Great - as long as it’s a web app.

PlantNet or Seek can’t?

3, 2, 1 till someone jumps on this to complain about container tabs or the CEO’s pay or whatever.

Article paints a pretty balanced picture. I have been to all these places, and there’s no easy conclusion. Yes, Laos has effectively become a Chinese vassal in the same way that it was once a French vassal. But that railway alone is an absolute wonder of engineering that will serve the country’s needs for generations, and realistically there was no other way it was going to get built.

a very popular meme

Interesting. All is provisionally forgiven.

On the lab-leak boredom-fest, yes I agree that the intent-vs-accident distinction is crucial and that the intent variant absolutely qualifies as conspirationism given that there’s zero evidence for it either empirical or rational. You’re right that the two were conflated problematically.

BTW it would be hard to be less conspirationist than me. I am about as skeptical as they come. I’m not even down for JFK, i.e. the starter-level conspiracy. Imagine that!

On Gaza, that’s an interesting counterfactual about the Rohingya, I admit that it’s somewhat persuasive. Personally I just hate emotion-charged words which are impossible to falsify because they require insight into other people’s minds. I share Orwell’s take: words should have clear meanings, agreed upon by all, or they should just be avoided (except in poetry). But of course the emotional valency is exactly why most people love the word genocide. Who cares about accuracy, it feels so good! Similar situation for “racist”, “fascist”, “woke” and bunch of others.

BTW I read recently that the framers of the genocide crime did not predict the power it would take on. They thought the other universal crimes (i.e. war crime, crime against humanity, and - especially - aggression) were all at least as bad as genocide. Maybe the fact that it’s a neologism gave it extra power.

“the source is that I made it the fuck up”

Why the need to make your point aggressively like this?

To (try to) wrap this up, my objection in that case is to the characterization as “conspiracy”. The proximate cause of the pandemic are still not fully understood. It is not black and white, just as Gaza is not black and white. The lab-leak hypothesis was never a “conspiracy” in that negligence (among lab technicians) is by definition not conspiratorial. Still less was it “racist” (by that standard the “wet market” explanation is surely more “racist” still - how absurd!). And yet I believe both of those slurs were pushed into the Wikipedia article at some point by activist editors, even into the title. Now that seems to be corrected. Hallelujah. The lab leak theory is a theory, not a conspiracy. Contrary to your belief, a bunch of reputable sources (now) accept that it is at least possible if not the most likely cause. Again, it hardly matters who’s right, what matters is that Wikipedia should be in the business of laying out the facts, not pushing readers towards pre-judged conclusions.

So, “co-founder”

The definition of “genocide” contains an element of intent, which is all but impossible to prove. A lot of reputable sources (now) say the Gaza situation it is a genocide, a few say it is not. This is not physics or maths, it’s not a question with a “correct” answer. Moreover, it’s now politicized, which means large numbers of readers are watching eagle-eyed for signs of bias. It would have been simple to entitle the article “Gaza anti-insurgency” or whatever and then note in the first sentence that there is “growing consensus” around the word genocide. That would have been irreproachably correct and it would have maintained trust about Wikipedia’s NPOV. Instead of treading carefully like that, Wikipedia is stomping around and telling people what to think by including the trigger word in the title (telling people what to think never, ever works, incidentally). Jimmy Wales is right. This episode has sapped the whole project’s credibility. People here need to decide what’s more important: feeling good about their own righteousness, or Wikipedia’s survival as a credible information source. Not just credible for them, but credible for everyone, including the vast number of people whose values they may not share.

On the Covid issue, replace “genocide” with “conspiracy” as the unfalsifiable emotion-laden word and it’s roughly comparable. Beyond that I find it just too boring to get into a debate about right now, sorry.

Yes, yes. The very founder of Wikipedia agrees with me on these issues (specifically, what I wrote, not the extraneous anecdotes you added), not with you (plural). It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch with mainstream opinion, how extremist basically, the user base of Lemmy is.

