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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 12 Sep \ on: The Last Programmers AI
Wow, this is so different from my experience with AI this week. I'll write a longer post on it, but damn was this a messy experience. Useful in the long run, maybe, but my frustration level has been much higher than my satisfaction level.
Installed Cursor. I have been debugging AI code for the last few days. In hindsight, I guess I'd have done it faster myself. But the experience is valuable, it might pay off for the next time I ask it to help me implement some routine in Fortran.
Yeah, with proper PR, they might leave the ecosystem, but it's rare.
Most, if not all, of these papers don't get more than a few citations (unless they have some shady self-citation scheme going on). These papers disappear into oblivion from the moment they are published. Their only purpose is to increase someone's H-factor, satisfy a PhD graduation requirement, or some other stupid reason.
Probably never read a paper from there... maybe even never cited a paper from there.
I've vaguely heard of it, but a paper published there is not really something taken seriously in my field.
As a rule of thumb, "open access"-only journals for which you pay a high publication fee as an author, but nothing as a reader, have a dangerous incentive structure in the sense that they have no reason to reject papers. So even though they are solving the paywall problem of scientific dissemination, they carry this burden of proving they are non-predatory.
Now, lots of standard journals let you decide as an author if you want to pay the fee to make it open access. This already mitigates part of the problem.
On the one hand, i want to say it's quite alarming, but on the other hand, i feel like it's just the rotten behaviour happening in a quite insulated part of the ecosystem. By design, it's not my problem. I am not proud to admit that, but that's what it is.
By default, i will never read or even consider the results from those corrupt journals. Every one knows who they are. I know the select group of journals i can trust in my field, and that's it.
It's mostly sad that if you are not part of the right groups (read, country), you'll have to struggle to be taken seriously. Because those journals are clearly associated with certain countries.
A story of have and have nots, also in science. A sad tale of privilege or lack thereof.
Antoine's post is quite interesting too (responding to Mechanic asking why increasing OP_return would be useful).
You know why, you're just engaging in bad faith. But i'll repeat the reason for anyone lurking who's not aware.
The point of making it bigger was that some applications want to have a proof of publication for a modicum amount of data (like Lightning does) in case a specific transaction in an offchain protocol is broadcast.
This data needs to be in the non-witness part of the transaction, so they can't use the (cheaper and already-available) inscription mechanism. They also cannot use OP_RETURN outputs because of the misguided 80-byte policy limit on those.
If they only wanted to store data onchain, they wouldn't be too concerned about policy limits. They could just have leveraged private APIs to miners (as they unfortunately already do for other transactions in their protocol), or even just used Libre Relay.
But what they are really interested in isn't to store this small amount of data, is to do so while using the p2p transaction relay network. This is why the policy limits were a binding constraint for them, and are not one for people who just want to store arbitrary data onchain regardless of how it gets there. The reason why they want to use the p2p transaction relay network is because their transactions are time-dependant (again, like in Lightning) and the p2p transaction relay network is the best mechanism available today to propagate your transaction to as many miners as possible in a timely manner, while making it hard for an adversary to prevent its propagation.
Because they wouldn't give up this property, important to the security of their protocol, they routed around the OP_RETURN policy limit by storing the data in unspendable outputs instead. This method is strictly more harmful to everybody, and it was incentivized by the misguided policy limits on OP_RETURN outputs (which don't achieve anything anymore since inscriptions and since people have started being serious about bypassing mempool policy).
Because the policy limit on OP_RETURN outputs was not achieving anything but incentivizing harmful behaviour, Bitcoin Core contributors decided collectively after long discussions to get rid of it.
Too many to count. Luckily, it has been years.
Because I'm on SN, let me mention the one around the time I was working at UT Austin. I went to 6th Street to see a soccer game in a bar with a friend. I drank too much. I then, for some reason, decided it'd be a good time to go back to my office at UT and get some work done. It must have been at midnight or so. I decided to go to the bathroom, which was near my office, and for some weird reason, decided to get partially undressed before going there. Bad luck for me, I locked myself out of my office with clothes still inside. I still had some shorts, but no shoes and no shirt. There was no one else around in the office, and as it was the weekend, I did not expect to find a solution until Monday to get my key back from the office. So, my drunk mind thought it'd be a good idea to walk barefoot and bare-chested all the way through town to where I was living with some roommates. I eventually made it home, but got to explain myself several times to random people on the street, asking why I was walking around like that through town. It took more than an hour to get home as I was living pretty far by foot. My roommates had a good laugh when I knocked on the door to let me in.
A good reminder that 6th Street was not a place I should frequent often.
A big fear is that Google Maps’ dominance could displace competitors like Naver and Kakao, if it was allowed into the country
This is the main and, at this point, only, real reason for the current situation I think. All the rest makes for a nice story, but politicians are fully in the hands of the Chaebol, this is what steers most decisions.
For example, Google could potentially replace local providers on platforms that rely on online maps – like Airbnb and Uber, which do work in South Korea but use Korean mapping tools. The number of apps relying on Korean mapping tools – like rideshare platform Kakao T – could dwindle with Google on the scene.
(emphasis mine)
Only partially true. Yes, you can use Uber's platform, but you won't end up in local Minsu's car. You'll end up with a licensed taxi driver without any special treatment that makes Uber sometimes a nice experience in other countries. Uber ended up in a same battle with the government and local special interest groups that they had to bend over and make so many concessions that it's uber, but just in name. I as an individual cannot sign up to Uber as a driver.
