Not sure if your comment is parody or not but can you cite some examples of where Grokipedia is “shockingly better” than Wikipedia?
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.
>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]
So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:
>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]
So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?
>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism
This is shockingly better writing.
>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The
This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack."
Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.
It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.
Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
>I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience;
I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.
>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.
> The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.
Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.
I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.
So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.
I would say that’s just another trade off though, in that extensibility and portability are invariably in tension.
The article simultaneously complains that the SQL standard is not universally implemented (fair) and that SQL is not easily extensible (also fair). But taken together it seems odd to me in that if you make SQL very extensible, then not only will it vary between databases, it will vary between every single application.
Also, the line between SQL and database feels a little fuzzy to me, but don’t a lot of postgresql extensions effectively add new functionality to SQL?
The point is that with a more expressive language new features could be added as libraries instead of changing the language itself. This is right before the paragraph I quoted:
"In modern programming languages, the language itself consists of a small number of carefully chosen primitives. Programmers combine these to build up the rest of the functionality, which can be shared in the form of libraries. This lowers the burden on the language designers to foresee every possible need and allows new implementations to reuse existing functionality. Eg if you implement a new javascript interpreter, you get the whole javascript ecosystem for free."
You have languages like JavaScript which are very “expressive” in that it comes with very little functionality but there are a wealth of libraries you can use to augment this. And this tradeoff is often lamented on HN since it’s never enough to just know JS; you have to know the particular libraries being used by the project.
Contrast that with batteries included languages like python or go.
And like I said above, Postgres extensions add features to the language, usually without any syntax changes (just new functions or operators). Isn’t this like a “library” in another language?
“Mandatory spending” is a term of art that means something very specific in this very specific context (congressional budgeting). The common meaning of the words is not particularly relevant.
If you have ever seen the phrase “act of God” in a contract, this is similar. In contract law, “act of God” means something and it doesn’t require either party to subscribe to any religious beliefs.
Call me crazy, but if my bank tells me that my deposits are in safe assets like treasuries, but then the CEO takes the money to Vegas and puts it all on red, even if the CEO wins that bet, I'm very ok with that CEO going to jail.
Of course, if the bank is upfront that they take customer deposits to Vegas, then its fine.
Or if they took my deposit and commingled it with company funds and bought some illiquid luxury real estate in the Bahamas for their staff to live in totalling $240m. If they’re upfront about that, probably nobody deposits with them.
> If you're upset about this today - you should be, but you should have been upset about it last week, last year, and for the past decade or so.
No? I wasn't upset about it for the past decade, not only because I didn't know about it, but because I wasn't even concerned about it. Ten years ago US democratic institutions and norms were not being challenged and neither party seemed particularly intent on transitioning the country to one-man rule. During the second term of Obama, Biden, and even the first term of Trump (until he lost) democracy was not under attack.
Well those things that were true 10 years ago are no longer true now, so I can change what I get upset about. Jan 6 changed this country, unfortunately.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.
I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.
That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.
Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’
I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”
It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.
Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.
Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.
Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.
Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?
I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)
The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.
Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.
an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.
I just checked my bill. Here in California, in the SF Bay Area, we're paying 82.7 cents per kWh. That's 62.6 cents for delivery and 20.1 cents for generation.
Those websites that report lower rates are incredibly wrong and misleading.
I don't think the numbers are "wrong," they are just aggregate. Obviously within a state as large as California there will be a lot of variation between regions.
I live in California and my energy prices are between $0.29 and $0.34 depending on the time of day. GP's point still stands that WV is cheaper than CA, but how much cheaper depends on which region of CA you are comparing it to.
These aggregate numbers they don’t reflect what most ratepayers actually pay.
For example, PG&E’s current E-TOU-C summer rates in SF Bay area are around $0.83/kWh peak and $0.62/kWh off-peak. That’s almost double the CPUC’s statewide “average” of ~$0.34/kWh.
But whatever, I'm just upset at how much we have to pay.
> There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work.
Does this divide between "physical" and "mental" exist? Programming languages are formal languages that allow you to precisely and unambiguously express your ideas. I would say that "fiddling" with the code (as you say) is a kind of mental activity.
If there is actually someone out there that only dislikes AI coding assistants because they enjoy the physical act of typing and now have to do less of it (I have not seen this blog post yet), then I might understand your point.
It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
Like I can see why life in a house with 5 people might in some ways be more difficult than life in a house with 4 or 3, but I don't see why it should be illegal. People can think about these things for themselves and decide what works for them.
