from the wipe-your-feet-at-the-door dept.
EDIT: Struck a naught word -- NCommander
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It all started when Slashdot rolled out a new, "Beta" user interface that was soundly disliked. In response, they posted a story calling us an "audience". That did not go over well. At all. Cries of "Buck Feta" were numerous and frequent. Then came a call for a Slashdot boycott — a "Slashcott" — scheduled for the week of February 10-17, 2014.
While the Slashcott was going on, a handful of intrepid nerds pulled down the (horribly out-of-date and unmaintained) open source code dump of Slashcode, forked it, and started whacking it into shape. This culminated in our announcement to the world: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!.
Now, one could argue as to the exact date of our birth. Was it when the domain "soylentnews.org" was first registered? (2014-02-09T01:50:26Z) How about when the first user was registered to the site? (2014-02-12 06:00:06 "NCommander") Or, maybe, the very first story posted to the site? Welcome Testers ... (2014.02.11 21:28 UTC)
Whichever one of those you choose, it has now been at least FIVE years...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SOYLENTNEWS!
We've had hiccups along the way. Even the past year was not problem-free. Server reboots so our hosting provider, Linode, could roll out mitigations for the Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Then we had a server go down on us, which would not be such a big deal except its mirror had already predeceased it, so there was nothing to fail over to. A couple more issues with Apache and nginx going off to who-knows-where and needing to be restarted. Oh, and our mailserver decided to stop serving mail at one point, too. There may have been another couple of things which happened over the past year that escape me at the moment, but all-in-all I would like to think we are doing a pretty good job of keeping things up and running. Consider we are an entirely volunteer organization. Consider, too, that big-named sites like Wells Fargo, TSB, Google, and others all had site-wide outages in one or more of their services... we've got a good group here and it has been truly a wonderful experience to be a part of what keeps this site running.
A quick look around the site reveals some interesting statistics. That by week's end, we will have posted our 26,000th story. To that, add the 3,994 journal entries that have been posted by the community. We had our 800,000th comment posted to the site just this week. We have had, however, comparatively few comment moderations: ~540,000. We have 7,333 registered users, too!
Many thanks are in order to those who have helped keep everything up and running. Not just the sysops who lurk in the background, but also those of you who have opened your wallets and bought the subscriptions which pay the server bills, domain registrations, as well as the CPA for filing taxes, and the like.
Ultimately, this site is for you, the community. We focus stories on those which have a technical or science (aka nerd) angle with maybe a politically oriented story posted each day. And an occasional story that looks like it might engender discussion. There are plenty of other sites which cater to the latest Hollywood gossip, political machinations, recipes, and cat pictures... you've made it clear you don't want a bunch of that here. Submit stories. Make journal entries. Post and moderate comments.
Yes, we have had many accomplishments over these years, but we know nothing is perfect. We are overdue for a site upgrade, but it's likely nothing much will happen for a few months until TheMightyBuzzard can free up some of his time to work on it. Complaining is easy, but if you have concrete suggestions on what we could do better and how we might go about it, we can't promise anything (one man's drink is another man's poison), but we will certainly give it serious consideration.
If you should run into an issue with the site, please send details to admin (at) soylentnews.org noting the date/time/timezone and any data you can provide to help us locate and isolate the problem. That includes the URL for the story or journal entry. If it pertains to a comment, then please also include a link to that, as well. (That is the link under the (#nnnnn) in the comment header). Fair warning: complaining in the comments about a story not being accepted or about the moderation of one of your comments is generally off-topic and often moderated that way. Exception: if you accidentally modded a comment as spam, or have had a comment of yours moderated as spam that you think is incorrect, please send an e-mail to the admin address and we will take a look at it. We are running a bit lean on staff ATM with several of us in the midst of time-consuming things IRL, so please be patient.
Thank you.
Thanks to all of you who have helped this site persevere all these years!
The tool could let teachers spot plagiarism or help social media platforms fight disinformation bots:
Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we're reading are written by a human or not.
These "watermarks" are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language models, they could help prevent some of the problems that these models have already caused.
