• 6 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle








  • This certainly mirrors what I’ve seen on the ground. In the last 10 years, predatory publishers and publication mills went from known issues to the new normal. And yet despite how easy it is to publish, interest in reproducibility seems at an all-time low. It’s jarring, and I’m kind of making a career change out of research as a result, because what I do as a lowly assistant is essentially engineering results and marketing as opposed to anything having to do with discovery or science. I interpret it as capitalism’s going to capitalism.

    This has resulted in a 47% growth between 2016 and 2022 in the global number of published papers (Hanson, et.al. 2023). Moreover, we should expect a further spurt of growth following the widespread advent of large language models in late 2022. During the 2016-2022 period there was little net increase in the number of PhD students globally or in the funding of science, both indicators of science activity. Increased paper productivity implies either that scientists became suddenly much more creative over the period, or had spent more time writing, and therefore reviewing papers: an increase in paper productivity but a decrease in scientific productivity.




  • I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool

    Yeah, it’s just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. It showed the exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. 100% fabrication. I’d never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me





  • I think I’m more or less with @verdigris. I’d get behind the position that most large corporations have bent the rules of society so much to their favour and accrued so much wealth at the expense of ordinary people that we don’t owe them anything at this point. I got mad respect for the independent creators. But I feel there’s no moral transgression with streaming a pirated show vis-a-vis the corporations missing out on making a few bucks from that, to use a example. It’s not black and white; actors and others salaries are important and related. But those “you wouldn’t steal a car, so why are you trying to a CD/DVD?” ads were clearly corporate propaganda, as another example


  • Thanks for the info! I general sail the seven seas for that suff but thought it was a pretty good example of the larger trend.

    I played guitar for 5+ years, never really learning properly, but being able to jam okay. I can’t do that any more, but I have a pretty good knowledge base to start from. It’s probably a matter of I should just do whatever’s fun until I’m picking up the guitar a few times a week regularly - then I can get more focused. For easy-starting fun, that’s probably strumming and singing through songs on a less ad and malware-bloated website. To get serious, I’d like to work with a metronome, maybe finally feel confident with a 12-bar blues, transcribe some solos perhaps. Very old school 😎. Do you play or want to learn?








  • I might’ve misspoke about never paying for a video game again. I do like the look of gog. I’m really out of the loop when it comes to gaming. I like more privacy- and ownership-respecting platforms, and I would (do) pay for those. What I meant was I’d caught a glimpse of the direction of the mainstream gaming industry with WC3, and I realized it wouldn’t work for me and had to get off it. I use LibreOffice. I’ll check out the libre gaming software, thanks!

    They’ll obviously win when we run away. We should take the fight to them.

    I appreciate your point of view. The way I see it, I think maybe 95/100 people blindly trust big tech companies and 5 of us don’t (to the willing we’ll avoid mainstream social media, for example); the proportion is debatable, but I think it’s a very uneven divide. I don’t think we have enough power to “stick it” to big tech. I also don’t think we need to. I participated in the reddit blackout last summer and then I left it altogether for here (Lemmy), which I enjoy more and want to help grow more than I did the last place. I guess I do want some people to keep big tech in check and whistle-blow, at least to help spread awareness. I guess I’m just not the person for the job, and I think that’s okay. More tech savvy people would do well in those roles :)