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.
I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.
LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.
Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.
It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.
Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.
it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.
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.
"just" yes, you "just" have to do it every time. and so does everyone else.
sadly we live in a society of comfort, where people do not even remove the trackers from links, so why would you expect they add a blur to images...
I tried both options, and both options visibly* degraded quality while failing to remove my hidden message. Consider that good schemes are already designed to be resilient in the face of lossy image compression, which is a lot more disruptive than the things you suggested.
* the 7-bit quantization + 1-bit noise option not by much, but still, visible
The lattice configuration comes from a conventional triangle mesh, so you can prepare it with any STL editor of your choice, and the lattice shape comes from a precalculated Fourier polynomial in barycentric coordinates.
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.
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.
My professor thought that there could be paper in my thesis. Thankfully they did not insist. Work was pretty crap and useless(mostly due to happening in between versions of project/idea they were working on). But well I did graduate so that is fine for me.
I can't even imagine the horrors what papers on some Master thesis would look like. Often as there is so many graduates they are not that novel topics anyway.
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.
From the other side of the coin, refereeing papers, if we were still doing this stuff via dead trees I'd get a stamp made up "this is a mailing list post, not a conference paper". Or possibly "this is a blog post, ...".
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.
The other side is: my grandmother could survive heatwave just because her house wasn't heating up that much. It's old, it's stone, stone is just good at keeping temperature even. And the air coming through the windows passes through trees that are good at lowering temperature.
Even if it got a bit hot – like it does in mine, that has less volumetric heat capacity — simple floor scrub lowers temperature. Evaporating water is just a very good at that, and floor is a big area.
If we take a house made of paper and place it in a place with no trees and a lot of asphalt, I believe that AC could become a necessity. No amount of evaporating water could help you to fight heat rising from the road.
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.
Not always. AFAICT my papers have often been reviewed by people I have never met and who have expertise that overlaps with, but does not fully match, mine, and I couldn't possibly contact those people out of the blue to ask for feedback, particularly because I'd never get the chance to meet them outside of peer review (they wouldn't be in the same conferences as me etc). And that's a good thing because that way I get a sort of "outsider looking in" view.
I've sure given and taken informal feedback in the past from people I know and that's great but peer review also makes the whole process more formal and less sloppy; at least sometimes and depending on the venue and to my experience.
Triply periodic minimal surfaces are the golden standard in thermal management, acoustics, and even medical applications. But minimality itself doesn't contribute much to practicality. We use them because they are simply studied better than the non-minimal surfaces.
So I'm studying the non-minimals. They are much more governable, what I link to is a demo of a surface builder with two levels of control. Next, they are conjugatable including conjugations with different period of self (that will be the following paper), they generalize nicely to non-periodic or partially periodic surfaces, and they work in other space configurations. E. g. I'm now playing with bi-periodic curves that cover the 2D space with self-replicating hexagons.
If all that I'm experimenting on today in 2D will turn out well in 3D too, we'll have a whole new direction in implicit modeling.
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.
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