For a solid 10 seconds, I was transported to a reality where Mozilla shunted development of Rust off to some random studio who were removing Linux support because it wasn’t in the budget.

Get that first week of Macroecon 101 shit out of here before I go into outrage withdrawal.

resist corporate bullshit by spitting in their face.

“Resist corporate bullshit by eschewing the free, non-corporate option – which, because it’s open, gets better the more people use it – in favor of continuing to use the exact same corporate product but with an abstruse, hacky workaround that 0.001% of the userbase will use and will probably be plugged by this time next week. That’ll show those corpo fucks who’s boss. ✊Ⓐ”

There’s only so much incessant bitching I can hear about dark patterns, intrusive automatic updates, shoehorned-in and useless AI, zero user choice, planned obsolesence, and being blindsided by enshittification before I say “just try using the free thing that doesn’t have those problems”.

“I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas.” If you have to for work or something, though, I totally get it and encourage the bitching.

I guess they think they’re a Homestuck troll.

It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.

So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.

Basically, if I’m not flat-ass broke, I’m paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what’s the page yield? 430. I’m still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I’m so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.

They struggled to deliver their ambitious mainline Linux phone on time during Covid yes, but they eventually delivered.

And for the people who requested refunds who waited months if not never received them? Despite them moving back their timeline literal years with repeated delays? I don’t care what challenges they faced; they knowingly took people’s money and refused to give it back to them when they couldn’t deliver. It’s their responsibility to be prepared for challenges. And in some extreme edge case where they couldn’t have been prepared, it’s their responsibility to be transparent about that to the people who gave them over a million dollars (let alone purchased the product after the Kickstarter was finished). I suppose too that the pandemic affected Purism in January 2019 when they were supposed to deliver their product?

The fact that they did is a huge win for the mobile Linux ecosystem becoming a real contender just when we need it.

The Librem 5 is not a contender for shit. It’s so overpriced that it can only be successfully marketed to people who care so deeply about their privacy that they’re willing to use an inconvenient mobile OS, get completely boned on hardware specs, and deal with a company notorious for fucking over its customers. Purism’s behavior is a fucking embarrassment to the Linux ecosystem.

NXP i.MX family debuted in 2013; Intel i7 family in 2008. Their phone uses a 2017 i.MX 8M Quad, the same year they crowdfunded their phone.

That CPU is based on the ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-M4, launched in 2012 and 2009, respectively.

2017 i7 computers are equally not from 2008…

When I say “2013”, I’m not talking about the debut year of i.MX. I’m talking about the fact that you can compare this phone side-by-side with a Galaxy S4 or S5. 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of eMMC storage, a 720 x 1440p IPS display, no NFC, USB 3.0, an 8/13 MP front/back camera (which they inexplicably call “Mpx”; good job, guys), 802.11n Wi-Fi, no waterproofing, and a shitty-ass i.MX 8M CPU. I still remember watching a trailer for the Librem 5’s continuing development, and as they were scrolling through a web browser, it was noticeably stuttering. This was years and years ago; I can’t even imagine it today.

It still today remains one of the best ARM processors with open source drivers without an integrated baseband. It means basically any flavour of Linux can install on the device, with a significant layer of protection from carrier conduited attacks. Other modules have similar tradeoffs between performance and interoperability/security.

I do not give even the slightest inkling of a shit try to confirm or deny this, so I’m just going to assume it’s 100% true, because it’s not relevant to the point that the spec is absolute trash and being sold for $800. If you are not absolutely married to privacy, this is not a sellable product in 2025.

Want better specs? We either need SoC companies to release more of their drivers open source, or more people to patiently reverse engineer closed source ones.

Actually, if I want better specs, I’m just going to go out and buy a phone that isn’t from Purism. It really sucks that it’s not open, private hardware, but Purism is such a scummy company that so wantonly fucks over their customers that I wouldn’t touch the Librem 5 even if I could justify spending $800 for that spec just for privacy’s sake.

Purism scams their customers left, right, and center and have for effectively their entire existence. They should not be trusted, and their phone specs are basically from 2013 sold for $800.

• Scam (Louis Rossmann)
• Scam
• Scammy
• Scam
• These specs for $800

So even if you’re idealistic enough to pay $800 for a phone that’d be in a landfill if it didn’t have hardware privacy features, Purism will take that trust you have in them and screw you over – delay you for as long as they need to/can/want with no recourse for a refund outside of maybe the courts. After which you hope you either get a functioning product or get good luck with a disorganized, opaque, scumfuck company like that.

You’re hereby invited to /c/vegan, as you appear to be a Northern Hemisphere vegan.

The short answer is that I really, really suggest you try other things before trying to create your first article. This isn’t just me; every experienced editor will tell you that creating a new article is one of the hardest things any editor can do, let alone a newer one. It’s why the task center lists it as being appropriate for “advanced editors”. Finding an existing article which interests you and then polishing and expanding it is almost always more rewarding, more useful, easier, and less stressful than creating an article from scratch. And if creating articles sounds appealing, expanding existing stub articles is great experience for that.

