Shouldn't you also compare to mmap with huge page option? My understanding is its presicely meant for this circumstance. I don't think its a fair comparison without it.
Respectfully, the title feels a little clickbaity to me. Both methods are still ultimately reading out of memory, they are just using different i/o methods.
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.
And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
I would say this is all we really should reasonably expect from our knowledge consensus systems. In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.
It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.
But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.
Indeed, Wikipedia really is worth celebrating. While I sympathize with the GP, we should avoid devolving into purity spirals or we'll never have moments of joy.
> In fact it’s the same values that “science” stands on: do our best everyday and continue to try improving.
Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
Yeah sure, all scientists have the same opinion on that matter, while all philosophers have a different obsolete dogmatic view, both camp are perfectly disjoint, and only the first one is acquired this fundamental truth^W continuously improving model always closer to truth^W something relative to something else and disconnected of any permanent absolute.
> Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it.
I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category. Everything we know as a species is really just consensus. "Truth" is what we agree it is because the universe does not offer actual truth. What we know is the best guess that our greatest minds can agree on. What we consider to be truth changes far more often than it stands to scrutiny.
There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes.
We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
> There is very little about the universe that is axiomatically true and correct in and of itself. Math is about the only thing I can think of, and really that's in a different category.
My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).
The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
> This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
(Sorry I already forgot the password to my recently created account!)
> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:
"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
My brain (the one in my head) can only interpret red or green, given its makeup and the rest of the state of the universe including the display that I'm looking at.
Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.
Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.
Scientists are trying to make predictions about the future based on past experiences (inductive reasoning).
Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.
You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.
But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.
So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
Wikipedia isn't perfect and worthy of constructive criticism and debate.
However its current political enemies are not interested in a constructive debate with a shared goal of finding the truth. These are extremists that can think of nothing else but the destruction of their ideological opponents. They will destroy everything including the concept of truth as long as they see an opportunity for a temporary victory or more publicity.
One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.
Uh.. <raises hand> I might be one of the few people who actually knows a bunch of the theory on why wikipedia works (properly). I had to do a bunch of research while working on wikipedia mediation and policies stuff, a long time ago.
I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.
I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.
Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...
To me the key highlight of the article is the finding that editors generally start fairly radical and neutralize over time. Only really passionate people are willing to put the effort into Wikipedia articles which correlates well with radical opinions. But over time working as Wikipedia editors tends to de-radicalize people's work.
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
That's some of it, but certainly Wikipedia's editorial discussions differ from most forums in that its objective remains neutral, with worldwide access.
If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).
If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).
I routinely edit articles on Wikipedia without even logging in. The controversial articles, where you are likely to run into problems, are a small minority of what's there.
Wikipedia also tends to suffer from fiefdoms, where even seemingly low-controversy articles become impossible to edit, as someone has decided that article is now their personal pet and they'll spend an absurd amount of time undoing and preventing other people's edits.
The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a page on a "softer" subject and there's a pretty good chance someone will try to nuke it with WP:PROOF, WP:NOTE, and/or WP:OBSCURE if it isn't perfectly fleshed out in the very first draft.
If you encounter that, you can possibly get help to get those articles unstuck. People are not supposed to keep fiefdoms, much of policy prevents it. (and someone with a bit of practice can call in help and clear it up)
Fair-ish. It really depends. The last few areas I did anything in (I'm not a regular anymore) basically nothing happened except what I wrote, so I guess the quiet parts are really really quiet and you don't get into much trouble at all.
> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus
I agree with both your points. Wikipedia is extremely useful because it's generally very good - and it's also not perfect.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
When you put something on a pedestal it almost always eventually gets co-opted by people who's goals are not noble enough to build a pedestal themselves and who are seeking a ready made pedestal from which to spew their garbage.
Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.
i've built my own wiki platform cms for my niche-- the reason cool shit like wikipedia doesn't get built these days is because google will kill you. in my niche it's 90% indoslop content promoted by google these days. good luck against that and AI
I think one of the lessons of Wikipedia, is the more you link out the more they come back.
People come to your site because it is useful. They are perfectly capable of leaving by themselves. They don't need a link to do so. Having links to relavent information that attracts readers back is well worth the cost of people following links out of your site.
Interesting example, as Google used to link to Wikipedia much more prominently, then stopped doing that, which dropped Wikipedia's visitor counts a lot. A very large percentage of Wikipedia's visits are Google referrals.
Google shifted views that used to go to Wikipedia first to their in-house knowledge graph (high percentages of which are just Wikipedia content), then to the AI produced snippets.
All to say, yes...Wikipedia's generosity with outbound links is part of the popularity. But they still get hit by this "engagement" mentality from their traffic sources.
I would argue that this is less an example of why linking out may be bad for engagement and more an example of google abusing its intermediary/market position to keep users on their own pages longer
I'd argue that a user not having to click through is clearly a better result for the user, and that alone would be sufficient motivation to do it.
In terms of a single search, I don't think Google really benefits from preventing a click-through - the journey is over once the user has their information. If anything, making them click through to an ad-infested page would probably get a few fractions of a cent extra given how deeply Google is embedded in the ads ecosystem.
