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And having a 0.3mg (300mcg) group - the dose many meticulous online self-experimenters have found sufficient, a mere 15% of their lowest-tested 2mg.

Would a headline "morning coffee found to cause stomach problems and anxiety" be reasonable, if the smallest dose tested was 7 cups – and that dosage fact was omitted from the attached abstract/story?


If people are complaining about Anthropic (on an only-vaguely related thread) rather than simply switching to a suitable competitor, then Anthropic clearly has some 'monopoly' power over the specific capabilities the complainer wants from them.


Not to argue the point but that statement isn’t logical, look at all the complaints about restaurants. Publicly complaining about something doesn’t require it be a monopoly.


Fable/Opus 4.8 outperform Codex 5.5 for me at the general architecture/refactoring/performance work I’m doing, to the point where it’s not worth using Codex. Codex will often spit out non idiomatic code that overcomplicates things.


I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.

But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]

It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.


It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?


Because honorary degrees are not credentials.


But that's obviously not a reason to treat them as a bad thing. It's also not entirely true ... he was awarded those honors because of the quality of his science journalism.

FWIW, I think @mapontosevenths is wrong to say that @gojomo's mention of the honorary degrees and being an OOC was "like they're a bad thing" ... their "But it's hard ..." indicates a conflict between those "credentials" and the typo that gojomo makes way too much a deal of.


So many people here have no idea how things work and are far more interested in virtue signaling over an error (and making spiteful downvotes) than in correcting it, so we get ignorant and intellectually dishonest rubbish like

> I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.

and

> how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?

I, OTOH, sent them a note and they quickly fixed the article. Errors like this "persist for months" simply because no one takes the time for such a simple action when they encounter an error ... I'm the only person among those who commented here who did so. And no, of course no one at the CBC or anywhere else spends their time rereading their months-old articles to see if some error made its way in.


I just wanted to say thanks for actually taking the time to make the situation better for everyone, rather than complaining.


And thank you ... I really appreciate that.


Because I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.

Even if some typo of 'malevolent' becoming 'benevolent' was how this error initially created – & I have my doubts! – how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?


Someone should look into the author and/or editor.

Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.


I got so caught up in that phrase I went rereading the plot summary of WOTW to check my memory. After than I had no interest in the article, assuming it had been written by AI.


War of the Worlds is culturally-prominent enough I doubt any commercial AI would make this same mistake (or let the error slip through, if they'd asked the AI to fact-check the article).


Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".

If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.

But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?


I can confidently say that nobody has ever confused The War of the Worlds with The Two Planets.


It's hard to take seriously someone who dismisses the (factually correct) content of a popular science article just because of a typo that has no bearing on that content.


Have you independently checked all the other allegedly "factually correct" info in this article, with other sources that are actually diligent in getting the details right? What's the incremental value of a news source where every detail that you don't already know might be very wrong?


Distillation done via bulk automated activity of fraudulent accounts, in violation of a terms-of-service, can reasonably be called a "an attack" – specifically a "distillation attack" – even though distillation itself isn't necessarily an "attack".

This is similar to how compromising an account through bulk automated trials of many passwords is reasonably called "an attack" – specifically a "dictionary attack" – even though using a dictionary is not itself an "attack".

You shouldn't need to smuggle your sympathies (for the tactic or perpetrators) or antipathies (for the target) into peculiar judgy language prescriptivism against common, understood usages.… that then label Reuters "complicit" for simply reporting Anthropic's claims accurately. That's what Reuters is supposed to do, in a story about a letter Anthropic wrote!


Labeling it as an attack is smuggling sympathies. It is not common; there are only a small number of people who even discuss the concept. A company buying a product with the intent to reverse engineer or copy its features is likewise not an attack; it's just normal competition that benefits society.


Twice a year, typically to see how fast my own submission is sinking into obscurity.


Smart guy but whoever eventually actually fixes X search will probably use AI coding assistance to do it.


I don't see how your example, The Browser (thebrowser.com), supports your argument that ad-hoc query-string additions are so prone-to-breaking that 3rd parties should ban them.

In fact, the example seems to suggest the opposite: a 17+ year successful paid subscription business – to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer! – receives enough "business value" from the practice, despite its failure modes, they don't want to stop. Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.

Seemingly, the practice works often enough, pleasing more destination sites than it angers, that "referral tracking" is not something "so minor".


> Improving their probe of the risk-of-failure was enough.

The point was it was dangerous in a way they didn't even realize was an issue, for a thin business rationale. Unless you are going to do thorough tests and understand the risk you are taking (which they did not, as evidenced by screwing it up systematically at scale for years), you should not be doing it.

And it's not obvious that they are correct in their tightened-up testing, because even if a link is correct at the time they test it, it could break at any time thereafter.

> to which you appear to be a generally-satisfied customer!

No matter what _X_ is, _X_ would have to be a pretty epic screwup to make a customer unsubscribe solely over that! I never claimed it was such a major epic screwup that it could do that. So that is an unreasonable criterion: "well, you didn't outright quit, so I guess it can't be that bad." Indeed, but I never said it was, and somewhat bad is still bad; I was in fact fairly annoyed by the random breakage, and at the margin, everything matters. If TB did a few other things, in sum, they could potentially convince me to let my subscription lapse. An annoyance here, a papercut here, and pretty soon a generally-satisfied customer is no longer so satisfied...


In fact, you usually can just send arbitrary query string parameters to a server - that's why the behavior is so common, and often useful.

Most sites don't mind or break, some sites get value from the behavior in ways hard to replicate in other ways – and those sites that don't like such additions can easily ignore them. And a few lines of code will work better than ineffectually appealing to manners, when the freedom of the web's form of hypertext, and protocols, gives the outlink authors full freedom to craft URLs (and thus requests) however they like.


Crafting outbound links with your own additions and handing them out to visitors to your site is similar to the practice of writing someone’s phone number on the door of a bathroom cubicle with ‘for a good time call:’ written above it.

You’re handing out someone elses’s contact details, but giving the person you hand them to a completely fabricated expectation for how the interaction will go.


Trying to boostrap some taboo against novel unpermissioned URL munging is silly prudishness.

Ensuring both sides of a hyperlink agree/consent was a design flaw that limited the uptake of pre-web hypertext systems. The web's laissez-faire approach demonstrated a looser coupling was far better for users, despite all the new failure modes.

Of course any site/server has the practical power free to treat inbound requests as rigorously (or harshly) as they want. But by the web's essential nature, it is equally part of the inherent range-of-freedom of outlink authors to craft their URLs (and thus the resulting requests) however they want. URLs are permissionless hyperlanguage, not the intellectual property of entities named therein.

Plenty of sites welcome such extra info, and those that don't want it can ignore it easily enough – including by just not caring enough about the undefined behavior/failures to do nothing.

Though, when a web publisher has naively deployed a system that's fragile with respect to unexpected query-string values, they should want to upgrade their thinking for robustness, via either conscious strictness or conscious permissiveness. Thereafter, their work will be ready for the real web, not a just some idealized sandbox where scolding unwanted behavior makes sense.


The context of when that previous experience - Heartland outsourcing to India – happened would be helpful. The 90s? The 00s? The 10s?


The link in the article that is right near the words you're talking about links to a wikipedia page that says the book is from 2005. So I conclude it was 2005 or soon after


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