okaleniuk

It was a fascinating social experiment. I'm glad it's over.

Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."

Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.

My point is, it's easier to remove a spymark than a watermark.

Try.

The vulnerability of steganography is that is has to pretend that signal is noise. Remove the noise - and the signal is gone. I'm pretty sure that the simplest gaussian blur will remove the spymark from any picture.

Or... add some noise. Just align the last bit of every pixel channel with a random bit sequence - and Bob's your uncle.

Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.

Publishers have their KPIs too.

Exactly.

And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.

The masters program in our uni is 1.5 years long.

Academic publishing is in deep crisis. It didn't start with AI, and it probably wouldn't end with it. The crisis came from trying to turn academia into a factory of some sort.

I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.

But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.

Has anyone ever argued that AC is luxury? This century? Really? I believe, the division goes between harm/comfort and not luxury/necessity.

I don't have AC at home. Some think I don't install it because I somehow don't get hot in summer or cold at winter. It's the other way around. We, people, have one of the best thermoregulation systems among animals, our whole skin is essentially a huge cooling system. The only way to render it incapable is... stop using it for a prolonged amount of time. It's use it or lose it all over again.

If you don't believe me, read what ultra-marathon runners have to say. If a trained athlete can survive Badwater, almost everyone can train themselves to survive a European heatwave.

Sure, some people can't. Some need AC because of cardiovascular conditions. It's fine, let them have it. But some people can't walk because of musculoskeletal conditions, but no one would argue that a wheelchair is a necessity.

It's not just AI. The whole business of academic publishing is a mess. Can't imagine anyone outside academia wanting to get there. In theory, it should have been a bridge between people who do interesting things that benefit society. In practice, it's a huge indifference machine powered by the institutions KPIs and benefiting no one but Elseveir.

The alternative is to use your network directly. The very notion of "I'll publish my work and someone will notice me" is wrong. Most people in academia are too concentrated on their own work to care about yours. The only minority that cares is already in your contact list.