But giving the user the result faster means they're more likely to come back when they need the next piece of information, and give them more time to search for the next information. That benefits Google, but only because it benefits the user.
That'd be all fine if google produced that content, but since it doesn't, once they kill off the website, what happens to the quality of their snippets? Then the user has only shitty snippets that are out of date.
That's the kind if short-sighted view that's the root issue in a ton of enshittification happening around: the belief that short-term gains or benefits are all it's about. It's not sustainable to leech off of wikipedia content to fuel your own (ad in Google's) knowledge pop-ups, even if it benefits the user in that they save a single click, because that means long-term wikipedia will die out because users no longer associate the knowledge gained with wikipedia but with Google even though they had nothing to do with it apart from "stealing it".
In my niche these links are all going to indian scam sites for years and years. Right now can google "taehyung" one of the largest kpop idols and see it live. Count the indian links that have been dominating without any particular expertise thanks to google's changes (indian scammer site kickbacks etc)
I won't call it dead, but it is declining. Their various sources of traffic are now regurgitating Wikipedia Content (and other 3rd party sources) via uncited/unlinked AI "blurbs"...instead of presenting snippets of Wikipedia contents with links to Wikipedia to read more.
It's not the only reason their traffic is declining, but it seems like a big one.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think the people that edit Wikipedia are the same people that are content with half truths from LLMs and thus no longer visiting the site. So I kinda doubt it matters much.
Also, Stack Overflow is a commercial website, while Wikipedia is a free (as in freedom) project. Editing Wikipedia feels like you're contributing towards "an ideal", that you're giving back something to humanity, instead of just helping somebody else getting richer.
Allowing the population of an occupied territory to vote in elections of the occupying power is illegal under international law.
Generally speaking, in theory, the occupying power is supposed to be a care taker - they aren't supposed to take any action that integrates the occupied territory into the main territory. Allowing occupied territories to vote in the occupying power's elections is considered a form of integration. Doing so is considered acquiring territory via annexation, which is illegal under the UN charter.
(See for example Israel when the international community yelled at them for allowing people in Golan Heights to vote).
So the question is whether Israel is a democracy. If a state both maintains an occupation and denies the occupied population political rights, then it is not democratic (even if the dominant ethnic group and some others are allowed to vote).
At its core, democracy requires political equality. The governed people must have a meaningful say in who governs them and how. That is not present in Palestine due to Israeli occupation.
It allows Israelis to vote, including Jewish settlers in occupied territories, but it does not allow occupied Palestinians (many of whom live right next to settlers) to vote.
While your point about international law is technically correct, it is also a masterclass in deliberate evasion. You are not engaging with OP's argument, but you're using a legal footnote to sidestep the clear and openly stated intent of the system he's condemning. Leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have a precise legal term for this system, which is built on that very intent: apartheid. [1][2] "Israel is not, cannot be democratic based on Jewish superiority - No honest Israeli citizen can claim that the Palestinian citizens of Israel live as equal citizens in the State of Israel." [3]
This isn't a secret. Israeli officials have long been explicit that their policies are guided by the goal of maintaining demographic control. As Netanyahu declared, "Israel is not a state of all its citizens... but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them." This driving intent is what gives rise to the entire apparatus of control. It is legally enshrined in constitutional law through the 2018 Nation-State Law, which reserves the right of self-determination for Jews alone. This legal supremacy is then enforced through a two-tiered justice system in the West Bank, where Israeli settlers are governed by rights-respecting civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subjected to draconian military orders. This judicial separation, in turn, enables the physical re-engineering of the land: a state policy of systematic land dispossession confiscates Palestinian property for settlements, while a discriminatory planning regime makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to build, leading to routine home demolitions. The ultimate result is the deliberate fragmentation of Palestinian life into disconnected enclaves, which B'Tselem calls 'territorial islands' carved up by walls, checkpoints, and permit regimes designed to sever social and political ties.
Your narrow focus on the procedural illegality of a vote under occupation law is a calculated deflection from this reality. The disenfranchisement of Palestinians is not an incidental legal problem, it is a fundamental and necessary pillar for maintaining this regime of apartheid. You are meticulously explaining the legality of the lock on the cage, while deliberately ignoring that the crime is the cage itself.
You're making a different argument then the person I am responding to.
The person I am responding to only said: "Hardly a democracy when it occupies Palestine, and Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections." [Presumably they meant citizens of Palestine here, since Israeli citizens living in Israel who are ethically palestinian can vote]
Simply put, that is an unreasonable criticism as Israel is simply following international law. Other countries do the same. If they did not do this they likely would recieve criticism. People who don't like it should encourage the international community to change international law.
That doesn't mean that every possible criticism of Israel is unreasonable (in fact there are many reasonable criticisms you could make), only that the one i was replying to is unreasonable.
The rest of your post is irrelavent because its talking about arguments that neither I nor the person I was responding to made. That said, i think the way you are quoting is misleading, but that is neither here nor there.
