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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#151

Post by cge »

Hendrikto wrote: post #102
bonoboTP wrote: post #69

I fear their Mozilla-ification and Wikipedia-ification. Scope creep, various outreach feel-good programs, ballooning costs, lost focus etc. And other types of enshittification. Any change to the basic premise will be a negative step. They should just be boring quiet unopininionated neutral background infrastructure.

> Mozilla-ification All the Mozilla executives have done for the last 15+ years is * lay off developers * spend lots of money on stupid side projects nobody asked for or wants * increase their own salaries and all that with the backdrop of falling quality, market share, and relevance. I would happily donate to Firefox, but this fucked up organization will never see a single cent from me. They will spend it on anythin…

>They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.

Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#152

Post by mort96 »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #134
mort96 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Usually this kind of argument leads to punishing the programmers , not lifting up the janitors.

That's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries, isn't it?

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#153

Post by PaulHoule »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #62
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…

My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

That's a specific field at a very specific time. In general there is a difference between research and development, you're going to expect the early work to be done in academia but the work to turn that into a product is done by commercial organizations.

You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.

Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.

As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.

It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#155

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos

arXiv has become a target for grifters in other domains like health and supplements. I’ve seen several small scale health influencers who ChatGPT some “papers” and then upload them to arXiv, then cite arXiv as proof of their “published research”. It’s not fooling anyone who knows how research work but it’s very convincing to an average person who thinks that that they’re doing the right thing when they follow sources that have done academic research.

I’ve been surprised as how bad and obviously grifty some of the documents I’ve seen on arXiv have become lately. Is there any moderation, or is it a free for all as long as you can get an invite?

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#156

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters?

When I used to visit the Meta campus in Menlo Park, the QA folk I worked with were commuting 2 hours each way just to be able to afford housing. I've no idea how far away the janitorial staff must have lived to do the same

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#157

Post by [deleted] »

jjk166 wrote: post #149
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.

That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.

[deleted]

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#158

Post by groundzeros2015 »

jjk166 wrote: post #149
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.

That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.

I don’t buy “some fields are just more honorable”. Everyone uses publishing for personal gain.

But yes it’s a people problem, not an arxiv problem.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#159

Post by swiftcoder »

mort96 wrote: post #152
throw-the-towel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually this kind of argument leads to punishing the programmers , not lifting up the janitors.

That's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries, isn't it?

> The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries

Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#160

Post by doctorwho42 »

contubernio wrote: post #111

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 becau…

As a US based academic, I have to say when I saw the salary I immediately gawked. I think it's not americans but silicon valley-ites and tech bros on here who have lived with inflated salary/net worth that think it's just a middle of the road salary. As I regularly interact with friends in engineering who make like $200k + benefits ($), and I wonder why I don't jump ship to that weird land.
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