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Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but if the blobs in the pictures are car-sized, then Argentinians are three-meters tall. The modern internet really does provide constant practice in mild disappointment.

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The OP seems to be at the end of a long chain of broken telephone. The 19 February 2020 press release from the institute doing the dig doesn't say anything about cars [1]. The 21 February 2020 article in Metro [2] correctly states that glyptodonts could grow to the size of a VW Beetle, but leaves out that it's not this species of glyptodont and certainly not these specimens (it also incorrectly calls glyptodonts a genus; the specimens here are in the genus Glyptodon but the largest in the subfamily Glyptodontinae are Doedicurus clavicaudatus). The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

1. https://www.conicet.gov.ar/hallan-cuatro-gliptodontes-en-la-...

2. https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/21/ancient-armadillo-size-car-di...

> The mixing up of these specimens with the largest ones makes it into the headline.

Where were the editors in all of this? Did no one person look at both the headline and the photo?

> Where were the editors in all of this?

Their salaries were redirected to google's ad network employees.

The editors had OKRs that had key results driven by money metrics. What did you expect the result would be?

Good point. How could one possibly notice this if you have to ever consider money? It's impossible.

The editor is listed at the end of the article, and in an ideal world would have corrected the error by now, if not before publication. I know what role editors used to play in journalism, but I'm honestly not too sure what they do these days. Write headlines, I guess. Look for the little red squiggly lines beneath misspelled words, and occasionally stir themselves to correct them. And someone has to press 'publish' on the CMS, might as well be them.

I'm even less sure whether the traditional fact checking role still exists; it doesn't seem to!

I think it’s - “Write catchy headlines and get more page-views” now.

So the real title of the article was "Argentinian Farmer Finds Family of 20k-Year-Old Car-Sized Armadillos Purple Monkey Dishwasher"

In a few minutes of searching I couldn't find any report in English that doesn't have this error.

This says everything we need to know about how centralized the media is. There is zero diversity. A single source drowns out competition

The CAFE standards that incentivized today's massive cars are actually relatively recent - the original standards were enacted in 1975 AD. Twenty thousand years ago, this was a perfectly normal size for a car.

You might want to check those pictures. They’re barely bigger than the people squatting next to them. Cars have gotten a lot bigger but they were never THAT small.

How do you even know how big or small cars were 20k years ago?

And how big were hominoids 20k years ago?

Perhaps not car-sized but car-massed? Cars have lots of internal voids, like the passenger compartments. Most land animals not. A VW beetle weights about 800kg, IIRC. An animal with similar weight probably has smaller total volume.

I think you mean three deci-metres tall?

Or are you saying Argentina is really wild, and they have extra tiny cars and extra tall people? Like some sort of clown land?

Bit rough on the Argentinians.

More seriously - how does such a crap clickbait article filled with actual mistakes get all those upvotes? Do the hackers of hackernews merely "smash the like button" based on titles? Uh-oh!

No, GP was right in the comparison:

If that is a car-sized rock, then the person seems to be much larger than the car. In fact, it seems that if they laid down next to it, they'd be longer than the car-sized rock!

Given a car is probably >2 meters, and < 5 meters, that person must be even larger!

3m is the minimum integer meters to satisfy that.

Unless I'm missing a ninja edit in GP?

Ahhh I get it. Hah. No I think you're reading correctly and I was imagining the opposite, like they have tiny cars, so they must be tiny.

Wouldn't it be _hilarious_ if, years from now, it was proven that the reason for LLMs hallucinating was because they were mimicking the reality of what they were trained on. We could have had accurate AI all along!

The good ol' "Make a mistake so that everyone talks about it"

If Argentinians are three meters tall, then their cars must be even bigger than normal cars. So these armadillos are even bigger than car size... probs the size of a small truck!

A bit funny but in all honesty they don't specify what kind of car that is. Maybe they meant cart and the t got lost along the way in the noise.

They have pretty small cars in Argentina...

The car is perhaps a Citroën Ami.

It's hot-wheels car sized.

Fun fact, people thought giants (patagones) lived in our land, hence the Patagonia name. I blame Thor personally for their eradication, otherwise we may have been 3m tall.

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