@p "On Human Bots" reminds me of the "As $person says [citation]" pattern where they don't even add their own thoughts and it's quite often taken too much out of context so the cited person can actually end up disagreeing.
@lanodan Yeah, or just "Here's a PDF I didn't read." Part of the motivation for writing the post to begin with was that I was frustrated with that type of thing.
Specifically, there was someone that was plaguing fedi by just taking a list of "If the other person says $x, refute with $citation, which shows $y and !$x", and I found out because I tried to look up one of the citations (I wanted to know where they got their sample set; I suspected it was inmates, because the claim didn't make sense unless there was a severe skew) and the first search result was the wiki they got the "debate script" from; without exception, everything they cited was from that list, and cited in the same form. It was actually difficult to track down the articles they were citing (which explains why they couldn't produce the article when asked, or even name the title of any of them, because the citations didn't even list the journal most of the time, just "$name ($year)"). You can probably guess that almost most of the papers didn't show anything related to the assertion, they often enough contradicted it, and the remainder had a severely skewed sample set because they were studying a pathological group rather than taking a random survey.
So, tangentially related, the "screenshot of a provocative headline with no link" bothers me; if you manage to dig up the article, sometimes the date is fifteen years ago and it's being presented as current, or the article contradicts the headline, or something like that. Then the article itself sometimes only links to other articles on the news site, so you have to go digging further to find the actual published results. I mean, journalists do that, it's worse that they contradict themselves: they'll dump some headline that is extremely misleading and then the article says the opposite. (I don't recall your age; I think you are younger than me, but if you are much younger than me, you might not remember that they have been doing clickbait headlines since there were no clicks, just physical paper.) I began to suspect that people don't understand the concept of a primary source, so they don't realize that they don't have one.
So, in addition to the fake-citation guy (you can probably guess that he was advocating for the universal acceptance of his right to bother children), the politics people will do that kind of thing. Gablins and Gablin-adjacent people are really bad about this: there's some GLR-inspired website full of primary colors and clipart and random words red-bolded, that says "Actually, history shows that Hitler was good." and "Jesus's DNA was proven to be 100% Scandanavian!" and they just throw images or screenshots from the site, and it's making these assertions and they completely blank if you ask them how they'd know that. "It's right there, didn't you look at the image?" You ask where the information came from, they send you to that blog, you say "No, where did the information actually come from, where did he get it?" and nothing. It's like there's some kind of mental block that prevents them, even if you ask directly, from recognizing "This Wordpress/Blogspot/whatever site says it is true" just means that a random guy on the internet is saying it, it doesn't demonstrate anything. It's like they can't process the question.
Gablins or Citation Guy or slogan-chanters or Redditors or whoever, I mean, I think it is such a terrible fixed pattern of interactions that if you do it for too long, your communication habits get so distorted that you can't talk to real people any more.
:lainstress: Completely unrelated, I think I'm on my own with this one because old version and patched all to hell (security stuff backported, weird local patches, etc.), but if you know off the top of your head where this might be coming from, let me know, because there's not even a stack trace so every time I think "All right, let's try to fix attachments", I end up having to speculate, because I can't get the damn thing to give me a crash dump or a stack trace or anything:
Request: POST /api/v1/media
** (exit) exited in: :gen_statem.call(#PID<0.3295.49>, {:perform, "/tmp/plug-1714/multipart-1714174132-869085199244546-4"}, 30000)
** (EXIT) no process: the process is not alive or there's no process currently associated with the given name, possibly because its application isn't started
Don't think about it too hard; shot in the dark, like I said, just if this is something that is a common problem and you recognize it right away and I've merely erroneously removed the part that recombinates the monoid apparatus by failing to pass 'true' somewhere, a hint would be appreciated.
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