With some controversial topics like Nuclear Power on the German wikipedia or the Gaza conflict on the English one, wikipedia has become less than useless. Once an activist editor sith too much time gets hold of a page, it is game over for neutrality of wokipedia. Grokipedia might introduce some much needed competition.
It is not politically correct to observe this, of course, but the only competition Grokipedia is introducing is the competition to mainstream white supremacist ideas while maintaining plausible deniability.
I think the question that XAI asks is "how close to mecha hitler can we get before people notice and complain?"
There are more than 7 million articles on wikipedia. 2 controversial ones do not invalidate the rest and sure does not deserve the "less than useless" label.
>While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence.
To be fair, their isn't any evidence for any explanation how COVID happened. The only thing we know is that gene splicing isn't involved, it's a genetically 'natural' variant. All other theories about what happened, including it's origin, is unsatisfactory at best.
Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].
If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.
[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.
I wouldn't say it's proven one way or the other but you can cite evidence on both sides, like in favour of a zoonotic origin, the previous SARS outbreak and other viruses have been zoonotic, there were cases near the wet market. In favour of lab, it's a bit of a coincidence that a novel form or SARS popped up near the number one lab in the world researching such stuff, and in a way that could be easily explained by research proposed by Ralph Baric, the no 1 researcher of such stuff who proposed such research in collaboration with the Wuhan lab.
My guess is that although a grant application for Baric's research was turned down, the Wuhan lab went ahead and did it anyway and had a screw up.
Evidence doesn't have to mean proven beyond all doubt.
I think it depends on the subject. Sure, I have heard a historian call it "Wickedpedia" because it gets all the facts wrong. But have a look at the "hash function" page. That is pretty in-depth.
However, this all misses the point that the article is making: It's a store of knowledge added to and edited by humans. At least they're not AI, the article says. I don't know if this is true, but if so, I find it compelling.
I used to download books when I was still in academia and money was more of an issue. These days with a decent salary, I just buy most books on kindle and don't think twice about it, clicking through the download links on these download sites is just too much of a hassle. Sometimes I even download a book I already own again in pdf form, so I can feed it to some GPT prompt as context. I do not think most people would be able to buy the books they download there, and I welcome it as a counter to Amazons DRM policy.
This is not an adequate way to look at nuclear. If you check the stats of established constructions and not first of a kind prototypes (check Barakah instead Hinkley), the construction time is closer to 10 years, often less.
With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue. Only the low fission parts of the spent fuel is low-grade active for longer than 1000 years, but this is such a low level of radiation, it is comparable to natural uranium formations and not an issue. The high radiation part of the fuel has lost the dangerous level of radiation in less than 1000 years and can be recycled before. The arenic compounds and other substances as byproduct of copper etc production for the mass of renewables have a much longer shelf life of toxitity. Also, you need more of them.
This is on top of an LCOE that is 5x that of solar or wind power and the need for catastrophe insurance to be provided essentially for free by the taxpayer on top of that.
(Fukushima cost about $1 trillion to clean up, the liability cap for US plants is about $250 million because otherwise private insurers who understand the risks better than you or I WILL NOT shoulder the liability)
The cost of nuclear can be dragged down by taking various risks that the people getting that sweet free catastrophe insurance would probably be happy with.
> With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue
Yes, waste is an issue. We only recently got the first permanent storages and their viability is to be tested.
Dropping barrels in the ocean was just kind of recently disallowed. Nuclear waste processing still drops contaminated water into oceans and rivers.
Water is a brilliant radiation absorber. But you can be sure this radiation will at some point reach the food chain. These are insurmountable costs and other technologies don't have these problems, toxicity of materials is different from ratiation from decaying materials.
Perhaps there is a place for nuclear power, but its problems should not be ignored or downplayed as well as its costs.
Similar concerns hold for the "adult entertainment" (=porn) industry, including onlyfans and such. Without judging the type of content, there is a massive number of existing revenue streams and millions of specialised creators and supporting professions up for disruption. A sudden shift in demand would rather reinforce than counteract existing patterns of exploitation in that sector as well.
When I visited the Georgian mountains last year (Kazbegi area), on the way from Tbilisi we passed an endless column of trucks. They were parked on the side of the road, the drivers taking a rest before crossing into Russia.
Trade with Russias neighbours has increased noticeably since the start of the "sanctions", it is profitable to order western components in bulk, repackage them and send them off.
The sanctions need to be enforced for neighbouring countries as well. The new US government likely won't life a finger, but the current one still could, and europe also can have an impact if they get their act together.
