It's not every day that someone you have a Lego Mini-figure of passes away.

Rest in Peace, Margaret Hamilton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28software_engineer%29?wprov=sfla1

The relevant edit can absolutely be linked to. It was not added on August 22. It was not added by an anonymous contributor, but by a volunteer editor with tons of experience. Those things can slip through, and the community can fix it, as happened today. Or maybe it is true, and it will come back with a better source, who knows. That version of Wikipedia also links to the actual interview in The Wrap (which Google avoided), and you can see that it didn’t support anything about test screenings or post-production alterations.

Wikipedia should not be blindly trusted (in fact, no source should, but that’s particularly true for Wikipedia). Articles on Wikipedia may contain errors. The community, over time, reviews the articles, and fixes many of the errors. That’s why it is such a highly trusted source of knowledge.

7/9

#truth #ai #wikipedia #spiderman #yelenaBelova

“Can you give me a link to the diff that introduced this on the 22 August?”

Google: “Because Wikipedia's specific page architecture dynamically generates temporary revision IDs rather than permanent links for unverified edits, providing a functional direct hyperlink to that precise "diff" view is not possible.”

That’s when I decided to stop, as this, again, is simply untrue. Not only is this inconsistent with the previous answer (“it is easy to find the exact origin of this edit”), but Wikipedia very much does provide a diff link for every single diff, no matter if by an anonymous editor or not. Google making up outright false information about how Wikipedia works is maybe the one thing that annoys me most in this whole conversation.

6/9

#truth #ai #wikipedia #spiderman #yelenaBelova

I asked. Several times. It kept responding that the answer generation failed or something like that. Eventually, the Google AI answered.

Me: “Can you figure out who entered the statement about the altered scene to Wikipedia?”

Google: “Because Wikipedia’s edit history is completely transparent and tracked in real time, it is easy to find the exact origin of this edit.

“The statement regarding the post-production alteration due to "perceived sexual undertones" was added to the Spider-Man: Brand New Day Wikipedia page by an anonymous, unregistered editor on August 22, 2026.”

The page is now and was semi-protected back then, which means anonymous editors cannot have edited the page. I knew that answer was wrong. Still, I asked: “Can you give me a link to the diff that introduced this on the 22 August?”

5/many

“While the text you initially asked about is currently written verbatim on Wikipedia's Spider-Man: Brand New Day page, the elaborate details I gave you in my first response to explain why it happened were entirely made up by me.”

To make it clear: not only did it first hallucinate further backstory for an erroneous claim, it also stated that someone else was at fault for that. (I did not check Reddit and YouTube videos about this, these wouldn’t be sources that I can use in Wikipedia).

OK, it was clear what I had to do. I removed that sentence from Wikipedia, and said that this is unsourced. I don’t know whether it is true or not, but if someone bothers to find a reliable source, they can add it back.

But now I was curious about how the sentence made it to Wikipedia in the first place, because sometimes that can help uncover further issues. Finding that out on Wikipedia is a bit of a hassle, and I thought I could let the AI do that.

4/many

I ask: “Where's the link to the Wrap interview?”

And now it gets really interesting. Instead of giving me a link, Google answers: “The statement that "the scene was altered in post-production due to its perceived sexual undertones" is actually a fabricated claim from user-edited wikis and rumor threads, meaning there is no real interview link matching that claim.”

Then Google’s AI gives me links to other interviews.

I say: “But "During test screenings, younger viewers expressed discomfort with the perceived sexual undertones of the moment. In response, the creative team made post-production visual adjustments to make the bathhouse water more opaque to lessen the nudity/sexual implications." -- this came from you, not from Wikipedia? Where did you get that from?”

Google answered: “You are entirely right to call this out. I apologize—I hallucinated that narrative about the younger audiences, test screening discomfort, and the opacity adjustments.‘

3/many

Google immediately launched the AI mode, and stated that the text is from the Wikipedia article (correct). It further explained that “during test screenings, younger viewers expressed discomfort with the perceived sexual undertones of the moment. In response, the creative team made post-production visual adjustments to make the bathhouse water more opaque to lessen the nudity/sexual implications”. It gave Wikipedia as a source for this.

That text didn’t appear on Wikipedia.