For example, since OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT was launched in November, students have already started cheating by using it to write essays for them. News website CNET has used ChatGPT to write articles, only to have to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Building the watermarking approach into such systems before they're released could help address such problems.
In studies, these watermarks have already been used to identify AI-generated text with near certainty. Researchers at the University of Maryland, for example, were able to spot text created by Meta's open-source language model, OPT-6.7B, using a detection algorithm they built. The work is described in a paper that's yet to be peer-reviewed, and the code will be available for free around February 15.
[...] There are limitations to this new method, however. Watermarking only works if it is embedded in the large language model by its creators right from the beginning. Although OpenAI is reputedly working on methods to detect AI-generated text, including watermarks, the research remains highly secretive. The company doesn't tend to give external parties much information about how ChatGPT works or was trained, much less access to tinker with it. OpenAI didn't immediately respond to our request for comment.
Related:
- BuzzFeed Preps AI-Written Content While CNET Fumbles
- Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'
- ChatGPT Arrives in the Academic World
- OpenAI's New ChatGPT Bot: 10 "Dangerous" Things it's Capable of
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by mattie_p on Thursday February 13 2014, @04:29AM
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Dopefish on Thursday February 13 2014, @04:47AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2014, @05:00AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CowboyTeal on Thursday February 13 2014, @04:56AM
Getting siggy with it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by mattie_p on Thursday February 13 2014, @04:58AM
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 13 2014, @05:26AM
You sure about that?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by FrogBlast on Thursday February 13 2014, @05:33AM
(Score: 1) by FrogBlast on Friday February 14 2014, @06:53AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2014, @06:05AM
(Score: 1) by AudioGuy on Thursday February 13 2014, @06:25AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2014, @04:50AM
yeah there is some things to be adjusted in the stylesheets, for example the
[Reply to This] -links could be a bit less eye-stealing visible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16 2014, @04:56AM
the system should not add blank lines before&after comments when submitted as Plain Old Text either
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 24 2014, @04:17AM
I want to know if Soylent news will permit Unicode text. The following is a five-verse extract of introduction of the poem Mednyj Vsadnik; by A. S. Pushkin (in Russian):
По оживлённым берегам
Громады Ñтройные теÑнÑÑ‚ÑÑ
Дворцов и башен; корабли
Толпой Ñо вÑех концов земли
К богатым приÑтанÑм ÑтремÑÑ‚ÑÑ;
(Score: 1) by neagix on Thursday February 13 2014, @06:35AM
(Score: 1) by Maow on Thursday February 13 2014, @09:10AM
There's a smilie-face next to each and every commenter's name - indicating friend / foe type of relationship.
Gah, I hate those things - yellow laser pointers aiming at my eyes from the pages - all the pages...
(I know it's not an actual smiling face, but it has the same annoyance level.)
(Score: 1) by Maow on Thursday February 13 2014, @09:14AM
Also notice that Plain Old Text comment style in user prefs doesn't "stick", I keep getting HTML Formatted when making a comment or reloading User Prefs page.
During the composition of a comment, I can set Plain Old Text and it works.
(Score: 1) by Covalent on Friday February 14 2014, @05:31PM
Agreed. We want old school...but not THAT old school.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 1) by unitron on Sunday February 16 2014, @02:11AM
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 1) by Covalent on Sunday February 16 2014, @03:53AM
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 1) by janrinok on Friday February 14 2014, @08:44PM
Just checking how the text formatting works.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by ragequit on Friday February 14 2014, @08:50PM
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 1) by ragequit on Friday February 14 2014, @08:56PM
they
like
the ones in Skype [skype.com]. lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter lameness filter
The above views are fabricated for your reading pleasure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 12 2014, @04:07PM
8ETSOp xeblxagfjkia [xeblxagfjkia.com], [url=http://kkstfuozulln.com/]kkstfuozulln[/url], [link=http://ruymgepsslun.com/]ruymgepsslun[/link], http://nzteirqurghb.com/ [nzteirqurghb.com]
(Score: 1) by paulej72 on Sunday February 16 2014, @05:11PM
This is a test
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 1) by richardboegli on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:02AM
so is this