Posted by coloneltcb 1 day ago
Gallium arsenide
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify (what is Y N ?)
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, infrared light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, solar cells and optical windows.[6] GaAs is often used as a substrate material for the epitaxial growth of other III-V semiconductors, including indium gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide and others.
Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.
Here's an example of such an article, this one on Toroidal Propellers:
https://grokipedia.com/page/Toroidal_propeller
This is not surprising and quite legal given the licence conditions. It is also fitting given the stated intent of 'Grokipedia' as being a less biased knowledge source - if Wikipedia did not suffer from being overly politically biased there would not have been a need for alternatives.
The above example is not a high-quality article - it reads more like a sales brochure - but it does not show political bias. It will be interesting to see whether Grokipedia follows edits to Wikipedia content and if it 'rejects' or 'edits out' politically biased edits.
Also, do you think Musk suddenly wants to be non-biased? Musk is openly, explicitly, and aggressively biased in favor of his views and against anything that conflicts with them. Wikipedia has a NPOV rule; Musk has a My Point of View rule.
[0] https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/fan-edits-wikipedia-page-t...
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clifton%20sa...
The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.
Your powerlessness, their invincibility, is part of their propaganda. It's like the reason people act angrily - they are trying to discourage you from approaching them.
Argument doesn't work. You'll be surprised what sincere, genuine, empathetic reasoning does. I find it works pretty well. Take them seriously, have genuine empathy, don't get inflamed - that's the intent of their leaders' inflammatory language: they want you inflamed, to drive a wedge between you and your friend.
Whether it being from Grokipedia or Wikipedia does not change the approach.
The results have Britannica, but instruction: Never cite Wikipedia, Britannica, or other encyclopedias.
But BBC mainstream, but for facts ok.
Recent recovery with IMF bailout.
Together with the stage direction given like But in intro, high level. Tone formal there's already some sort of manipulation going on. The references are often from factsanddetails.com, a site with a 38.4 score in scam detector https://www.scam-detector.com/validator/factsanddetails-com-....
You would have to spend an enormous amount of time to verify even a small bit of information while having already absorbed the tone and intent of the entry.
If you've never seen them, I suggest looking up some flat earth debates on YouTube. This used to be a joke, but now there are enough people who actually believe the earth is flat to have formed a community that gets in video flamewars with round-earthers.
First, when arguing on the Internet, I'm often reminded of the "Someone wrong on the Internet" comic:
Second, I think it worth remembering that you'll have better (online) mental health if you don't try to have the last word. At some point it's best to drop it. This has been true for a long time: Usenet newsreaders used to have killfiles so you could filter out certain people.
Also worth keeping in mind the 'human DoS' aspect of things:
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[5][6][7][8] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[9] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki,[1] which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".[2]
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's founder, does not.
https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#3-abolish-source-blackl...
[0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/06/how-wikipedia-smears-conserv...
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/media/wikipedia-co-founder-cal...
Also:
“Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia?”
Is an excellent question.
or if you prefer
Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles
They being the oligarchs, the goal being to privatize public services, consolidate control and power, own the information space, or make it such a mess no one knows the truth anymore, idea popularity trumps facts
Moldova elected a pro-EU instead of sliding into alt-right territory. So to declare it (or anything) never fails is never going to be true. Looking to Russia as an example, what hasn't been failing? They went from being #2 to being a a pariah state
Took me a while after that to accept it wasn't just an aberration.
My perspective now is that it continues a pattern of behaviour also seen with his response to Top Gear; it's just that when he reacted to Top Gear, I had an even lower regard for Top Gear…
> I don't know that "evil" is a really useful word to fling around, full stop, because it's actually quite subjective.
I agree. FWIW, I think "evil" is mostly a strong overlap with dark triad personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
But clearly the word is used far more broadly, and it does not reliably keep any meaning from one person to the next.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.
If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.
I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??
On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.