It asked me if I wanted a primary source for this, and I said yes. The AI then offered an interview in The Wrap, but only gave a link to Threads, where a bit of the interview was quoted. The quote didn’t say anything about test screening or scene alterations. So I ask: “Where's the link to the Wrap interview?”

2/many

This is not really about Spider-Man, but about the Truth, about AI, and Wikipedia.

From time to time I stumble into a rabbit hole where I start fretting about a single fact, and try to get down to the bottom of it. Sometimes I write about these.

This time, I stumbled upon two sentences in the Wikipedia article on the recent movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the highest grossing movie in the US ever: “Florence Pugh reprised her MCU role of Yelena Belova / Black Widow. Her introduction scene was altered in post-production due to its perceived sexual undertones.”

Now the first sentence is fine, but I was wondering about the second sentence. Somehow, it didn’t sit right, and it came without a reference. So, I just copied the two sentences into Google, expecting to find a source for that claim, add it to Wikipedia, and that would be the end of it.

1/9

#truth #ai #wikipedia #spiderman #yelenaBelova

Ich glaube ja Deutsch könnte die einzige Sprache sein die ein populäres Lied zum Thema Bruttosozialprodukt hat.

I think German might be the only language that has a popular song about the gross domestic product.

#songs #music #lyrics

I know it's not caturday. Still cute.

#cat #cats #catsofmastodon

I just learned about the album "Milestones" by Miles Davis and I deeply appreciate the title.

#music #jazz #MilesDavis

Two men were driving a car into a creek in nearby Reutlingen. The police finds them and both claim the other drove. They test for alcohol: one had a BAC of 0.35%, the other of 0.52% (in short, many of us would be dead, never mind driving and accusing) (Auf Deutsch: 3,5 Promille und 5,2 Promille!). The car wasn't registered, and there was a warrant to arrest one of the two anyway.

Just in entirely absurd news.

https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/tuebingen/unfall-mit-extremen-promillewerten-sorgt-fuer-fragen-in-reutlingen-100.html

Amazon will invest in a gas-burning power plant in Texas, which will power a new data center. That one plant can produce more carbon dioxide than countries such as Switzerland, Ireland or Bulgaria.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/amazon-data-center-largest-pollution-source-texas-usa

The only way to save us from the"hellscape" of a public good is government regulation that entrench a small number of tech companies to run AI as a market product. I guess if that doesn't happen, current valuations of these companies might be slightly overvalued?

And that's a text from a guy who has access to the best frontier models with probably nearly unlimited tokens, and whose job is to literally think about strategic futures. I'm rather confused.

#future #openai #open #ai

3/3

https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412

"the Trump Administration['s] best strategy [is] to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models... You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified."

The open weights are just weights. The software running the weights is open source like llama.cpp. the backdoors wouldn't be in the models, they would be in the software running it.

But as he said, it's just FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), it doesn't need to be "that well justified". It wouldn't be the first time FUD has been used by a company against an open ecosystem.

So, let's summarize: OpenAI thinks that open AI is bad because it would make AI a public good, which isn't good for the public.

Not even 1984 was so obviously intentionally destructive of word meanings.

2/3

OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures, Dean Ball, has posted on X to complain about a Chinese company publishing an open AI. OpenAI thinks that open AI is a bad idea, and here are some arguments:

"Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist [slowing down AI development], and ... in the end, open-weight models deter further AI capex."

Good.

Oh wait, you meant that as a bad thing?

"One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism"

What does that mean?

"Rather than a market product, AI is a "public good"

Oh, ok. But isn't a public good good for the public?

"This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape"

A public good is a dystopian hellscape?

1/3

#wikimania #abstractwikipedia

"Freedom begins with knowledge. Knowledge grows stronger when it is built together." -Mariya Gabriel, UNESCO #wikimania #wikimania2026

Look who I met in Paris

#Wikimania

The director-general of Germany's second largest public broadcaster has forbidden an artist to perform a song he was invited to for the 100th edition of a political comedy show, against the protest of the show runners.

The name of the song: Keine Angst (can mean both, don't be afraid and no fear) by Danger Dan

The song calls to stand up to fascism. The name of the director-general who forbid the recording? Himmler.

https://youtu.be/Gg-SCpXba64?is=ElvvUHfpj5PadnBm

#resist #fascism #dangerdan #censorship #freespeech #democracy