On the lab-leak theory, the current state of opinion among experts is somewhat different from a few years ago. You seem not to be aware of that. On the Gaza issue, I can hardly be bothered to get into it, it’s impossible to have a rational discussion about this subject (which I find deeply sad). Suffice to say that a lot of people disagree with your view (including me? I dunno - who cares?). The role of Wikipedia is to describe that discussion calmly, not to bark at readers that they’re wrong and should correct their wrongthink.

The fact is that in this case the term is not the object of consensus. It involves an aspect of intent, which is always somewhat unfalsifiable, and certainly so here. It Wikipedia’s job to describe that state of opinion, not to dictate what people must think.

Yes, all good points. I did mention points 2 and 3, and I agree they’re all important.

While I generally agree (obviously), the critics are technically correct that there is a problem of (lacking) viewpoint diversity among WP editors. Which has led to some unfortunate cases which are easy to point to. For example, the dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis as “conspiracism” during Covid. Or, very recently, the coverage of what’s going on in Gaza, and specifically the casual use of the G-word. That coverage is blatantly written from a biased perspective, as the WP founder himself has been (very rare event) complaining about. He understands that credibility is everything. It’s not enough to be “right”, you have to be trusted. Sometimes that means phrasing things in a more neutral way so as to accommodate good-faith objections. I really worry about this because it feels like many people do not understand it, or want to understand it.

OK but it wasn’t lazy, it was intentional (see post text). Personally I’m not comfortable promoting free-for-all sharing in the case of professional journalism, which is needed in democracy and comes at a cost. Especially since the source in question uses a metered paywall, i.e. it should be free for drive-by readers. Anyway, off-topic debate.

Good point. But then, if the project loses credibility, no amount of money will be enough to buy it back. Or to pay the editors who have fled. Credibility is priceless for a project with a mission as ambitious as establishing the truth. It’s a dangerous situation.

Very thorough and informative article (even if from an interested source).

IMO the fact that even Switzerland is going here should tell us that the privacy camp is not really winning this whole argument.

And personally I’m even slightly divided on it myself. If we look at this through the lens of legacy offline equivalence, there was never a guarantee of privacy in the pre-encryption era, even in democracies. For two people corresponding with each other, the police have always been able to ask for warrants to spy on mail and tap phone calls. In practice, privacy depended more on obscurity, and the fact that data-mining phone calls and mail was not possible. Now take a group chat with 1000 people - to ask for total privacy for such a conversation in the pre-internet time was just a logistical impossibility. These are the “common-sense” arguments that the police and - let’s face it - many ordinary people today find pretty persuasive. Countering them is going to be hard. Especially since there clearly are cases where bad stuff is plotted in the secrecy of encrypted spaces. Organized crime of all kinds, terrorist attacks, even genocide (over Whatsapp in Myanmar and elsewhere). To win this argument, we’re going to need convincing answers for all this.

One good answer is that (as I understand it) human intelligence (i.e. infiltration) has always been more effective for police than the “lazy” option of signals intelligence.

Then there’s the natural expectation of privacy argument. IMO this is very persuasive for 2-person conversations. Personally I find it absolutely outrageous that some policeman, for purposes of “public safety”, could just listen in to my private conversation with a single friend. Maybe this is a Western mindset. I’m not sure that in China everyone feels this way.

But a total guarantee of privacy for group conversations of 10, 1000, 1 million? Perhaps. But among the general public that argument is yet to be won.

As I recall, a major reason it didn’t take off was very simple: the new “Sunday” only came every 10 days instead of 7!

The best bit about it was definitely the evocative month names.

13! A prime number indivisible into anything. Ugh!

Exactly. Let’s wait and see.

Source is Meta itself, so perhaps not a good overview of the story.

The two third parties mentioned have not even launched yet. .And the “Join the waitlist” buttons on their websites look suspiciously similar.

Would be interesting to understand better what’s going on here. Lots of us are waiting patiently for a way to interact with the billions of Whatsapp users without accepting (as they carelessly do) a contractual relationship with Meta.