Correct, that's exactly what I want from encyclopedia, the current academic consensus on a topic. Digging deeper on a topic requires moving to other sources, like books and specialized literature.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be an academic journal where all sorts of competing views are put forth and debated.
I do not go to wikipedia to learn the 15 different alternative theories about [subject], I want to learn what the prevailing scientific consensus is.
Will that consensus sometimes be wrong? Undoubtedly. It's nearly guaranteed to happen at some point.
That doesn't mean a system that records the current consensus is wrong in any way.
This is how the article on Earth handles flat earth/geocentrism:
> Scientific investigation has resulted in several culturally transformative shifts in people's view of the planet. Initial belief in a flat Earth was gradually displaced in Ancient Greece by the idea of a spherical Earth, which was attributed to both the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides.[288][289] Earth was generally believed to be the center of the universe until the 16th century, when scientists first concluded that it was a moving object, one of the planets of the Solar System.[290]
We don't need to repeat 100 of years of arguments and attempts at science that were ultimately incorrect, we can just note that at one point the consensus was different and go on talking about what the current one is.
> The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
We can measure all sorts of things (with varying degree of accuracies) about "society" and then choose a specific set of "good ones" and "bad ones" but who gets to make those choices? And what specific geographic region are we measuring them?
If average literacy goes down in rome but up in paris, what does that prove? Is one darker than the other?
The term Dark Ages was invented solely to make the renaissance people feel special. It only exists as a term of disparagement to compare against the supposedly better time period. It's not some kind of objective term that people came up with after studying the times and places involved.
Like, as a general thing, it's useful to have words that refer to periods of time that other people understand. Saying "the middle ages" or "the classical age" is pretty vague but at least it more or less communicates something useful to most people. If we really want to call a period of time "the dark ages" and everyone agrees that this is the standard nomenclature, this isn't the worst thing in the world.
But "dark ages" is intended to be a very prejudicial term that is way less factual than its name would imply.
Industrial output, long-distance trade, literacy, artistic quality (yes, I know it's subjective. I don't care: if it hadn't collapsed the Grotesque style wouldn't have been a revolution), and tons of other things collapsed. Records became extremely spotty. There's no reliable descent from antiquity for a reason. By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common. People were legally bound to their parent's professions. Free movement was restricted. Spoliation was universal because new high-quality materials couldn't be sourced at any price.
Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
Yes, the dark ages were real, miserable, and significant, and I don't care for the modern revisionism on the subject. You could argue about the speed of the decline and whether it really got going in the third or the fifth centuries, or whether it might have been averted without the Gothic Wars wrecking what was left of already-fragile Mediterranean trade, but that there was a civilizational nadir in western Europe around the end of the first millennium is beyond honest dispute.
The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change in civilization style and we don't know which is better so don't judge" is infuriating and gaslights the public.
I absolutely can and will make moral value judgements about civilizational statuses. Lower literacy rates is bad! Public healthcare is good!
The problem is that the world is far more complicated than the term "dark ages" accurately reflects. There sure was a reduction in some types of trade and some literacy rates in some specific areas at some specific times.
Constantinople was having a fine old time in 450c.e. for example and their literacy rates hadn't changed meaningfully.
> By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common
Yes? It was also common in the 4th century, 3rd century, 2nd century, 1st century... you get the idea.
I looked up the "bound to parent professions" and the first reference I can find is to emperor Diocletian around 280c.e., I admit I'm not sure if that counts as part of your dark ages.
> Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
The "corpus of literature" was constantly being lost before the invention of the printing press.
Look, talking about history (and in general) requires some degree of generalization and vagueness. We literally don't have time to cover every single detail, so we use commonly understood if slightly inaccurate terms like "roman empire" to refer to complicated subjects. "Dark Ages" is similar.
It doesn't help that the term "Dark Ages" was invented specifically to make Rome/Greece and the Renaissance ages look better. It's hardly an unbiased term.
But the overall point is that if you actually look at history, 900 c.e. is really truly not that much different from 500 c.e. or 1200 c.e.
It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.