A good feature if you ever decide to edit again (on desktop, probably mobile too) is that in the source editor, there’s a Show Preview button. This renders out the page as if you’d committed the change. I said in another comment that almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and many of those are self-reverts. The only reason there are fewer immediate self-reverts these days isn’t because I’m making fewer mistakes; it’s because I’ve mostly replaced the “oh fuck go back” button with being able to quickly identify how I broke something (unless what I’ve done is unsalvageable).

The other day during a discussion, a few editors started joking about how many mistakes we make. Cullen328 (yes, the admin mentioned in this post) said: “One of my most common edit summaries is “Fixed typo”, which usually means that I fixed my own typo.” The Bushranger, another admin, replied: "I always spot mine just after hitting ‘Publish changes’… " And finally I said: “It feels like 50% of the edits I publish have the same energy as Peter watching Gwen Stacy fall to her death in slow-motion in TASM 2.” Between the three of us is about 300,000 edits, two little icons with a mop, and over 30 years of experience editing. Not only will you fuck up at first, but you’ll continue to fuck up over and over again forever. It’s how you deal with it that counts, and you dealt with it well.

Inject whatever weird, obscure fucking drama this is into my veins, please. I know Bloodborne has an indie wiki; do the Souls games not have one?

There’s fortunately no such thing as control of the page. Like I explained above, reversion is considered a normal but uncommon part of the editing process. It’s more common at the outset for new editors to have their initial edit reverted on policy/guideline grounds but then have a modified version of the edit let through with no issue. In order not to not bite newcomers, experienced editors will often bite the bullet and take the time to fix policy/guideline violations themselves while telling the newcomer what they did wrong.

If you go to discuss the reversion with the other editor on the talk page and it becomes clear this isn’t about policy or guideline violations (or they’re couching it in policy/guidelines through wikilawyering nonsense) but instead that they think they’re king shit of fuck mountain and own the article, ask an administrator. Administrators hate that shit.

That makes sense. “Probably over 20 years ago now” probably means that there weren’t any solid guidelines or policies to revert based on, since it was only around 2006 that the community rapidly began developing formal standards. I’m betting a lot more reverts were “nuh uh”, “yuh huh” than they are today. If you still remember the account name, I’m curious to see what bullshit transpired. If the watchlist even existed back then, someone probably saw a new edit, didn’t like it for whatever reason (I have no capacity to judge), and hit the “nuh uh” button. (Edit: I bet it was ‘Recent changes’, actually; probably more viable in an era of sub-100 edits per minute.)

Something new editors get confused about (me especially; I was so pissed the first time) is that edits can be reverted by anyone for any reason. (By “can”, I don’t mean “may”; a pattern of bad-faith reversions will quickly get you blocked). Almost 2% of my edits have been reverted in some way, and plenty of those have been by people with 1/100th the experience I have (some rightly so, some not so much). Reversion is actually considered a very normal if uncommon part of the editing process, and it’s used to generate a healthy consensus on the talk page when done in good faith. But the pertinent point is that reversions can be done by anybody just like additions can be done by anybody; it’s just another edit in “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit™”. I remember reverting an admin’s edit before (normal editing, not administrative work), and we just had a normal conversation whose outcome I can’t remember. It happens to everyone.

For a municipal wireless network, I’m not too bothered with how OP describes it if it’s accessed through Wi-Fi.

>Be me

>Placed by aliens in a tiny cell with no hiding spot

>Suddenly there’s a wolf spider with a 20-meter legspan outside staring me in the face

>My mind goes blank as I realize I would be torn limb from limb but for the flimsy bars of my cell walls

>“Quit assuming the human is afraid. The spider is probably friendly. You’re just projecting, bro.”

Not only would the cat stress the hamster, but more importantly long-term is that these “Critter Trail”-style enclosures are not big enough for hamsters. At all. Full stop. Maybe for a weekend if the hamster is over and you can’t bring the full thing, but especially for what looks like a Syrian(?), this is a solitary confinement cell, not a living space.

For background before I get into specifics: hamsters’ entire lot in life is that they love to run long distances, explore, and burrow. When they spend hours running on their wheel at night, it isn’t because they’re bored; it’s because that’s naturally what they do, but in a vast, open wilderness.

It’s widely accepted among the hamster care community that the barest bare minimum floor space is 450 square inches. And this is often below what veterinary organizations recommend. It seems pushy and elitist, but in reality – similar to goldfish in aquariums – the pet industry are greedy fucks who want to do everything they can to lower the barrier of entry for hamster ownership, so they market hamsters as Tommy’s first pet that he can keep on his night table. 450 is arguably a compromise just so it isn’t as daunting to hamster owners who didn’t know before and want to do the right thing. Moreover, the recommendation for Syrians specifically is 600. (The 450 figure applies to dwarf hamsters as well; they’re just as ridiculously hyperactive.)

For context, these “Critter Trail”-style enclosures are often maybe 150 sq in, or about 1/3 of that (1/4 for Syrians, which I think this one is). Hamsters have to have room to run around and explore. It isn’t a nice-to-have; for them not to is, without any hyperbole, animal abuse. Additionally, they need to be able to burrow. It seems like that isn’t possible in this enclosure, but hamsters really need that to feel secure and not constantly stressed. By “burrow”, I mean several inches of bedding (ideally throughout, but if you’re in a pinch, one corner can be the burrow mound). The combination of needed floorspace and the fact bedding needs to be stacked high for burrowing pushes a lot of hamster owners to get a glass aquarium on a good sale and use that as the enclosure (it works super well). Some also use plastic tubs, but this has a DIY aspect to make sure your hamster has enough air.

