Everyone else is throwing in there 2¢, so here's my pet proposal.
Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
I hate both. The time jump in fall means sunset starts happening depressingly early (almost exactly 5pm where I am, which means no sunlight after work).
That's the setting for The Electric Church, by Jeff Somers. There's a very small capital class who own all the automated manufacturing plants, etc., and they live in obscene grandeur. Then there's the rest of the world which is basically a slum, brutally oppressed by the police force to keep them from rising up. The population gets everything they need to survive, but it's all fairly shitty - the technology for a post scarcity society exists in the setting, it's just hoarded by the most obscenely wealthy.
Pretty decent sci-fi, just pretend he didn't write any sequels tho.
Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.
I agree that the work culture promoting this is bad, but being sick is still simply not an excuse to fabricate quotes with AI. It's still just journalistic malfeasance, and if Ars actually cares about the quality of their journalism, he should be fired for it.
If anyone who makes a mistake rarely and owns it completely shall be fired, everyone would be homeless.
To err is human, so owning what you did. This is the first time I have seen Ars to make a mistake of this kind in any size, so I think this is a good corrective bump given Ars' track report on these matters.
Maybe we should learn to be a bit flexible and understanding sometimes. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and we don't need more of that right now.
I agree, I think this should be taken in context and his past work should be reviewed by Ars to ensure this isn’t a pattern. If he made a mistake one time this is a learning experience and I doubt he would ever make it again. You don’t need to fire someone every time they make a mistake. Especially if the mistake was made in good faith.
I don't know about that - I'd say it's the managers responsibility to make sure employees don't feel pressured to work when they're to ill to function.
And also brings to mind the IBM one million dollars story:
(...)
A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no, Thomas J. Watson Sr.—needed every deal. Unfortunately, the salesman failed. IBM lost the bid. That day, the sales rep showed up at Mr. Watson’s office. He sat down and rested an envelope with his resignation on the CEO’s desk. Without looking, Mr. Watson knew what it was. He was expecting it.
He asked, “What happened?”
The sales rep outlined every step of the deal. He highlighted where mistakes had been made and what he could have done differently. Finally he said, “Thank you, Mr. Watson, for giving me a chance to explain. I know we needed this deal. I know what it meant to us.” He rose to leave.
Tom Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye and handed the envelope back to him saying, “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?”
Should he? Where does that mindset come from? The author has owned up to his mistake. Unless there is a pattern here, why would we not prefer to let him learn and grow from this? We all get to accidentally drop the prod DB once, since that’s what teaches us not to do it again.
He's not some junior developer with his first job, he's the senior editor. If a senior editor plagiarized an article, he would rightly be fired because it's a serious violation of journalistic ethics. He knew using AI tools like that was against company policy and he did it anyway. That's well beyond just making a mistake.
There are degrees of plagiarism and you could argue this is not really plagiarism at all. Paraphrasing instead of directly quoting is probably about as mild as it can get. Most publications wouldn’t even note the mistake.
This wasn't paraphrasing either. The tool couldn't access the subject's website and instead fabricated quotes, which Benj nor anyone in the editorial process bothered to vet.
Have you met any professional journos? It's not exactly a laid back profession. I could easily imagine the people I know pushing through illness to get a story out.
> I have been sick with COVID all week /../, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh.
Being under stress and being ill at the same time can change your modus operandi. I know, because that happens to me, too.
When I'm too tired, too stupid, and too stressed, I stop after a point. Otherwise things go bad. Being sick adds extra mental fog, so I try to stop sooner.
Paste the original blog post into ChatGPT asking it to summarize or provide suggestions. Unintentionally copy and paste quotes from the ChatGPT output rather than the original blog post.
Okay. I've been harsh on Ars Technica in these comments, and I'm going to continue to hold an asterisk in my head whenever I see them cited as a source going forward. However, at least one thing in this apology does seem more reasonable than people have made it out to be: I think it's fine for reporters at an AI-skeptical outlet to play around with various AI tools in their work. Benj Edwards should have been way more cautious, but I think that people should be making periodic contact with the state of these tools (and their pitfalls!), especially if they're going to opine.[1]
We don't know yet how widespread these practices are at Ars Technica, or whether this is a one-off. But if it went down like he says it did here, then the coincidental nature of this mistake -- i.e., that it's an AI user error in reporting an AI novel behavior story at an AI-skeptical outlet -- merely makes it ironic, not more egregious than it already is.
