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Re:Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good... by ben_w on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:34AM (#44222729)
In some senses, everything is political. When Ignaz Semmelweis said ~ "Doctors should wash their hands between autopsies and helping midwifes give birth" he failed in his own lifetime because of politics.

> Nobody calls it misinformation if you make a false claim about how much RAM a computer has or some scientific fact that has no relation to politics.

Wasn't this common during the Cold War? Each side making false claims about both side's computers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics_in_the_Soviet_Unio...

Isn't it basically what's happening now with public statements about how big "Stargate" will be, and how much of a risk there is of Chinese compute catching up with American compute?

Re:Building supercomputers for autocrats probably isn't good... by foxglacier on Monday June 09, 2025 @09:04PM (#44231397)
Those examples are political because they're indirectly about controlling groups of people. But not everything is. Sometimes it's personal pride - you might make a mistake on some inconsequential fact then double down after you realize you're wrong just to feel like you're right. People do that. Or you might just have learnt a wrong fact by accident and repeated it. If it requires intent to mislead, then the classic activity of bullshitting (did you know a mole can smell a dead cat from one mile away?) would be spreading misinformation, but we don't call it that.