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I usually try to review cheeses virginally - that is, ones that I’ve never had before. In this case, this is a cheddar I’ve had many times before. But I couldn’t leave it off the blog, what with its obvious appeal to leather and rubber fetishists.
As far as cheddars go, Grafton’s 2-year aged isn’t going to shock you. It’s mild, light on the salt, with a slightly sweet and grassy flavour. It’s got a nice texture. It’s dense, more moist than I expected, and smooth.
So what is the deal with the gummi suit on this cheese anyway? Well, cheese has obviously been around a lot longer than fridges. Fresh cheeses like mozzarella are too moist to last very long outside of a cold place (bacteria and fungi do so love damp places), though I don’t think anyone was too mad about eating that stuff quickly. But cheeses that have been aged (and dried) more have some more preservation options, which is where cheese wax comes in. The wax is a physical barrier, stopping fungal spores from landing, and also blocks moisture and air, making the cheese a pretty unfriendly place to grow. Even drier cheeses can be bandaged in cheesecloth and then slathered in lard to preserve them while allowing some ventilation.
I gotta admit: hot wax isn’t really my thing. But cheesecloth bondage and grease… it has potential.
I use swipe typing on my phone and I also use portmanteau and other made up composite words very frequently and sometimes I do unconsciously expect swipe typing to recognize me attempting to type some shit like “funnybee” to describe my cats as if I or anyone else have ever typed that before let alone regularly
Okay, this is honestly not as bad as you might assume from the headline, and please understand I’m saying this as someone who is very much Anti-AI
Firstly: Wikipedia is not signing up to replace editors or article writers. They mention that it may be used to create some editing tools, but for linking articles together by identifying natural-language terms. I would say this is honestly one of the better uses for LLMs, which are massive multi-dimensional networks that function by linking like parts of speech together. If it weren’t resetting all progress made on green energy, I’d even think this was a good idea. still don’t support it, but it’s not actual content editing. They do mention including a Q&A style chatbot though, which i hate.
The bulk of this, however, is about corporate AI using information from wikipedia. This has been an issue for a long time, first entering the public discussion when amazon introduced the Echo and Alexa. One of the most common functions of that device was to ask it questions, and it got most of its information from wikipedia, which means amazons servers were constantly making requests from wikipedias servers, putting a significant load on wikipedias systems, and costing them a lot of money. If i recall, a lot of the smart-speaker companies like amazon and google ended up making large donations to wikipedia after some public pressure, to help offset the costs.
The same problem is repeating itself with AI, where massive AI companies are putting a major strain on a resource that is supposed to be for everyone, and is funded by individual doners. As you can imagine, a lot of folks are not happy that their donations to the wikimedia foundation are effectively subsidizing AI firms. Including me. I’ve had a small monthly donation going to wikipedia for nearly a decade now, and I don’t like that they’re having to spend the money I give them to prop up OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft, all of which are rolling in either revenue or venture capital money.
The core of this deal is that a lot of the major AI companies putting a strain on wikipedia’s systems are now agreeing to pay for their access and training data, so it’s not on everyone else to support it.
I’ll be honest, i have extremely mixed feelings about this, as I did with the smart speaker trend. On the one hand i do feel like these companies shouldn’t be able to abuse a collective resource for free, and i’m glad they’re making up for some of those costs. On the other hand, I’m worried that this makes wikipedia, which currently functions on individual donations from millions of people like myself, more beholden to large tech companies. If the wikipedia article for Amazon discusses their abysmal labor conditions, will amazon threaten to pull their funding? Will google do the same if their article mentions the military projects? The idea of wikipedias content being up for sale is honestly pretty scary. It’s far from a flawless and unbiased source of information, but it’s still a pretty damn good resource to have, and putting a dollar amount on corporate interests is worrying.
I don’t know how to feel about this, and I don’t know what the right answer is, but I want to be clear to anyone that just read the headline and not the article: for the time being, based on what’s been said here, wikipedia is not introducing AI-generated content into their articles. Other then what independent editors are already (probably) putting in.
If that changes, I’ll probably be canceling my recurring donation, and telling them exactly why I did.