[1] Edit: I read and agreed with ilamont's new comment elsewhere in this thread, right after posting this. It's a very reasonable caveat! https://hackernews.hn/item?id=47029193
That's a poor mea culpa. It begins with a preamble attempting to garner sympathy from the reader before it gets to the acknowledgement of the error, which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity.
> which is a sleight-of-hand attempt to soften its severity
That’s not sleight-of-hand, I think we all immediately recognize it for what it is. Whether it is good form to lead with an excuse is a matter of opinion, but it’s not deceptive.
I speculate that curious minds, with a forensic inclination and free time, will go back to previous articles and find out it happened before...When you see a cockroach...
It's not really important whether it's a one-off thing with this one guy, he's not relevant in the big picture. To the extent that he deindividualizes his labor he's just one more fungible operator of AI anyway.
People are making a bigger deal about it than this one article or site warrants because of ongoing discourse about whether LLM tech will regularly and inevitably lead to these mistakes. We're all starting to get sick of hearing about it, but this keeps happening.
My immediately thought when I read the description of the book was that I have some internet friends who are into ABDL (adult baby diaper lover) stuff, and it sounds like the book's somewhat like that. I haven't GRILLED them about their motivations or why they're into it, but they like pretending to be a baby sometimes (not always in a sexual way) - maybe it's freeing to let go of responsibilities and pressure, etc. Anyway, it doesn't hurt anyone, and they get something out of it that makes them happy.
This ruling is sad IMO, because I have the feeling that Australia is increasingly hostile to The Weird Stuff, and I'm worried about what it might mean for people over there who are into abdl and the like.
But you're wrong. The memo says they can use an administrative warrant - which is to say, a warrant signed by an immigration official, part of the executive branch - to enter a house and arrest someone. The executive branch is authorizing an executive branch official to enter a home, bypassing the judicial branch.
The CRUCIAL thing to note is that ICE gets stuff wrong. Their info is often stale or flat wrong - so even though they say "this is only for illegal immigrants, don't worry about it ;)", it can ABSOLUTELY affect citizens.
Note also that, since it's ICE and immigration officials (again: all executive branch) making these determinations, the executive is also deciding whether there's probable cause to think that an illegal immigrant is in a particular house. This damage to due process is ostensibly only aimed at immigrants, but it affects all of us.
I see the issue raised with the process owner being all Executive --but on the other hand due process frequently inadvertently affects non-criminals (i.e. not all suspects are the guilty party in a given case; however many suspects go through a process where they are finally eliminated as a suspect --but that sometimes can carry on for many years as in the Ramsey case and people spend tens of thousand and millions while they are under suspicion (i.e. not cleared of wrongdoing). So due process doesn't guarantee an innocent person is not inadvertently "dragged though mud".
I don't think it's valid to deflect by saying "well, due process isn't perfect" - no one ever said it was. But due process is there to protect you from arbitrary persecution, and it's much better to have it than to not have it.
> people spend tens of thousand and millions while they are under suspicion (i.e. not cleared of wrongdoing)
You managed to hit the nail on the proverbial head... "not cleared of wrongdoing" means "guilty until proven innocent" and turns the promise of the justice system on its head - spending millions to prove innocence is just a mundane consequence of that perversion.
> So due process doesn't guarantee an innocent person is not inadvertently "dragged though mud".
And, not quite accidentally, it allows to drug anyone though mud regardless of guilt - both purposefully or inadvertently.
I've said this before but the type of argument you use is quite common and it boils down to the following fallacy: If something is already happening somewhere, sometimes - it's the right thing to do everywhere and all the time.
The fact that the government can excuse and routinely do something while getting away with it doesn't mean that the getting away or the action itself are right or justified.
The discussion here is about the compatibility of government's actions with the spirit of the Constitution which doesn't provide an exemption for habituated wrongs.
Authorities have to conduct investigations. Their voters demand that as part of a civilized society those deputized to keep the peace pursue and solve violations to the public order. Since investigators can't consult a magic ball, their investigations will necessarily involve people who are later cleared. One can attempt the ideal, knowing the ideal is not attainable and that reality is messy. It's a balance. It's not perfect. Some innocent people get caught up in the messy parts.
> Some innocent people get caught up in the messy parts.
What's the number of innocents you're willing to sacrifice to get the outcome you desire? Would you be okay if you or your loved ones are caught up in the messy parts?
