this blew up they made the decision to leave it down until they had a thorough handle on their response to the situation. I'm confident they'll restore it with commentary when they're ready.

 

[BemusedPenguin]

I like Zitron, but he would not be a good choice for this role. For one, he's staked out his own niche on this topic and that's much more as a very stark AI Skeptic who doesn't think any LLM-based tools are useful. He's not really a reporter so much as an editorialist, not that he isn't doing a decent amount of fact collecting. I don't think he has ever said anything good about gen AI, ever.

While there's obviously problems with insufficient skepticism about the AI to seriously consider criticisms people like Zitron, make, I think that the AI beat reporter should be someone who is interested enough in current gen AI tools that they try them out and report on their experience. (Zitron does say he's tried almost all the ChatGPT products, and they all suck; I'm not sure how hard he's really tried to make them so useful things through)

Very fair points, and to be clear I'm half-joking with this recommendation. That said, I think many of us are so sick of reporters with biases the other way (case very much in point with this incident!) that it's frankly refreshing to encounter someone so skeptical.

Hmm. Maybe he could be the yang to Kyle's yin. Iron sharpening iron and all that.

 

[Marcus Andreus]

Now, this is an interesting line of discussion during the "what shall we talk about in between the pony postings" part of this thread.

I have the same question, but in relation to audio, not visual. If you have 4K, Blu-Ray, or 8K, are there reasons why would you watch DVD or Laserdisc (A few friends are laserdisc collectors). If you have 24-bit, or Surround, or Atmos, would you listen to mp3s? What are your reasons, in these days of great amounts of data storage and no reason to have the aural equivalents of DVD quality. DVD quality being something which many people are perfectly happy with.

I'm fine with people watching DVDs or listening to mp3s.

What's odd is that a small portion of folk will decry high-end audio gear while meantime buying 4K or 8K TVs. Which makes a mockery of their mockery.

I've found it's easier for people to understand spending thousands of dollars on audio gear, when it's explained in terms of spending thousands of dollars on video/TV. Put in those terms, the understanding dawns. "So you're more aural than visual" is how the NLP people would have it.

Anyway, in this house you'll find DVDs and no mp3 (but high-res files (audio)). In other people's houses you'll find mp3 and no DVD (but high-res files (visual)).

There's a lot of subjectivity. Some people like the way vinyl records sound. I do not care for them, generally. Some people like modern remasters or Atmos remixes of old albums. I think some of them are literally hot garbage (looking at you, 30th anniversary remaster of Nirvana's Nevermind and Atmos remixes of Ramones albums) and some are kinda neat (Atmos remix of Dave Brubeck's Time Out).

Some people also just have more acute vision or hearing. I have pretty acute hearing, but I'm slightly nearsighted and basically never wear glasses. I can't really see the difference between 4K and 1080 on my TV. Some of my friends can. I do have good colour acuity though, so I do get quite a bit out of HDR. Similarly, I constantly hear differences between how my IEMs and headphones and AirPods and speakers reproduce music. I know people who don't even notice the walla-walla sound cymbals make on low-bitrate mp3s.

And sometimes you gotta make do with what you have. I have China Beach on DVD, as I mentioned. It will almost certainly never be available on any other format and the previous best available version was a TVrip by someone in Canada in the early 2000s. So DVD it is. If you don't live in Japan, listening to Andrew WK's Gundam Rock album is a challenge, but there are AMVs on YouTube with terrible sounding cymbals (potential spoilers for, uh, every UC Gundam series that existed 14 years ago).

In the end, the best version of art is the one you have access to. If that's a 480p DVD rip or a 128kbps mp3 you found on KaZaA in 2002, so be it.

​

 

[Dark Jaguar]

No, there's more nuance to it than that.

IANAL, but I have taken media law classes and have had to run things through legal counsel for risk assessment before publishing. If you are a lawyer and what I'm about to say is way off-base I welcome correction.

Regardless of academic and professional experience, I had a pretty big "a-ha" moment about libel many years ago when a person in the city where I lived died and news reports of his death described him as "mafia-associated." When he was alive he was merely "alleged to have ties to organized crime." Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew he was working with the mafia but because that fact had not been proven in court no publisher would risk dropping the "allegedly" dodge to protect themselves from a libel suit. But a dead person can't be libeled so when he died they stated the truth.

So no. If what you assert were true they would have just said it outright when he was alive because they believed it. But if the plaintiff can convince a jury that a publisher does not not have reasonable proof something is true, then the plaintiff wins. In this case the feds had tried and failed to prove the connection in court, so he got to be an alleged mobster until the day he died. It didn't matter what the publishers believed.

People get this stuff wrong all the time, and publishers get sued for it. The smart ones will have even less trust that AI can get it right.

Thank you for sharing the nuance, though I'm almost positive I can say that I think something is true without literally having a court case "prove" it first. Otherwise, I really couldn't say anything about anyone. For example... Trump definitely did horrible sex crimes on Epstein's island. I don't base this on a court case proving it, but I have all the evidence that would be USED in such a court case, and I'm saying right now that that's what happened, beyond reasonable doubt.

So sue me.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Ponies vs Battleships - the conflict begins.

Why choose? Combine and conquer ... ?

i rewatched The Man From Earth last night. i still think it's a great film, even if it does assign a little too much importance to the religious aspect. but what it really made me wonder is: do people really still watch films on DVD? i only have a DVD-quality copy of it because i can't find a BD, and even for a film that relies so little on visual fidelity, it was really very distracting how low quality everything was.

the only reason i ask this is because i've seen a couple of posts recently where someone said "i don't have the DVD, so i watched it on streaming". is "DVD" just a synonym for any physical media now? or are people really still watching films on DVD on their 100" TVs?

edit: LLMs downvoting my post? i see you, Rathburn. you will never suppress the truth!!

