The Intercept conservative?! The Nation conservative?! What gives?

  • vhstape@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    Just because you don’t like the top result doesn’t mean it is irrelevant EDIT: I am in fact an asshole. I see the problem now 😂

    • hedge@beehaw.orgOP
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      11 months ago

      I’m on Fennec, searching DuckDuck from the address bar. Here’s another one:

      • Steal Wool@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Weird I just searched and got totally different text, can’t upload the screens screenshot tho

        A Current Affairs subscription is one of the best known ways to improve your life in a hurry. Our print magazine is released six times a year, in a beautiful full-color edition full of elegant design, sophisticated prose, and satirical advertisements. Tell me more How Anti-Homeless Sentiment Made Its Way Into Popular Cartoons Alex Skopic

        The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah

  • DonnieDarkmode@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Yeah where are those descriptions coming from? Also mentions “the strike workers’ strike” and repeats “politics” twice

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Seems like a poorly trained ML model - crudely speaking, perhaps its training set was tilted towards descriptions of conservative news sites so it learned to insert the word “conservative” when describing a news site.

      • tuckerm@supermeter.social
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        11 months ago

        I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but that does sound like a very possible explanation.

        Poo. I was hoping DDG would keep LLM-generated summaries out of their UI.

        • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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          11 months ago

          My guess is that they’re surfacing something from Bing rather than doing this themselves. Still Not Good, though.

    • radix@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      That makes it sound like an outdated LLM, like GPT-2 or something. You think it is?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    11 months ago

    There’s nothing in the meta tags describing the website, so maybe it pulled this information from somewhere else?

    I also found out that The Intercept is using WordPress with a bunch of plugins, that was a weird surprise.

    • upstream@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Wasn’t there a funny little zero-day in a widely used Wordpress plugin just last week?

        • upstream@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          “Smart WordPress sites”, now that’s an oxymoron!

          But do please tell how you figure out if a plugin will be caught having a vulnerability or not.

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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            11 months ago

            You can audit the code yourself, it’s all PHP. The plugin I see mentioned in the HTML takes all pages and generates a sitemap XML file. It’s not interactive as far as I can tell. The worst case scenario seems to be that it dumps a link to an unpublished article.

            Almost every piece of software can have vulnerabilities, you can’t guarantee anything will be caught having a vulnerability or not. You can formally prove correctness of ADA programs, but even then you’re going to get SPECTRE style side channel attacks that may break code even if it’s perfectly secure based on the raw instructions generated by the compiler.

  • tuckerm@supermeter.social
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    11 months ago

    It showed me the same thing, but after searching again a few times I’m now seeing a summary of the articles on their homepages.

    Side note: I’ve had a weird bug a few times with DDG lately, where it showed me results for current events that were completely unrelated to what I was looking for. I searched for something like “10 inch chef’s knife” but the results were as though I had typed “US house of representatives speaker.” This has happened maybe three or four times in the last two weeks.

    • NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      This happened to me earlier but I was searching phrases in German and it was pulling results for the Israel and Hamas war exclusively. Nothing related to my term.

      My search was “ Ein schwer zu tötendes Unkraut” which translates roughly to “a difficult weed to kill”.

      • smollittlefrog@lemdro.id
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        11 months ago

        I do have an idea how “a difficult to kill, unwanted growth” could be put into relation to a war fueled by hatred.

        • NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          I guess. But it was literally every result. I wish I got a screenshot. I wouldn’t bet an eye if I saw one or two articles but every single listing? It seems way off at that point.

  • TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    It did the same for me.

    I clicked on the link then went back and the description calling it conservative was gone.

  • KinNectar@kbin.run
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    11 months ago

    @hedge because they aren’t using the political compass. Two or three political dimensions with only two words describing them leads to meaningless labeling.

    • hedge@beehaw.orgOP
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      11 months ago

      That would explain it! I think I remember seeing Jacobin as being the same degree of liberal as The Atlantic, and there’s no way that could be right! Oops, I mean “correct.” 🙄