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Prism

openai.com

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Re: Prism

#381

Post by DominikPeters »

mturmon wrote: post #163
DominikPeters wrote: post #13

This seems like a very basic overleaf alternative with few of its features, plus a shallow ChatGPT wrapper. Certainly can’t compete with using VS Code or TeXstudio locally, collaborating through GitHub, and getting AI assistance from Claude Code or Codex.

Getting close to the "why Dropbox when you can rsync" mistake ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ) @vicapow replied to keep the Dropbox parallel alive

Yeah I realized the parallel while I was writing my comment! I guess what I'm thinking is that a much better experience is available and there is no in-principle reason why overleaf and prism have to be so much worse, especially in the age of vibe-coding. Prism feels like the result of two days of Claude Code, when they should have invested at least five days.

Re: Prism

#382

Post by saidnooneever »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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 unprece…

tons of things are called prism.

(full disclosure, yes they will be handin in PII on demands like the same kinda deals, this is 'normal' - 2012 shows us no one gives a shit)

Re: Prism

#383

Post by aembleton »

i2km wrote: post #330

This 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...

Maybe Open AI will sell you 'Lens' which will assist with sorting through the submissions and narrow down the papers worth reviewing.

Re: Prism

#384

Post by ZpJuUuNaQ5 »

Perseids wrote: post #341

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 unprece…

>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

I just think it's silly to obsess over words like that. There are many words that take on different meanings in different contexts and can be associated with different events, ideas, products, time periods, etc. Would you feel better if they named it "Polyhedron"?

Re: Prism

#386

Post by port11 »

haspok wrote: post #359
i2km wrote: post #330

This 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...

> This is going to be the concrete block which finally breaks the back of the academic peer review system Exactly, and I think this is good news. Let's break it so we can fix at last. Nothing will happen until a real crisis emerges.

Disrupting a system without good proposals for its replacement sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Re: Prism

#387

Post by kakacik »

pageandrew wrote: post #342
Perseids wrote: post #341

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 unprece…

These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.

I came here based to headline expecting some more cia & nsa shit, that word is tarnished for few decades in better part of IT community (that actually cares about this craft beyond paycheck)

Re: Prism

#388

Post by Otterly99 »

MITSardine wrote: post #249
JBorrow wrote: post #32

From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…

If I may be the Devil's advocate, I'm not sure I fully agree with "The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research)". Plenty of researchers hate writing and will only do it at gunpoint. Or rather, delegate it all to their underlings. I don't see an issue with generative writing in pri…

Thank you for bringing this nuanced view.

I also am not sure why so many people are vehemently against this. I would bet that at least 90% of researchers would agree that the writing up is definitely not the part of the work they prefer (to stay polite). As you mentioned, work is usually relegated to students, and those students already had access to LLMs if they wanted to generate the work.

In my opinion, most of those tools become problematic when people use them without caution. Unfortunately, even in sciences, people are not as careful and pragmatic as we would like to imagine they are and a lot of people are cutting corners, especially in those "lesser" areas like writing and presenting your work.

Overall, I think this has the potential to reshape the publication system, which is long overdue.

Re: Prism

#389

Post by tarcon »

This is a actual prompt in the video: "What are the papers in the literature that are most relevant to this draft and that I should consider citing?"

They probably wanted: "... that I should read?" So that this is at least marketed to be more than a fake-paper generation tool.

Re: Prism

#390

Post by epolanski »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #233
epolanski wrote: post #197

Not gonna lie, I cringed when it asked to insert citations. Like, what's the point? You cite stuff because you literally talk about it in the paper. The expectation is that you read that and that it has influenced your work. As someone who's been a researcher in the past, with 3 papers published in high impact journals (in chemistry), I'm beyond appalled. Let me explain how scientific publishing works to people out o…

> But if asian researchers (yes, no offense), were already spamming half the world papers with cheated slop (non reproducible experiments) in the desperate bid of publishing before, I can't imagine now. Hmm, I follow the argument, but it's inconsistent with your assertion that there is going to be incentive for 'proper work' over time. Anecdotally, I think the median quality of papers from middle- and top-tier Chines…

Japan is notoriously an exception in the region.

South Korea and China produce huge amounts non reproducible experiments.

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