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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#111

Post by contubernio »

What is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them.

A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#112

Post by fidotron »

stared wrote: post #72
frankling_ wrote: post #40

The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…

> arXiv fulfills its function better the less power it has as an institution It is an interesting instance of the rule of least power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power .

The irony of the TBL quotes there being the entire problem with the semantic web is the ontological tarpit that results due to the excessive expressive power of a general triple store.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#113

Post by 0x3f »

mort96 wrote: post #110
0x3f wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all it's a CEO position, not an SWE :) Even if we scope it to SWE, I don't think that's far off the US percentiles. In London I imagine the top 10% SWE is not even 100k GBP. In Germany even worse.

I responded to the idea that $300,000/year is a "mid-to-high engineering salary". CEO salaries are absurdly high everywhere.

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the home owners are politically active.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#114

Post by mort96 »

0x3f wrote: post #113
mort96 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I responded to the idea that $300,000/year is a "mid-to-high engineering salary". CEO salaries are absurdly high everywhere.

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the hom…

Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown?

I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#115

Post by rsfern »

0x3f wrote: post #105
bonoboTP wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.

Not sure about that. How would a university test scaling hypotheses in AI, for example? The level of funding required is just not there, as far as I know.

This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.

Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#116

Post by 0x3f »

mort96 wrote: post #114
0x3f wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the hom…

Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown? I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an ap…

You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both.

Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#117

Post by mort96 »

0x3f wrote: post #116
mort96 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown? I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an ap…

You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both. Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.

I guess I don't understand why programmers somehow deserve a better life than other people. Janitors deserve to start families too, don't they?

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#119

Post by 0x3f »

mort96 wrote: post #117
0x3f wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both. Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.

I guess I don't understand why programmers somehow deserve a better life than other people. Janitors deserve to start families too, don't they?

It's not about deserving, programmers just have enough market power to be able to choose to go elsewhere. Janitors and other more fungible employees do not.

Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.

Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#120

Post by PaulHoule »

fidotron wrote: post #112
stared wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arXiv fulfills its function better the less power it has as an institution It is an interesting instance of the rule of least power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power .

The irony of the TBL quotes there being the entire problem with the semantic web is the ontological tarpit that results due to the excessive expressive power of a general triple store.

Well, I’d argue that many things in the semweb are not expressive enough and lead to the misunderstandings we have.

People think, for instance, that RDFS and OWL are meant to SHACL people into bad an over engineered ontologies. The problem is these standards add facts and don’t subtract facts. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT: it’s a data transformation system not a validation system.

That is, you’re supposed to use RDFS to say something like

  ?s :myTermForLength ?o -> ?s :yourTermForLength ?o .
The point of the namespace system is not to harass you, it is to be able to suck in data from unlimited sources and transform it. Trouble is it can’t do the simple math required to do that for real, like

  ?s :lengthInFeet ?o -> ?s :lengthInInches 12*?o .
Because if you were trying OWL-style reasoning over arithmetic you would run into Kurt Gödel kinds of problems. Meanwhile you can’t subtract facts that fail validation, you can’t subtract facts that you just don’t need in the next round of processing. It would have made sense to promote SHACL first instead of OWL because garbage-in-garbage out, you are not going to reason successfully unless you have clean data… but what the hell do I know, I’m just an applications programmer who models business processes enough to automate them.

Similarly the problem of ordered collections has never been dealt with properly in that world. PostgreSQL, N1QL and other post-relational and document DB languages can write queries involving ordered collections easily. I can write rather unobvious queries by hand to handle a lot of cases (wrote a paper about it) but I can’t cover all the cases and I know back in the day I could write SPAQL queries much better than the average RDF postdoc or professor.

As for underengineering, Dublin Core came out when I worked at a research library and it just doesn’t come close in capability to MARC from 1970. Larry Masinter over at Adobe had to hack the standard to handle ordered collections because… the authors of a paper sure as hell care what order you write their names in. And it is all like that: RDF standards neglect basic requirements that they need to be useful and then all the complex/complicated stuff really stands out. If you could get the basics done maybe people would use them but they don’t.

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