I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprecedented during the life-times of most of us) and talking about digital sovereignty has become mainstream in Europe. As a company trying to promote a product, I would stay as far away from that memory as possible, at least if you care about international markets.
Prism
341–350 of 543 posts
Re: Prism
#342I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprece…
These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.
Re: Prism
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are tools. In the hands of adept, conscientious researchers, they can only be a boon, assisting in the crafting of the research manuscript. In the hands of less adept, less conscientious users, they accelerate the production of slop. The poster I'm responding to seems to be noting an asymmetry- those who find the most use from these tools could be inept researchers who have no business submitting their work. Thi…
The LLMs does assist the adept researchers in crafting their manuscript, but I do not think it makes the quality much better. My objection is not that they are the "wrong people". They are just regular people with excellent tools but not necessarily great scientific ideas. Yes, it was easier to trash the crank's work before based on their unLaTeXed diagrams. Now, they might have a very professional looking diagram, b…
The democratization is mostly in allowing people from outside the field with mediocre mathematical ideas to finally put them to paper and submit them to mediocre journals. And occasionally it might help a modern day Ramanujan with "exceptional mathematical insights" and a highly unconventional background to not have his work dismissed as that of a crank. Yes, most people with exceptional mathematical insights can typeset quite well. Democratization as I understand the term has quite a higher bar though.
Being against this is essentially to be in favor of a form of discrimination by proxy- if you can't typeset, then likely you can't do research either. And wouldn't it be really annoying if those people who can't research could magically typeset. It's a fundamentally undemocratic impulse: Since those who cannot typeset well are unlikely to produce quality mathematics, we can (and should) use this as an effective barrier to entry. If you replace ability to typeset with a number of other traits, they would be rather controversial positions.
Re: Prism
#344Less thinking, reading, and reflection, and more spouting of text, yay! Just what we need.
Re: Prism
#345I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprece…
I mean it's also the name of the national engineering education journal and a few other things. There's only 14,000 5-letter words in English so you're going to have collisions.
Re: Prism
#346I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprece…
These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.
They are farming scientists for insight.
Re: Prism
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overleaf is a little curious to me. What's the point? Just install LaTeX. Claude is very good at manipulating LaTeX documents and I've found it effective at fixing up layouts for me.
I can code in monospace (of course) but I just can't write in monospace markup. I need something approaching WYSIWIG. It's just how my brain works -- I need the italics to look like italics, I need the footnote text to not interrupt the middle of the paragraph. The visual editor in Overleaf isn't true WYSIWIG, but it's close enough. It feels like working in a word processor, not in a code editor. And the interface ov…
Same for me. I wrote my PhD in LyX for that reason.
Re: Prism
#348It may be useful, but it also encourages people to stop writing their own papers.
As they demo in the video, it even encourages people to actually skip doing the research (which includes reading both relevant AND not-so-relevant papers in order to explore!) Instead, prompt "cite some relevant papers, please", and done. Hours of actual reading, thinking, and exploration reduced to a minimum.
A couple of generations of students later, and these will be rare skills: information finding, actual thinking, and conveying complex information in writing.
Re: Prism
#349This is going to be the concrete block which finally breaks the back of the academic peer review system, i.e. it's going to be a DDoS attack on a system which didn't even handle the load before LLMs. Maybe we'll need to go back to some sort of proof-of-work system, i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written...
> i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written...
And you think the indians will not hand write the output of LLMs ?
Not that I have a better suggestion myself..
Re: Prism
#350I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprece…
This comment might make more sense if there was some connection or similarity between the OpenAI "Prism" product and the NSA surveillance program. There doesn't appear to be.