A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.

The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.

OP, the site you’re linking to is LLM slop. Like seriously just look at this site for a second.

• There’s zero consistent theme.
• The images are generated.
• They’re all “BY JOHN” (no pfp, no last name, no bio, let alone no indication why they’re qualified to write about this cornucopia of shit).
• It only ever hyperlinks to itself – i.e. the sources may as well be “I made it the fuck up”.
• The way the articles are structured are LLM slop to a tee – randomly bolding words, meandering prose, overuse of bullet points, jarring logical flow, etc.
• At least five articles per day from the same “person” despite extensive length, perfect grammar, and alleged research being done.

Can’t you please link to an actual source to make this claim?

Something Happened, the other, far lesser-known work by Catch-22 author Joseph Heller. It’s too apples-to-oranges to throw around “better”, but I already love Catch-22 and still prefer Something Happened. It’s considerably longer, but in my opinion, it’s criminally overlooked.

OP, you linked to the comments instead of the top of the article. 💀

I’m not agreeing with their dumb point, but just pointing out: this satellite works on radar. I’m genuinely concerned how many people seem to be commenting without reading the article.

I don’t know why you’re assuming their ‘/s’ is alluding to sarcasm around this being surveillance versus sarcasm around needing more surveillance. “We need more surveillance (we actually don’t)” seems to be indicated here, not “This is surveillance (it actually isn’t)”.

Especially when Reddit types are notoriously, chronically unable to read articles before they go spouting uninformed bullshit in the comments.

Did you read the part where this is a radar satellite designed for monitoring the climate? That is, did you read anything besides the headline before you decided: “Yeah, I think I’m able to make informed commentary about this”?

Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

• Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
• Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
• And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
• And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
• And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
• Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.

That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.

it shouldn't be that hard?

OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.

I don’t at all understand why the second law of thermodynamics is being invoked. Nonetheless, capillary condensation is already a well-studied phenomenon. As the scientific article itself notes, the innovation here over traditional capillary condensation would be the ability to easily remove the water once it’s condensed.

Re: Entropy:

• Entropy is a statistical phenomenon that tends to increase over time averaged across the entire body, i.e. the Universe. Not literally every part of the Universe needs to increase its entropy as long as on average it is increasing. You’re evidence of that: your body is a machine that takes entropy and pushes it somewhere else.
• Water vapor is a high-energy state compared to liquid water. What you’re saying therefore is the opposite of how the second law works: water vapor’s energy tends to spread out over time until it eventually cools back to a liquid. Liquid water is a higher entropy state than water vapor.

That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.

Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed. Not only am I almost never checking who an editor is when I check their edit, but I maybe know 100 people total (orders of magnitude less than the pool of very active editors); even among the few people I’d consider acquaintances, I’ve had my edits reverted and reverted theirs.

The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.

(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)

If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to take a look and see what the reason edits got reverted. Obviously it’s stale enough now that I can’t ask anyone involved to not bite the newcomers or tell them why reversions they made may not be correct, but I’m still curious to see what kinds of edits by new editors commonly get reverted.

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.

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.