Prism • Hacker News Board

Re: Prism

#261

Post by mrbonner » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

syntex wrote: post #191

The Post-LLM World: Fighting Digital Garbage https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up Mini paper: that future isn’t the AI replacing humans. its about humans drowning in cheap artifacts. New unit of measurement proposed: verification debt. Also introduces: Recursive Garbage → model collapse a little joke on Prism)

Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM.

"Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." LinkedIn influencers will pivot to calling themselves "Organic Intelligence Validators" and charge $500/hr to squint at emails and go "yeah, a human definitely wrote this passive-aggressive Slack message."

The irony writes itself: we built machines to free us from tedious work, and now our job is being the tedious work for the machines. Full circle. Poetic even. Future historians (assuming they're still human and not just Claude with a monocle) will mark this as the moment we achieved peak civilization: where the most valuable human skill became "can confidently say whether another human was involved."

Bullish on verification miners. Bearish on whatever remains of our collective attention span.

Re: Prism

#262

Post by lupire » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:24 AM UTC

JBorrow wrote: post #60

bloppe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time. Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.

The journal that I'm an editor for is 'diamond open access', which means we charge no submission fees and no publication fees, and publish open access. This model is really important in allowing legitimate submissions from a wide range of contributors (e.g. PhD students in countries with low levels of science funding). Publishing in a traditional journal usually costs around $3000.

Who pays the operating expenses?

Re: Prism

#263

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:31 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #256

I know many people have negative opinions about this. I'd also like to share what I saw. Since GPT-4o became a thing, everyone who submits academic papers I know in my non-english speaking country (N > 5) has been writing papers in our native language and translating them with GPT-4o exclusively . It has been the norm for quite a while. If hallucination is such a serious problem it has been so for one and half a year…

Translation is something Large Language Models are inherently pretty good at, without controversy, even though the output still should be independently verified. It's a language task and they are language models.

Re: Prism

#264

Post by ivirshup » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #256

I know many people have negative opinions about this. I'd also like to share what I saw. Since GPT-4o became a thing, everyone who submits academic papers I know in my non-english speaking country (N > 5) has been writing papers in our native language and translating them with GPT-4o exclusively . It has been the norm for quite a while. If hallucination is such a serious problem it has been so for one and half a year…

I've heard that now that AI conferences are starting to check for hallucinated references, rejection rates are going up significantly. See also the Neurips hallucinated references kerfuffle [1]

[1]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/26/machine-le...

Re: Prism

#265

Post by sincerely » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

varjag wrote: post #200

pazimzadeh wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk if OpenAI knew that Prism is already a very popular desktop app for scientists and that it's one of the last great pieces of optimized native software? https://www.graphpad.com/

They don't care. Musk stole a chunk Heinlein's literary legacy with Grok (which unlike prism wasn't a common word) and noone bat an eye.

Grok has been nerd slang for a while. I bet it's in that ESR list of hacker lingo. And hell if every company in silicon valley gets to name their company after something from Lord of the Rings why can't he pay homage to an author he likes

Re: Prism

#266

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

mrbonner wrote: post #261

syntex wrote: post #191

The Post-LLM World: Fighting Digital Garbage https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up Mini paper: that future isn’t the AI replacing humans. its about humans drowning in cheap artifacts. New unit of measurement proposed: verification debt. Also introduces: Recursive Garbage → model collapse a little joke on Prism)

Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM. "Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." L…

Bullish on verifiers who accept money to verify fake things

Re: Prism

#267

Post by kinduff » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:37 AM UTC

mrbonner wrote: post #261

syntex wrote: post #191

The Post-LLM World: Fighting Digital Garbage https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up Mini paper: that future isn’t the AI replacing humans. its about humans drowning in cheap artifacts. New unit of measurement proposed: verification debt. Also introduces: Recursive Garbage → model collapse a little joke on Prism)

Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM. "Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." L…

Human CAPTCHA exists to figure out whether your clients are human or not, so you can segment them and apply human pricing. Synthetics, of course, fall into different tiers. The cheaper ones.

Re: Prism

#268

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #181

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean Kagi is probably the PageRank revival we are talking about. I have heard from people here that Kagi can help remove slop from searches so I guess yeah. Although I guess I am DDG user and I love using DDG as well because its free as well but I can see how for some price can be a non issue and they might like kagi more. So Kagi / DDG (Duckduckgo) yeah.

Does anyone have kept an eye of who uses what back-end? DDG used to be meta-search on top of Yahoo, which doesn't exist anymore. What do Gabriel and co-workers use now?

Kagi is mostly stealing results from Google and disenshittifying them but mixes in other engines like Yandex and Mojeek and Bing.

DDG is Bing.

Re: Prism

#269

Post by direwolf20 » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

storystarling wrote: post #193

jcranmer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first casualty of LLMs was the slush pile--the unsolicited submission pile for publishers. We've since seen bug bounty programs and open source repositories buckle under the load of AI-generated contributions. And all of these have the same underlying issue: the LLM makes it easy to do things that don't immediately look like garbage, which makes the volume of submission skyrocket while the time-to-reject also goe…

I run a small print-on-demand platform and this is exactly what we're seeing. The submissions used to be easy to filter with basic heuristics or cheap classifiers, but now the grammar and structure are technically perfect. The problem is that running a stronger model to detect the semantic drift or hallucinations costs more than the potential margin on the book. We're pretty much back to manual review which destroys…

If it's print-on-demand, why does it matter? Why shouldn't you accept someone's money to print slop for them?

Re: Prism

#270

Post by _bohm » Wed, Jan 28, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #212

plastic041 wrote: post #207

The video shows a user asking Prism to find articles to cite and to put them in a bib file. But what's the point of citing papers that aren't referenced in the paper you're actually writing? Can you do that? Edit: You can add papers that are not cited, to bibliography. Video is about bibliography and I was thinking about cited works.

I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count. Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms. Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class). The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that student…

Huh? It's quite sensible to make reference to someone else's work when writing a philosophy paper, and there are many ways to do so that do not amount to an appeal to authority.