There's more than one way to do that, some a lot better than the current practice which, as of now, involves shooting suspects in the head.
> Since investigators can't consult a magic ball
That's what the shooting perpetrators claim too - "we weren't sure if this woman was going to try to wipe us all out, we've got no magic ball, thus, head meet bullet seemed like a reasonable thing to do... repeatedly".
> One can attempt the ideal
There's no evidence that anything close to that has been attempted since at least 2001.
> It's a balance.
It's not. Nobody's punished, no consequences for errors, not even a hint of admission - replaced by blame the victim in the worst crimes imaginary - before looking at the evidence and without even consulting a dictionary to see what the words mean.
The only reason I use Windows is probably the same reason a lot of people use Windows: the company I work for requires it. It's a small company and they don't want IT to have to support more than one OS, so I _get_ why, but man do I hate it.
Linux on my non-work machine tho. Windows 11 made me rip off the bandaid and get rid of the windows dual boot I very occasionally used for some old software.
In a job interview last, year a CEO told me he was personally a fan of Linux at home but hated Linux and MacOS as workstation in a corporate env because it was a pain in the ass to manage compliance.
Not sure if it is really the case or just lack of knowledge, I think you can do a long way with tools such as puppet and chief.
Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
The problem is not capacity of a tube. Let's take a recent example, Teheran. And let's assume desalination is just totally free. The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
This does not include actually pumping the water (ie. horizontal movement) (30% inefficiency would certainly not be considered bad engineering), doesn't include electrical inefficiency (30% in the power plant + 10% in the motors), doesn't include desalination (100%), doesn't include building the massive bridges something like this would require, doesn't include ...
So let's say you need a 4 Gigawatt power plant, every single drop just to keep this one city alive.
And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
What needs to happen is that people in Asia need to abandon quite a few cities (yes, European cities are largely in, when it comes to water, sustainable places. Africa is less ideal, but still reasonable, US is reasonable with some exceptions, it's a bunch of Asian cities that are the problem here)
> The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
> E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
The energy required to lift that water does not give you a power requirement, which is a rate that energy is consumed. Tehran has a water deficit of 101 million m3 per year which would require 38 MW to lift. That's a couple of wind turbines worth of power. Obviously there's a lot more to keeping the water system working, but you're off by an order of magnitude. Building a small power plant to keep a city of that size habitable is certainly achievable.
> And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
Tehran's urban area is the 29th most populous in the world with over 14 million people. Pakistan has one larger urban area, Karachi, which is 40% larger.
China is in a bind, though they have more money to deal with it than most countries. Their clean energy is in the west, but not much water out there (well, more than you think, but still not enough), their industry is the in the northeast, their water is in the south east (also in Tibet, but those glaciers are melting quickly), so they have to divert water from the southeast up north (the grand canal they build a decade or so ago), they have ultra high volatile wires to bring the energy from west to east, etc...
Why you just say move, you are still making a compromise. Maybe you have flat land with no water, and you are moving to somewhere that is mountainous with water, you now have to terrace a bunch of mountains before that area is productive, and let's say you use wind and solar, but that is even in another area, so you need wires to bring that in...etc...
I'd also add that it is easy to underestimate the water usage.
Desalination could be viable if it was only for subsistence/drinking. But water use is extensive in every single product/service we use and thing we cconsume. Cost of water going up across the board will have effects that shouldn't be underestimated.
Isn’t the problem ultimately that water is heavy and it takes a lot of power to pump it and that’s expensive?
You can pump water faster through a big tube but then you need big pumps and tons of electricity. If it’s going uphill that’s going to be serious power.
1 ton of water is only 240 gallons. So if we're talking a tube that is 4 feet in diameter and 10 miles long, that's 12.5 million gallons, or 52100 tons (or 104,000,000 pounds). While it wouldn't take that much to move that if your pushing downhill, I have to imagine the energy cost would be AMAZING moving it uphill at all.
But also fluid dynamics is the only college course I dropped because it was fucking witchcraft, so who knows.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
Here's the undeniable fact: everyone (ok, almost everyone, but it's a rounding error) hates the switchover in spring, when you have to get up an hour earlier. Conversely, everyone (or a rough approximation) likes the switchover in the fall, when we get to sleep in an extra hour. So why don't we just get rid of the switchover in the spring and get rid of the one in the fall?
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