qbit42

So this is a bit of a hot take for HN, but while my life is dramatically more convenient due to smartphones, “better” is actually not obvious to me. Some things are better, some are worse.

Anyway, I don’t think anything I said was even framed morally (although of course I have my personal opinions). My prediction is just that the amount and average quality of paid creative work is going to massively decline. To me, the scale difference matters a lot (compared to impact of previous tech). I hope I’m wrong.

I agree with some of your characterizations here, but I don’t think it is fair to say that if you are not currently a professional artist, you were never a true artist. People get unlucky, have families to support, etc

Sure, this mirrors history, technology is always transforming economics.

I guess my point is that there is a decent sized middle class of creative professionals right now, and I expect that the number of them will go down significantly due to AI. Seems like art will become more and more restricted to hobbyists and the lucky few who achieve mainstream success.

This is kind of what happened with photography. But I think the scale is much bigger, affecting all creative industries.

It was already bad, but I think there is still room for it to get a lot worse unfortunately.

They are not always the same but there is more overlap than you would think. One place that I know is being hit hard is Nashville (no comment on what this implies about the state of US country music). There are a lot of local musicians with their own (small) bands whose primary income came from (relatively low quality, compared to their own music) song-writing, playing back-up instrumentals/vocals for studios, stuff like that. This income stream is shrinking rapidly.

AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists. The issue is that many are paid for their art mostly for its aesthetic rather than artistic value. This isn’t the most creatively fulfilling, but it previously allowed many artists to make a living while refining their skills, often enabling them to pursue their real creative ambitions on the side.

I think shade is a big factor here. Trees can really cool down a neighborhood.

I found replacements for the Chrome extensions I was using and switched to Zen, which builds off of Firefox and closely resembles Arc (RIP).

It might not be the best security idea to rely on a relatively obscure browser like this, but I find it very pleasant to use.

Round brackets are standard in the US but that notation is used in France and some other places.

I think there is still an implicit restriction on the complexity of the operator for this to be interesting. Otherwise you could design an operator which accepts a pair x,y and performs one of 2^k elementary binary operations by reading off the first k bits of x and applying the specified operation on the remainder of x and y. (This is kind of like how real-valued computational models become too powerful for complexity theory to work if you allow bitwise operations.)

There are certainly no other causal factors...

I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.

The choice was to review using AI or not, they can just say no? And review like we’ve done for years without AI tools.

Are you objecting to ICML’s reciprocal reviewing policy?

The alternative as I see it would be to charge for submissions and pay reviewers. There are pros but also clear cons when it comes to fairness.

What? Why is that a false choice? The only way you got caught here is if you literally gave an LLM the PDF and used its response verbatim.

And they didn't give a permanent ban or anything, these authors can just resubmit to another conference, of which there are many.

Banned for life is a stretch but the actual response is completely fine. They can just resubmit to the next conference.

Words mean something, if you promise to uphold a contract and break it, there are consequences. The reviewers were free to select the policy which allows LLM use.

Loads of researchers have only used LaTeX via Overleaf and even more primarily edit LaTeX using Overleaf, for better or worse. It really simplifies collaborative editing and the version history is good enough (not git level, but most people weren't using full git functionality). I just find that there are not that many features I need when paper writing - the main bottlenecks are coming up with the content and collaborating, with Overleaf simplifying the latter. It also removes a class of bugs where different collaborators had slightly different TeX setups.

I think I would only switch from Overleaf if I was writing a textbook or something similarly involved.

Our democracy is clearly disfunctional. I believe corporate money has played a big role to make it worse.

https://noambrown.github.io/papers/22-Science-Diplomacy-TR.p...

I see. You seem quite sure that Iran is not doing this - do you have some local source of information? My friends there said the government does shut down the internet at times (but I am not currently in communication with them...)

They did shut down the Internet. I cannot communicate with some Iranian friends right now.

You think many are built without any assistance for coding? My impression was that people were mostly concerned about game assets like graphics and music

It is nicer to state theorems that hold for all vector spaces, so mathematicians like to invoke AoC. However, in any applications that are practically relevant, you can obtain a basis without invoking AoC.

Netflix wasn't buying CNN.

I don’t think many researchers take peer review alone as a strong signal, unless it is a venue known for having serious reviewing (e.g. in CS theory, STOC and FOCS have a very high bar). But it acts as a basic filter that gets rid of obvious nonsense, which on its own is valuable. No doubt there are huge issues, but I know my papers would be worse off without reviewer feedback

That is a fair assessment. By and large it is used for the former. It is super handy in the exploratory phase of certain kinds of mathematical research.

I don't want to have to create an account to view the full context.

Sometimes statistical rates for empirical risk minimization can be related to the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold (and noise level if present). In such cases, you are running the same algorithm but getting a performance guarantee that depends on the structure of the data, stronger when it is low dimensional.

Why? They're providing food for stray cats.

Is this falsifiable? I would be hesitant to claim that this is unique to humans. I'd probably agree with dogs, but the line is much blurrier with primates, for example.

I know lots of people annoyed by ads, but I also have family that buy things advertised on Instagram all the time.

Typst seems like an improvement in many respects, but I definitely prefer LaTeX when working with detailed math equations (most of my use of LaTeX). I think there is a lot of inertia for anything to replace LaTeX for mathematical research.