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yiyingzhang

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UCSD prof, AI entrepreneur, https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~yiying/

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My list is like 200 items now

Do human developers check for 200 items when they do code review? How long would that take? It's quite clear that AI code review could be better even with some error.

What's easy for human to review is also easy for AI (small code base, small PRs). What's hard for AI is also hard for human, if not more. But the time cost is so different that it's almost a nobrainer to choose AI to code and review, especially considering most software out there is not so critical :)

For academia people who care about publication, arxiv is more like a place to claim a spot before others do and before a paper gets accepted somewhere. It's also easier to get open-access publications from arxiv, as some journals are still behind paywalls.

The uncomfortable part is not that Anthropic wants to detect resellers or distillation pipelines. That is normal adversarial business.

The uncomfortable part is that a “safety” company put a covert classification channel into the system prompt of a developer tool that now routinely gets filesystem, shell, git, and browser access.

If a random npm package changed invisible-ish punctuation based on your timezone and API host so its backend could classify you, we would call it malware-adjacent telemetry. I don't see how Anthropic is different in this case.

Unfortunately, most students today just want to find the easiest way to get a good grade. The percentage of students truly want to learn is very low. For the most, they'd prefer instructors who feed them with exam problems. This is very sad, but true.

Another issue is with the curriculum and course structure, which should long been updated. But that's another rabbit hole on its own, especially in public universities with a big hierarchy of system. The sad truth is professors have no passion in teaching outdated curriculum, and students have no desire to learn.

As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

"Safety evals are an exception I believe eval startups can work when they're targeting safety benchmarks specifically. Researchers who want to work on safety evals tend to be ideologically opposed to working on capabilities, which means they don't migrate to post-training or applications due to monetary incentives."

This is quite interesting. Seems more relevant in 2026.