descriptive summarization?

Kudos! I no longer have to deal with any of that, but I appreciate it’s been a problem and am glad you took action. Thank you!

Read the title. Thought this was going to be about people spraying Roundup on their lawns. How dare you trick me into reading an interesting piece on perverse market forces?!

What happens when there’s a risk a crop could fail? “It puts pressure on me to consider cheating, because I’m not so profitable that I can afford to lose even one.”

I didn’t realize the growers operated on such thin margins.

For each batch tested, the lab issues a certificate of analysis (CoA) with contaminant testing results and details about the product’s chemical composition. Products that fail may be remediated — moldy cannabis might be treated with ultraviolet light to kill the microbes, for example — or destroyed.

The fatal flaw in this system is that cannabis labs are paid by the producers, which creates a financial incentive for labs to falsify results

That’s the same issue we have with bonds getting triple-A ratings.

But following the rules often means losing a client, he said. “They’re just going to go to another lab who will do exactly what they want, even if they charge double the price.”

So, as in with bonds ratings, honest and scrupulous labs will go broke, leaving us with labs that give reassuring results for high THC potency or low pesticide contamination.

For example, surveys have found that 25 percent to 37 percent of Parkinson’s patients use cannabis to reduce symptoms such as tremor, stiffness, and pain. But research suggests that organophosphate pesticides, which are common contaminants in cannabis, may be linked to the onset or faster progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Well why aren’t their stricter rules?

Recently, state legislators killed a proposal to expand the list of pesticides that labs must test for from 13 to 60.

Dammit. I blame the stupid rhetoric on how ‘regulation stifles industry!’ for letting such bozos govern. We could have a government that didn’t allow businesses to poison their customers, but nooooo, the U.S. thinks poison is fine if it gets us fewer laws and less government. I want to hear people saying, “Regulations are written in blood. They exist because people were injured and killed without them.”

I like the positive note about Maryland towards the end , but it shouldn’t be so hard to get decent information.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a spider’s web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

I knew about the police getting access, but I missed that home insurance companies were checking properties with drones. I guess I don’t mind them spending their own money to send their own drones to verify properties they insure, but I agree that using MY camera that I bought to get info or sell MY data is at least unethical and ought to be illegal. It should be required that they get my explicit consent to that sort of thing for each instance of data collection or sale.

Who? The Senators? I think they’re genuinely interested in stopping the practice (obviously it also gets them good press, possibly even votes, but they coulda probably got cash if they did nothing).

I think the car companies are just trying to make money anywhere they can.

I wish I could remember the source, but it was about the Catholic Church in central/south America with the gist of, ‘When I was young, I hated The Church for building grand structures amid an impoverished population. I thought they could spend the money better on food, education, or so many other things – but as I got older, I realized that having a glorious space to share with the community was worthwhile in its own right.’

I’m not saying that the Olympics aren’t vulgar, but at least a lot of it is carried on network TV so it is more public than, say, the latest Marvel movie that not only costs a fortune, but also requires everyone fork over the cash if they want to see it.

I was NOT expecting that in an Olympic Opening Ceremony! Audio aside, it was really good.

I can’t argue with you on that.

I misinterpreted your first sentence… until I read the rest of your comment.

I thought you were saying null results shouldn’t be published. Hackles go up. Keep reading angrily. Ohhhh… ALL results should be publicly available! We’ll that’s very different!

I do have a nitpick, though: if the internet has taught us nothing else, it is that all kinds of scammers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, deniers, and exploiters will ALL post lies and disinformation in any unvetted space they can find. Somebody has got to do some curation and somebody has to pay them enough to ensure that work gets done.

If you’ve seen the original Blue Brothers movie, you’ve heard a snippet of ‘Hold On’ and another Sam & Dave hit, “Soul Man”. I’m told they were fantastic live but not so much in studio. Back in the 60s the chorus might as well be a porn quote given radio stations were squeamish about playing something so ‘explicit’, but the writers maintained it was simply about rushing back to song writing. HBO recently released a short documentary series about their original label, Stax which covers the big concert the label threw, WattStax. I recommend all of that as better than trying to hunt down random Sam & Dave songs.

I actually DO have some hope it will be rewritten, but I figure we know about it and maybe contact someone? https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/ ?

Could be worse. Could be an Elsevier site (Lancet, Cell, ScienceDirect, etc.).

Please read wonky news, vote, and tell your friends and neighbors about the stuff you learn about candidates. We get crappy government by voting for it. We could fix the government if we elected people who would write legislation to stop corruption, was there to fix roads and balance budgets rather than scream about triggering issues, and wanted to make a better rather than to simply ‘win’ no matter the price.

I heard a strange take on this story. I know someone whose spouse worked at that very school and has heard the gossip about the incident. While the hen clutch has been gossiping in private conversations rather than internet posts for the world to see, their speculations about the Principal are almost as slanderous – and have been for years.

Long story short: the hens felt this wouldn’t have happened if the Principal didn’t let the kids run amok and instead provided consistent disciple.