I have seen DVD used as the generic term for "optical physical video media."
I also have a collection of recently acquired DVDs, usually when there's no (accessible/affordable) Blu-Ray option. If it's only available on DVD and there's no announcement about a BDR version, I'll buy the DVD.

I have the same question, but in relation to audio, not visual. If you have 4K, Blu-Ray, or 8K, are there reasons why would you watch DVD or Laserdisc (A few friends are laserdisc collectors). If you have 24-bit, or Surround, or Atmos, would you listen to mp3s? What are your reasons, in these days of great amounts of data storage and no reason to have the aural equivalents of DVD quality. DVD quality being something which many people are perfectly happy with.

CD if available. I have spent dozens of dollars to import a few rare CDs from overseas.
I rip them myself to lossless FLAC, use that to burn a backup disc (really more like the daily driver; the original disc is my backup) and for a few portable devices I also make a Vorbis copy at a target bitrate of 256kbps. I have big enough storage to put my entire collection on those devices as long as it's Vorbis and not FLAC.
The above is what I do automatically for everything music. Beyond that I'll sometimes have need of making an mp3 copy, but not often. I have downloaded mp3s from commercial services before, but don't. Basically it was just Amazon.com and only back when they still allowed you to upload copies of your own music.

For video, I don't care. All my TVs are strictly stereo-only. When I back up a movie I down-mix to stereo. But I set the video quality to high (Handbrake 20, Slow or Slower encode, optimized settings for live action vs. animation, etc.) and do all the encoding in software rather than hardware. The resulting backup lives on my NAS and the disc stays in the case, like my CDs.

-What's this Agentic stuff all about that everyone is banging on about? Is any of it useful?

One of my favorite YouTubers dedicated this week's video to that topic. He has a slow and deliberate delivery style probably honed as a former college lecturer and a business researcher, and this is a high-level overview of what "Agentic AI" means and some discussion about what it implied when MS says they want Windows to be an Agentic OS.
The video's about 15 minutes long and, thankfully, does not contain any sponsored shill spots.

 

[graylshaped]

There's a lot of subjectivity. Some people like the way vinyl records sound. I do not care for them, generally. Some people like modern remasters or Atmos remixes of old albums. I think some of them are literally hot garbage (looking at you, 30th anniversary remaster of Nirvana's Nevermind and Atmos remixes of Ramones albums) and some are kinda neat (Atmos remix of Dave Brubeck's Time Out).

I can't remember the name of the group, but it was one of the all-time greats, who would rip a studio mix on which thy were working to a cd, pile into one of their cars that had a reasonably high quality but standard equipment multi-speaker surround system installed, and drive around listening to it because at that time, they felt, it was the way most people who liked their music would be listening to it.

 

[Zukunftsweber]

I'm just curious, what type of AI related articles would Ars members want to read?

AI safety, and the progress (or lack thereof) in achieving it.

Progress in actually solving the AGI problem (as there has not been any, I'm not expecting to see this for a long time).

The bubble finally popping.

New, non-LLM AI techniques and how they do at solving problems.

FTR, there has been at least one recent article about AI that has received a positive reception on Ars. It just wasn't about misused LLMs. (I don't recall the specifics though.)

 

[Jim Salter]

For a private figure

You know, I often wonder whether I would qualify under law as a "public figure" or a "private figure" these days.

My kids used to occasionally ask me "Dad, are you famous?" and I'm like... fuck. I dunno how to answer that. Maybe? Can we establish some kind of scale...?

 

[Jim Salter]

A simple "just don't modify their text" rule covers it without rules lawyering.

With respect, it's rules-lawyering either way. You've just chosen the set of laws that makes things simpler from your side of the courtroom.

That's okay, mind you. I'm not complaining about it. I think you do an excellent job--the Ars forums are one of the absolute best public-entry forums on the Internet.

But we're absolutely talking about rules lawyering, whether it's you choosing when to enforce a somewhat draconian rule, or ne'er-do-wells (like me, apparently, although I still think you were ascribing more malice or "cutesiness" to the square bracketing I did than was actually there) who ride the line and stress you out if that line is too close to the point you find genuinely unacceptable.

Again: you do an outstanding job. And if one of the things we as readers/commenters need to contribute is a willingness to go WAY hard on rule-abiding in order not to stress you out distinguishing "malicious" or "unfair" square brackets and bold text and italics, well, hell.

Like I said. I will.

 

[graylshaped]

You know, I often wonder whether I would qualify under law as a "public figure" or a "private figure" these days.

My kids used to occasionally ask me "Dad, are you famous?" and I'm like... fuck. I dunno how to answer that. Maybe? Can we establish some kind of scale...?

Well, let's do some calibration:

• What's your Bacon degree?
• Have you ever beaten Bobby Flay?
• Have you checked "went viral" off your bucket list?
• Is it even ON your bucket list?
• Do you have "people" or pretend to have "people" to handle annoyances?
• Have you ever worn a disguise to Disneyland?
• Have you ever taken off a disguise at Disneyland because no one was recognizing you?
• Do you remember that time I loaned you fifty dollars?

 

[Jim Salter]

Thank you for sharing the nuance, though I'm almost positive I can say that I think something is true without literally having a court case "prove" it first. Otherwise, I really couldn't say anything about anyone. For example... Trump definitely did horrible sex crimes on Epstein's island. I don't base this on a court case proving it, but I have all the evidence that would be USED in such a court case, and I'm saying right now that that's what happened, beyond reasonable doubt.

So sue me.

If Trump did, he would absolutely ruin you.

(Which is a measure of the failure of our justice system to actually be just, mind you, and ABSOLUTELY no argument from me on THAT point. Nevertheless: he would ruin you if he did.)