qjack

The problem is the infinite other literature produced along the way. It doesn't work to throw more monkeys at the problem of verification, and checking for matches against existing Shakespeare plays is cheating.

On the contrary, formal logic probably played a much smaller role than the rest of their philosophy degree in their success. Most programmers deal equally with philosophical problems as they do technical problems: what components should exist, what the boundary between those components should be, how those edges should be described. These are not "engineering" problems, nor are they the type of philosophical problems that more formalized philosophy (which your reply seems to overweight) are good at solving.

The most dumbfounding thing in all of this is the number of people interacting directly with Jimmy Wales on twitter and having no sense for how wikipedia works or why. It should not be surprising that a company webpage or even the CEO confirming the fact are insufficient sources. If wikipedia did accept this, they would just be a place for people to make self-reported baseless claims. There's already a place for that, and it's the platform they're responding on.

Wikipedia has an interesting problem. How do you build a large corpus of generally true information? Their solution is to offload the work of verification to journalists and academics, who are held liable for their statements by the institutions they work within. This is why wikipedia is a tertiary source. Primary sources originate some piece of information, secondary sources investigate and verify those primary sources (verify being "they said that" not "it really happened"), and tertiary sources aggregate trusted secondary sources. All of the people in the twitter thread (excluding Jimmy himself, of course) seem completely unaware in this system, and while I too would be interested in more "modern" approaches, don't seem to have thought about this problem at all.

Journalism and academia are both on the back foot these days, and it seems unlikely that we will see a big resurgence in funding for either. Without them, I don't see how wikipedia can continue to outsource the problem of verification.

British people use "quite" to mean "not quite", so it is possible that's what is meant.

(Reading the paragraph over though, I don't think this is the case here.)

Anthropic has been trying to win the developer marketshare, and has been quite successful with Claude Code. While I understand the argument that this acquisition is to protect their usage in CC or even just to acquire the team, I do hope that part of their goal is to use this to strengthen their brand. Being good stewards of open source projects is a huge part of how positively I view a company.

While I agree with you broadly, remember that those that employ you don't have those skills either. They accept that they are ceding control of the details and trust us to make those decisions or ask clarifying questions (LLMs are getting better at those things too). Vibe coders are clients seeking an alternative, not developers.

> One implication would be to skip college, take that money and invest it in the stock market. Why invest in labor when capital grows faster? Although I don't think anyone with this mindset would offer that advice, but rather dwell in the fact that they are laborers by design with no hope of ever breaking that.

As a student, I could easily get a loan to cover my tuition, but the bank would not let me barrow money to gamble in the stock market. Even if they would, I of course would have also not taken that route. There were experiences I was interested in having and things I was interested in learning.

Now I have the capital to invest and those experiences I sought, but I still don't wish to become a capitalist or a landlord or a day trader. I take great pride in being a labourer.