You're right, I am making a bigger argument. That's because pbiggar's point about voting is impossible to understand without it. It's a symptom, and you are trying to discuss it while pretending the disease i.e a system of apartheid, as defined by international law, is "irrelevant". And this system isn't just a feature of the occupation. It is foundational to the state itself, a reality even zionists are forced to admit. As a Jerusalem Post op-ed concedes, "No honest Israeli citizen can claim that the Palestinian citizens of Israel live as equal citizens in the State of Israel."[0]
Your apologia that Israel is "simply following international law" is perverse. Everybody knows that Israel has never in its entire history, since its inception, ever given a fuck about international law, which makes your apologia extra comical. Furthermore, you are elevating a single procedural rule above one of the gravest prohibitions in the entire legal order, the crime against humanity of apartheid. The rule you cite is not a shield against this crime, it's a tool used to facilitate it. By forbidding political integration, the system enforces the very demographic separation required to maintain an apartheid state.
Your claim that "other countries do the same" is a baseless false equivalence that ignores the unique permanence and stated demographic goals of the Israeli apartheid system. And your deflection that we should "change international law" is an unserious diversion. The international community doesn't need to change the laws, it needs to hold these genocidal zionists accountable for violating the most fundamental ones that already exist. Your entire response is a performance of pedantry to avoid acknowledging a criminal reality which, for almost a century, has been inflicting hell upon the natives whose land zionists have been brutally colonizing with absolute impunity - culminating in the predictable conclusion of Genocide[1][2][3][4][5].
You are defending the apartheid system by pointing to a single, well-oiled gear, while deliberately ignoring that the entire machine is designed to make a mockery of international law.
Well you're certainly correct, as a tech person i'm nonetheless always disapointed by mainstream media reporting on these things as the "how" and "what" bit is by far more interesting to me than anything in the article.
The actual article is pretty old news and uninteresting - yes US police have used spyware for "surveilence". This is not new by any means. Similarly a number of Israeli private companies have made a name for themselves selling spyware software on, lets say the grey market. This is well known by now.
The only interesting thing to know would be how this particular piece of software works.
NSA isn't allowed to spy on US citizens. NSA is a US military organization under Department of Defense, and Posse Comitatus act makes it unlawful for the US military to act as a police force in the US.
One of the few good things revealed by Edward Snowdens leaks was the fact that the NSA has filters for intercepted communications to filter out comms from US citizens. This was in top-secret programs that had no reason to be publicly known, and yet the NSA still had these filters installed anyways, because everyone in the NSA understands that they're not a law-enforcement agency, because of Posse Comitatus.
> Posse Comitatus act makes it unlawful for the US military to act as a police force in the US.
Strictly speaking, that's not correct. The Posse Comitatus Act just changes the status of using the military as a police force from “allowed because any person or group can be deputized as a police at any time”, to “the US military can be used as a police force only under the laws specifically allowing and governing the US military as a police force.”
(Of course, the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal law, which means in practice the primary mechanism for enforcing it is for the executive branch to arrest and prosecute offenders. This works tolerably well to prevent, say, a rogue sheriff calling up his buddy who happens to command an infantry company to come help out, but not particularly well to dissuade the President from directing the military for policing as a matter of Administration policy.)
In principal the courts can constrain the government based on it, as well, but it is noteworthy that the determination that the deployment was illegal in the case filed by the State of California almost immediately when courts were open after the initial LA deployment was announced on June 7 and before troops arrived on June 10 was just released, on September 2, nearly 3 months later. And is on hold for 10 days to give the government time to appeal. So, one might consider the courts to not be a meaningful constraint, here.
So what would you say about the PRISM and Upstream programs where metadata about millions of Americans was collected? Doesn't it seem as if they could target any US citizen by just pretending to target any foreigner they communicate with?
I mean that the US government could have laundered some of the tools it is not supposed to have developed against US citizens through Israeli companies. (We don’t have any evidence of this in this case)
I suspect Israel does whatever they want under the auspices of national security, gives “private” cybersecurity corporations latitude to circumvent international laws, then packages it all up to sell to the highest bidder.
It seems pretty unlikely that selling a zero-day to a state actor is a violation of international law, unless the vendor knows that state actor intends to use it to commit an internationally wrongful act.
Like at the very worst - selling "cyberweapons" would follow the same rules as selling actual weapons.
I don't super follow US politics, but i don't think we are at the point where ICE is comitting crimes against humanity - which i think is what would be required for this transaction to violate international law.
Historically it was also common practise to die from diseases spread through fecal matter.
Or if not death, bad outcomes like hookworms, which were common in the american south and literally caused people to be stupid. They mostly went away when people stopped pooping in the woods.
> Part of the wider Operation Barclay, Mincemeat was based on the 1939 Trout memo, written by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Division, and his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming
I think its getting downvoted because they suggested that the article's copyeditor should have caught it, despite the article being right. I doubt they would have been downvoted if they just asked, but suggesting that someone failed at their job despite them actually doing it correctly tends to get people a bit uppity.
Respectfully, the title feels a little clickbaity to me. Both methods are still ultimately reading out of memory, they are just using different i/o methods.
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