The long answer is “you can”, but it’s really hard:

• New editors are subject to Articles for Creation, or AfC, when creating an article. The article sits in a draft state until the editor flags it for review. The backlog is very long, and while reviewers can go in any order they want, they usually prioritize the oldest articles out of fairness and because most AfC submissions are about equal in urgency and time consumption. “Months” is the expected waiting time.
• If you’re not using the English Wikipedia, you can try translating over a well-established article from English. There’s no rule that says sources have to be in the language of the Wikipedia they’re on, although it’s still considered a big plus if sources are in the same language. You’d have to keep in mind that the target language may have standards not followed on the English Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia’s notability guidelines are predicated on you understanding other policies and guidelines like “reliable sources” and “independent sources”. They’re also intentionally fuzzy so people don’t play lawyer and follow the exact letter without considering the spirit of the guideline.
• The English Wikipedia currently has over 7 million articles. There are still a lot of missing articles (mostly in taxonomy, where notability is almost guaranteed), but you really need to know where to look.
• When choosing an article subject, it’s extremely important to avoid COI.
• Assuming you have a subject you think meets criteria, now you have to go out and find reliable, independent sources with substantial coverage of the subject to confirm your hypothesis.
• Now you need to start the article, and you need to do this in a manner which:
  • Is verifiable (all claims are cited)
  • Is not original research (i.e. nothing you say can be based on “because I know it”)
  • Is reliable (all citations are to reliable sources)
  • Is neutral (you’ve minimized bias as much as you can, let the sources speak for themselves, and made sure your source selection isn’t biased)
  • Is stylistically correct (there’s a manual of style, but just use your best judgment, and small mistakes can be copy-edited out by people familiar with style guidelines)
• If the article is nominated for deletion, you have to keep your cool and argue based solely on guidelines (not on perceived importance of the subject) that the article should be kept.
• New articles are almost always given more scrutiny than articles which have been around; this isn’t a cultural problem as much as it is a heuristic one.
• An article deleted feels much more personal than edits reverted (despite the fact that subject notability is 100% out of your control).

Some of these apply to normal editing too, but working within an article others have worked on and might be willing to help with is vastly easier than building one from scratch. If you want specific help in picking out, say, an article to try editing and are on the English Wikipedia, I have no problem acting like bowling bumpers if you’re afraid your edits won’t meet standards.

Ratchet: “I’ll just call you… ***** for short.”

I’m going to write this from the perspective of the English Wikipedia, but most specifics should have some analog in other Wikipedias. By “contribute to new articles”, do you mean create new articles, contribute to articles which are new that you come across, or contribute to articles which you haven’t before (thus “new to you”)? Asking because the first one has a very different – much more complicated – answer from the other two.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c31hk/unidan_gets_mad_about_crows_and_jackdaws_in_an/

Is it possible that this is an effort to steal work from Wikipedia editors to get you to train their AI models?

I can’t definitively say “no”, but I’ve seen no evidence of this at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan

So Wikipedia has three methods for deleting an article:

• Proposed deletion (PROD): An editor tags an article explaining why they think it should be uncontroversially deleted. After seven days, an administrator will take a look and decide if they agree. Proposed deletion of an article can only be done once, even this can be removed by anyone passing by who disagrees with it, and an article deleted via PROD can be recreated at any time.
• Articles for deletion (AfD): A discussion is held to delete an article. Pretty much always, this is about the subject’s notability. After the discussion (a week by default), a closer (almost always an administrator, especially for contentious discussions) will evaluate the merits of the arguments made and see if a consensus has been reached to e.g. delete, keep, redirect, or merge. Articles deleted via discussion cannot be recreated until they’ve satisfied the concerns of said discussion, else they can be summarily re-deleted.
• Speedy deletion: An article is so fundamentally flawed that it should be summarily deleted at best or needs to be deleted as soon as possible at worst. The nominating editor will choose one or more of the criteria for speedy deletion (CSD), and an administrator will delete the article if they agree. Like a PROD, articles deleted this way can be recreated at any time.

This new criterion has nothing to do with preempting the kind of trust building you described. The editor who made it will not be treated any differently than without this criterion. It’s there so editors don’t have to deal with the bullshit asymmetry principle and comb through everything to make sure it’s verifiable. Sometimes editors will make these LLM-generated articles because they think they’re helping but don’t know how to do it themselves, sometimes it’s for some bizarre agenda (e.g. there’s a sockpuppet editor who’s been occasionally popping up trying to push articles generated by an LLM about the Afghan–Mughal Wars), but whatever the reason, it just does nothing but waste other editors’ time and can be effectively considered unverified. All this criterion does is expedite the process of purging their bullshit.

I’d argue meticulously building trust to push an agenda isn’t a prevalent problem on Wikipedia, but that’s a very different discussion.

So far, I haven’t seen all that many, and the ones that are are very obvious like a very glossy crab at the beach wearing a Santa Claus hat. I definitely have yet to see one that’s undisclosed, let alone actively disguising itself. I also have yet to see someone try using an AI-generated image on Wikipedia. The process of disclaiming generative AI usage is trivialized in the upload process with an obvious checkbox, so the only incentive not to is straight-up lying.

I can’t say how much this will be an issue in the future or what good steps are to finding and eliminating it should it become one.

If anyone has specific questions about this, let me know, and I can probably answer them. Hopefully I can be to Lemmy and Wikimedia what Unidan was to Reddit and ecology before he crashed out over jackdaws and got exposed for vote fraud.

Flip Windows and macOS and I think the meme works again.

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?