Technology

To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like "I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I'll throw my pacifier out of the pram". No regard for the considerations of the source sites.

Done.

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they're trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

Yay interrobang :D

AI has niches but they're exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over "hard problems" where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don't actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.

An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a "hard problem" from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it's own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn't ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn't require a data center's worth of resources to train, and since they're academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.

I’m dyslexic and basically a terrible writer. It has helped my professional communication develop. It really helps me speed up my issues with my disability and feel confident in my communications.

Like, we don't need government.

Welcome to the anarchist. Now you have to pick your flavor! Social Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho comunist, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho christianis, and the list goes on!

I found LLMs helpfuls to develop some scripts and answer some simple trivial questions (like how does house property work in China). I could have looked for that in a regular search engine though. But that's it, I am still happy looking for things myself and investigating since you can't really trust their answers.

And Wikimedia, in particular, is all about publishing data under open licenses. They want the data to be downloaded and used by others. That's what it's for.

Rate limiting in itself requires resources that are not always available. For one thing you can only rate limit individuals you can identify so you need to keep data about past requests in memory and attach counters to them and even then that won't help if the requests come from IPs that are easily changed.

It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they're novices.

Same here. There's a lot of denial going on but, LLMs are not good for anything that requires factual information. They likely will never be on account of just being statistical models for language. Summarizing long text where correctness isn't an issue is really one of the only places where I still think that they are good.

Search? Not if you want anything factual with citations.

Code? Fuck no. They constantly produce code of poor quality that may depend on non-existent libraries or functionality. More time it's spent debugging than writing code and it leaves the dev with a poor understanding of what the code actually does and ways to optimize/extend/etc.

Generating literary smut? Well, it's not going to do as good of a job as a person who can create something completely novel but can be passable without likely harm to authors (I'd classify it as a tier below erotic fan fiction).

Graphite is conductive. A short circuit and fire are Very Bad.