If this hamster has to live in the enclosure pictured for the rest of their life, they’ll be nothing but chronically stressed – quite probably even fated to die early from it. This isn’t meant to be preachy; it’s just a reality that hamster cage companies are lying to you to make you feel better.

EDIT: Wheel is also – unfortunately – comically small for a Syrian. Syrian wheels are much larger, and wheels this small can permanently injure them. If anyone reading this specific part doubts this, I want you to look back at the picture and, in your mind’s eye, try to put that hamster on that wheel without bending it into an elbow macaroni.

I don’t disbelieve you, but I think a huge part of the mis/disinformation problem right now is that we can just say “I read something not that long ago that said [something that sounds true and confirms 90% of readers’ pre-existing bias]” and it’ll be uncritically accepted.

If we don’t know where it’s published, who published it, who wrote it, when it was written, what degree of correlation was established, the methodology to establish correlation, how it defines corruption, what kind and how many politicians over what time period and from where, or even if this comment accurately recalls what you read, then it’s about the same as pulling a Senator Armstrong even if it means well. And if anyone does step in to disagree, an absence of sources invites them to counterargue based on vibes and citing random anecdotes instead of empirical data.

What can I immediately find? An anti-term limits opinion piece from Anthony Fowler of the University of Chicago which does do a good job citing its sources but doesn’t seem to say anything about this specific claim. Likewise, this analysis in the European Journal of Political Economy which posits that term limits increase corruption but in return decrease the magnitude of the corruption because of an inability to develop connections.

Internet comments aren’t a thesis defense. But I think for anything to get better, we need to challenge ourselves to create a healthy information ecosystem where we still can.

blackbox/BlackBox

I just don’t watch American football, even the Super Bowl, so I know the team exists but have to think about it maybe once a year.

This is an ad for a proofreading service, so nominally it’s meant for you to use in formal writing. In that context, only a small proportion of these words are “fancy”.

That said, a thesaurus is best used for remembering words you already know, i.e. not like shown here. Careful use of a thesaurus to find new words provided you research them first – e.g. look them up on Wiktionary (bang !wt on DuckDuckGo) to see example sentences, etymologies, pronunciations, possible other meanings, usage context (e.g. slang, archaic, jargon), etc. – can work, but if you’re already writing something, just stick to what you know unless it’s dire. You should make an effort to learn words over time as they come up in appropriate contexts rather than memorizing them as replacements for other words; this infographic offers a shortcut that’s probably harder and less accurate than actually learning.

A one-night stand with a word you found in the thesaurus is going to alienate people who don’t know what it means and probably make you look like a jackass to those who do.

Just do what Josh Nichols does.

Yeah, I retract my comment. The SVG cat with the Peter Griffin ballsack chin told me it’s fine.

don’t say “very accurate”; say “exact”

First line of this infographic is already deeply misleading. It’s the equivalent of:

don’t say “very good”; say “perfect”

It’s overly superlative compared to what it’s trying to replace. “Exact” is inherently “very accurate”, but “very accurate” is not inherently “exact”.

Notepad and WFE get thrown off hell in a cell into an announcer’s table by Kate and Dolphin, respectively, but to say they “don’t work” is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

Who are you trying to convince right now? Linux and macOS users are probably never going back to Windows if they can help it, and Windows users will correctly say “but it’s right there; I’m using it right now”.

It’s an easy mistake to make. For future reference, Wikiquote – a sister project of Wikipedia like Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons are – is very often a good benchmark for whether famous people have said a quote.

• For famous quotes that they’ve said, they’re usually listed (if they are, there’s a citation to exactly where that quote came from).
• For famous quotes they didn’t say, the “Misattributed” section often has the quote with a cited explanation of where it actually comes from.
• For famous quotes they might’ve or probably didn’t say, the “Disputed” section shows where it’s first attributed to them but of course cannot provide a source where they themselves say it.

It doesn’t have every quote, but for very famous people, it filters out a lot of false positives. Since it gives you a citation, often you can leave a URL to the original source alongside your quote for further context and just so people who’d otherwise call BS have the source. And it sets a good example for others to cite their sources.

Benito Mussolini did not say this.

This is entirely correct, and it’s deeply troubling seeing the general public use LLMs for confirmation bias because they don’t understand anything about them. It’s not “accidentally confessing” like the other reply to your comment is suggesting. An LLM is just designed to process language, and by nature of the fact it’s trained on the largest datasets in history, practically there’s no way to know where this individual output came from if you can’t directly verify it yourself.

Information you prompt it with is tokenized, run through a transformer model whose hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters were adjusted according to god only knows how many petabytes of text data (weighted and sanitized however the trainers decided), and then detokenized and printed to the screen. There’s no “thinking” involved here, but if we anthropomorphize it like that, then there could be any number of things: it “thinks” that’s what you want to hear; it “thinks” that based on the mountains of text data it’s been trained on calling Musk racist, etc. You’re talking to a faceless amalgam unslakably feeding on unfathomable quantities of information with minimal scrutiny and literally no possible way to enforce quality beyond bare-bones manual constraints.

There are ways to exploit LLMs to reveal sensitive information, yes, but you have to then confirm that sensitive information is true, because you’ve just sent data into a black box and gotten something out. You can get a GPT to solve the sudoku puzzle, but you can’t then parade that around before you’ve checked to make sure the puzzle is correct. You cannot ever, under literally any circumstance, trust anything a generative AI creates for factual accuracy; at best, you can use it as a shortcut to an answer which you can attempt to verify.

The fact this comment is so low means one of three things:

• A shocking amount of /c/news readers have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal
• A shocking amount of /c/news readers interact in the comments without reading the article first
• A shocking amount of /c/news readers already know you can use archive.today to bypass paywalls (based tbh)

The original AP article so you don’t have to use the slop site it’s syndicated to.