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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2024

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  • Both things are technically true: the article is primarily made up of content literally written by the company or people contracted by them for PR purposes, and it is a Good Article (Wikipedia jargon for having passed a review of certain quality standards around writing, coverage and sourcing, but not the higher standard required to be classed as a Featured Article).

    How much of a problem this is probably depends on the subject. Does Juniper Networks have any bad practices which the article omits because the people who researched it (i.e. Juniper Networks) didn’t think they needed to go in the article? You’d basically need an independent observer to research anything that potentially should be in the article but isn’t there, but how many people that aren’t getting paid are invested in researching a corporate networking business?

    There’s absolutely merit to Wikipedia having articles that are written by people paid to write them by their subjects, because a lot of it would otherwise be missing from Wikipedia entirely. But it’s also good to know that many articles are not necessarily written by impartial authors.




  • The Leta FAQ confirms this:

    Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.

    Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.

    Searching by proxy in other words.





  • I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn’t actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was “too woke”. They didn’t really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as “Don’t recommend” because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don’t know for certain that that’s why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.