RoadTrain

An article brought to you by the leading authority on cutting-edge computer science research: BBC.

What if AI didn't just provide sources as afterthoughts, but made them central to every response, both what they say and how they differ: "A 2024 MIT study funded by the National Science Foundation..." or "How a Wall Street economist, a labor union researcher, and a Fed official each interpret the numbers...". Even this basic sourcing adds essential context.

Yes, this would be an improvement. Gemini Pro does this in Deep Research reports, and I appreciate it. But since you can’t be certain that what follows are actual findings of the study or source referenced, the value of the citation is still relatively low. You would still manually have to look up the sources to confirm the information. And this paragraph a bit further up shows why that is a problem:

But for me, the real concern isn't whether AI skews left or right, it’s seeing my teenagers use AI for everything from homework to news without ever questioning where the information comes from.

This is also the biggest concern for me, if not only centred on teenagers. Yes, showing sources is good. But if people rarely check them, this alone isn’t enough to improve the quality of the information people obtain and retain from LLMs.

I realised that about a minute after I posted, so I deleted my commented right away :)

I use GroundNews. Their biggest value to me is that I can see the headlines for the same coverage from different sources before I read the text. A lot of times this alone is enough to tell me if there is actual content there or just speculation/alarmism. If I do decide to read the content, it's a very easy way to get a few different perspectives on the same matter, and over time I start to recognise patterns in the reporting styles even when I'm not reading through GroundNews.

Another useful feature is that you can past an article link or headline and it will show you alternative sources for the same coverage. This doesn't always find useful alternatives, but it's a simple, easy way to do basic fact-checking.

And while most people here might not appreciate it, when they aggregate multiple sources, they also have an LLM-written summary of the content of the articles. The (somewhat ironic) thing about these summaries is that often they're the least biased, most factual interpretation of the news compared to all the sources covering it. This is because the summaries are generated from all the content, so when the LLM finds weak or contrasting information, it won't report it as a fact; when most of the sources agree, then it will summarise the conclusion. This is an excellent use for LLM in my opinion, but you can use GroundNews perfectly fine without it.

the guardian, a respectable centre-left news organisation

I don't think The Guardian hasn't been centre for at least 5 years now. It used to be a respectable news origanisation, yes, but today the vast majority of their articles are opinions posts.

Could you give some examples of things that worked for you on Windows but couldn't port over to Linux? I'm interested if they're related more to games or just using Linux in general.

You should be happy. Mine does a different thing every time, no matter the setting...

Picocrypt is a very small (hence Pico), very simple, yet very secure encryption tool that you can use to protect your files. It's designed to be the go-to tool for file encryption, with a focus on security, simplicity, and reliability.

Thanks! I think that's the closest to what I was looking for, and it links to a couple more in the sidebar.

There are plenty of us technical folks here who have relevant experience and are keen on chatting, but lemmy is definitely generally pretty anti-ai.

I find this, too. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to start a thread and then a lot of good comments will be contributed!

How does GLM 4.5 (Air or regular) compare to more popular models? I picked its answer once on LMArena, but that's all my encounters with it.

I would say it’s slightly more than this: The vast majority of Lemmy is comprised of only a few things—politics, tech, memes—and it’s hard to find discussions or opinions about almost everything else. The main value of reddit to me is (was?) that you could find a lot of input from people involved in a wide variety of fields, from niche hobbies to more generic areas of interest like history, philosophy, or medicine.

I’ve actually found that there are people on Lemmy with similar levels of expertise, and they’re willing to share it just as well, but they have fewer opportunities to do so, because very few threads get posted outside the 3 main topics. Several times I’ve come across useful and interesting insight, but it was in the comments of posts only vaguely related, so it would have been difficult to find intentionally if I hadn’t run into it.

So, perhaps, this is what could improve Lemmy: starting more discussions about different topics. Perhaps this will attract more people to read them, which might attract more people to post.