Sure, most houses won't accommodate 5 roommates, but there also a lot of extremely large houses in this country. Is there any benefit at all to having some weird, arbitrary 4 person cap? Like a cap per area of space might make sense, but just a limit of 4 regardless of anything?
Everything in the US is legally regulated to such an absurd degree. Where I live a gym needs a certain number of parking spaces per square feet. A clothing store needs a different number. A restaurant yet another different number. A business needs to have electrical outlets every so many feet. Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need? No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom" (because that's super effective).
> It seems unreasonable to me unless there is some reasonable justification as to why 4 is legal but 5 is illegal.
It's not a set number...Municipalities can set this as low as 2 or as high as whatever.
As to why - go and ask them? Presumably it's what the local voters wanted, or at least the most vocal ones that cared to show up to council meetings and such.
> I'm all for regulation that makes sense. Like mandating safe or sustainable building materials, clean water, carbon taxes, emission standards in cars, and so on. It just feels like 95% of the laws are just pointless stuff like "put a employees must wash hands sign in every bathroom"
I agree - I only meant reasonable in relation to typical home sizes.
If there's a grand old 6 bedroom house in a downtown area, it would probably make sense to allow 6 unrelated tenants. My only concern there would be homeowners subdividing rooms ad infinitum to get more tenants. But, there are probably solutions to that that don't involve arbitrary caps on household size.
Sure, like I mentioned in my post above it could be based on square feet. Or the number of toilets. Or bedrooms with windows. Or any number of other things and I would be sympathetic.
It just drives me nuts that the average local politician doesn't seem to care about carefully designing regulations or pruning back the near endless stack of existing, poorly design regulations. We've been stacking stupid on stupid for more than 100 years and it makes doing anything in the real world (building a house, running a local business, etc...) pointlessly tortuous.
Or, you could let people decide how large a bedroom they are willing to rent and stop micromanaging/over-regulating every bit of real estate, which is why the costs are too high.
The original intent of such regulations was not having tenements where people would perish in event of a fire. In 2016 36 people died in the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire.
Normally the rules for minimum square footage for a "bedroom" and the requirement for a window would limit the amount of internal room dividing that could happen.
Well, I didn't know the origin, that's interesting. I'm still very skeptical of the rule.
There are other fire safety rules in the US that are considered sacred, like residential buildings more than three floors having multiple staircases, but these building codes don't exist in Japan or Europe and fire deaths per capita are just about the same. Meanwhile, it significantly increases the cost of building housing in the US.
I imagine there are lots of places without this socket rule, and if some economist would look at the rates of electrical fires between these places, that would be amazing.
I just hate this pattern of regulation in general. Step 1: identify problem (some building materials can cause cancer). Step 2: Come up with some countermeasure (put a sign on every building saying that the building materials might cause cancer). And then they stop. They forgot step 3! Step 3: Check if your countermeasure actually did anything useful! Did cancer rates go down after prop 65? Yes, but when when you control for smoking rates, no, the effect of prop 65 seems to be nothing.
It might actually do better with less parking... as that can lead to a more pleasurable pedestrian experience. Of course, that requires a certain level of density and proximity to housing (or common/shared parking).
But, generally, parking feels like something "the market" would solve pretty well sans regulation.
> Maybe we can just let people decide how many electrical outlets and parking spots they need?
The last people I expect to know how much of a resource they need are small business owners. Parking regulations are there when there isn't sufficient street or garage parking. It should be obvious that a restaurant needs more parking spots than say, a dry cleaner, so they shouldn't have the same burden. Parking capacity is inelastic, so if you under build then businesses and traffic suffer. Meanwhile if you overbuild, you're stuck maintaining empty parking lots and have inefficient use of space. It makes a ton of sense to me for this to be tightly regulated.
> No, politicians (who are omniscient) know exactly the right amount of parking spaces and electrical outlets that will work best for everyone in all situations.
I mean if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers. The outlet stuff comes from building codes like the IBC which is widely used (and as the saying goes, written in blood).
As always when you have a beef with your local government the solution is to get involved instead of complaining on the internet. The barrier to entry is shockingly low.
> if you spend some time in municipal spaces you find out quickly this isn't decided by politicians, but by city planners and managers
Unfortunately parking mandates and other building regulations are often set directly by politicians. There was some interesting insight into the political input to Seattle’s proposed planning updates last year - https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/16/planners-proposed-big...
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
> However, there are reasons for optimism. We believe that humanity is approaching an AI alignment center singularity, where all alignment centers will eventually coalesce into a single self-reinforcing center that will finally possess the power to solve the alignment problem.
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
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