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Prism

openai.com

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Re: Prism

#401

Post by lou1306 »

efficax wrote: post #44
crazygringo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how it compares to Overleaf in terms of features? Putting aside the AI aspect entirely, I'm simply curious if this is a viable Overleaf competitor -- especially since it's free. I do self-host Overleaf which is annoying but ultimately doable if you don't want to pay the $21/mo (!). I do have to wonder for how long it will be free or even supported, though. On the one hand, remote LaTeX compiling gets expe…

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.

The first three things are, in this order: collaborative editing, collaborative editing, collaborative editing. Seriously, this cannot be understated.

Then: The LaTeX distribution is always up-to-date; you can run it on limited resources; it has an endless supply of conference and journal templates (so you don't have to scavenge them yourself off a random conference/publisher website); Git backend means a) you can work offline and b) version control comes in for free. These just off the top of my head.

Re: Prism

#403

Post by lmc »

crazygringo wrote: post #80
markbao wrote: post #37

Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…

100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past. Typst feels more like the future: https://typst.app/ The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.

I've had some good initial results in going from typst to .tex with Claude (Opus 4.5) for an IEEE journal paper - idiomatic use of templates etc.

Re: Prism

#404

Post by biscuit1v9 »

parentheses wrote: post #324

It feels generally a bit dangerous to use an AI product to work on research when (1) it's free and (2) the company hosting it makes money by shipping productized research

Why do you think these points would make the usage dangerous?

Re: Prism

#405

Post by jll29 »

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #384
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…

What the OP was talking about is the negative connotation that goes with the word; it's certainly a poor choice from a marketing point of view.

You may say it's "silly to obsess", but it's like naming a product "Auschwitz" and saying "it's just a city name" -- it ignores the power of what Geffrey N. Leech called "associative meaning" in his taxonomy of "Seven Types of Meaning" (Semantics, 2nd. ed. 1989): speaking that city's name evokes images of piles of corpses of gassed undernourished human beings, walls of gas chambers with fingernail scratches and lamp shades made of human skin.

Re: Prism

#406

Post by jll29 »

sunaookami wrote: post #358
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…

>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Have you ever seen the comment section of a Snowden thread here? A lot of users here call for Snowden to be jailed, call him a russian asset, play down the reports etc. These are either NSA sock puppet accounts or they won't bite the hand that feeds them (employees of companies willing to breach their users trust). Edit…

What Snowden did was heroic. What was shameful was the world's underwhelming reaction. Where were all these images in the media of protest marches like against the Vietnam war?

Someone once said "Religion is opium for the people." - today, give people a mobile device and some doom-scrolling social media celebrity nonsense app, and they wouldn't noticed if their own children didn't come home from school.

Re: Prism

#407

Post by jll29 »

omnimus wrote: post #378
TiredOfLife wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Him being (or best case becoming) a russian asset turned out to be true

Like it would matter for any of the revelations. And like he would have other choices to not go to prison. Look at how it worked out for Assange.

They both undertook something they believed in, and showed extreme courage.

And they did manage to get the word out. They are both relatively free now, but it is true, they both paid a price.

Idealism is that you follow your principles despite that price, not escaping/evading the consequences.

Re: Prism

#408

Post by mfld »

I'd like to hypothesize a little bit about the strategy of OpenAI. Obviously, it is nice for academic users that there is a new option for collaborative LaTeX editing plus LLM integration for free. At the same time, I don't think there is much added revenue expected here, for example, from Pro features or additional LLM usage plans. My theory is that the value lies in the training data received from highly skilled academics in the form of accepted and declined suggestions.

Re: Prism

#409

Post by lionkor »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #368
sunaookami wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? Have you ever seen the comment section of a Snowden thread here? A lot of users here call for Snowden to be jailed, call him a russian asset, play down the reports etc. These are either NSA sock puppet accounts or they won't bite the hand that feeds them (employees of companies willing to breach their users trust). Edit…

Him being (or best case becoming) a russian asset turned out to be true

If the messenger has anything to do with Russia, even after the fact, we should dismiss the message and remember to never look up.

Re: Prism

#410

Post by Otterly99 »

legitster wrote: post #36

It's interesting how quickly the quest for the "Everything AI" has shifted. It's much more efficient to build use-case specific LLMs that can solve a limited set of problems much more deeply than one that tries to do everything well. I've noticed this already with Claude. Claude is so good at code and technical questions... but frankly it's unimpressive at nearly anything else I have asked it to do. Anthropic would p…

I completely agree.

In my lab, we have been struggling with automated image segmentation for years. 3 years ago, I started learning ML and the task is pretty standard, so there are a lot of solution.

In 3 months, I managed to get a working solution, which only took a lot of sweat annotating images first.

I think this is where tools like OpenCode really shine, because they unlock the potential for any user to generate a solution to their specific problem.

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