Airbnb is going the same way. I used to put up my place when travelling to make some extra cash, that's become impossible without going through so many legal hoops making it only worth my while doing it as a full time job.
Not saying those are bad things. Uber and Airbnb have destroyed a lot in other countries, so maybe letting Google do the same here is not really in anyone's interest other than Mr Eric Weng who struggles when travelling to South Korea~~
Universities arrange courses on how to write a successful application and hire consultants to support this. Academics are assessing lists of past grantees to see how to position their research and steer toward “ERC-compatible” research. And above all, they spend months writing a proposal, with a funding success rate of a bit above 10 percent.
As a side note, LLMs have completely changed what it means to write a research proposal now. For better or worse, time will tell. I hope time will be spent better.
I ended up doing economics, which has been fine, but part of me always wonders.
Come back. Just treat those years doing economics as your patent-clerk years~~ (I imagine the reference is clear).
When I started doing my PhD, after a few weeks, i got hit by the politics going on in the lab, including the fact one postdoc may or may not have slept with my boss to further her career. My illusion of people doing science for the sake of science got shattered. It's not all sunshine even in fundamental physics.
Luckily, i later got to work with people who truly love the science and have a level of intellectual integrity i can only aspire too.
When I see the type of content these days explaining abstract stuff very intuitively, i realize i was born a decade or two too early (for other reasons, I'm happy to have been born at the time I was). The Fourier transform content on 3Blue1Brown's channel is amazing for instance. Or maybe i just wasn't interested enough at the time to look for it. Anyhow, i know where to look when time comes for my son.
I ran a rather successful routing node too, at some point, it was top50 when I closed it. I had hardware and software problems, hitting all at once. But as you say, luckily, the community is great; Nitesh and others spent hours helping me recover locked funds.
I'm not certain if I'll reach out to authorities as I don't think they would have much to investigate.
Imagine explaining lightning liquidity to your local cop~~
The only thing I'll add, and this might be considered honest advice to your friend, is that telling people that "statistically, they're wrong", doesn't help.
For sure. I don't think he does. His wife even less. They don't live in an ivory tower in the middle of EU-Brussels. She hands out soup in the parks of Brussels, where illegal immigrants gather before trying to make it to the UK (many don't want to apply in Belgium because applying in one EU country automatically voids your application in another one... and the UK is the end goal for many). She sees the misery firsthand. She sees the bad job politicians are doing at handling this immigration crisis. She also sees the good that other people are doing.
I would much rather hear someone say, "We hear you. Things are getting worse for people in some places, and we want to take that seriously. But if you are fearful of going out, please know that the incidents you see online are extremely rare and amplified to generate online controversy. This doesn't lessen our responsibility to make everyone feel safe, we just want everyone to have an accurate picture of the situation."
But much more common you just hear, "It's exaggerated" or "The statistics don't back that up"... which is just not helpful.
Very well put. I'll keep this advice at heart.
I agree, communication can make all the difference.
I don't know the US, so I can't speak for what is happening there. But in my biased, likely liberal, opinion, sending the military to handle the crisis will not solve the problem. I don't think Europe has gone that way, just yet, but I hope that's not how they will try to make people feel safer.
I believe social workers in problematic areas play a much more important, yet often invisible, role in addressing how people feel in certain areas and how immigrants can stay away from crime.
And fighting propaganda is critical in getting an accurate picture of the situation. Twitter is not where one will find such a picture.
Completely inappropriate segue: immigration is here to stay, much as the spam on BTC's blockchain. Filtering will not work. One has to figure out how to work/live with it and/or use it to one's advantage. Same as Korea, which will likely need immigration to counter the very low birthrate.
Initially, based on personal experience and talking to many friends and family who live in Europe.
More recently, talking to a contact who is working at the EU level in Brussels and whose likely next job will be to combat propaganda on Twitter. He gave me a rudimentary rundown on how many of these channels operate and it seems to be quite orchestrated (language specific, keyword optimization, in response to current events for better reach,...). And it does not match reality. Yes, there is a large increase in immigration, yes, that comes with an increase in petty
crime. Yes, some cities see an increase in drug related violence due to cartels fighting over control of certain areas. But no, people are not walking the streets in fear of getting gunned down by a cartel member or getting raped by an immigrant, because it really does not happen the level portrayed on Twitter. Also, it's extremely localized to very specific areas in the big cities which have always been hotspots for crime. It's very easy to pick a video from one of these events and amplify it to make it look like it happens everywhere.
I agree mainstream media is likely downplaying some of the problems, but Twitter is exaggerating it. And if i have to choose between these two extremes, i prefer the former as the latter clearly exacerbates it by pitching people against each other.
Incidentally, and anecdotally, that EU institution friend's wife works for Fedasil in Belgium. A Belgian agency responsible for the reception of asylum seekers. What she reports is misery and suffering on the migrant's side, with the "locals" being insulated from this misery. It's a them problem, not an us problem, for many Belgians. Belgians mostly keep living their life, with their own problems to worry about.
Just to be clear, i am not saying there are no problems. It's just not happening at the level and scale portrayed by those clickbait accounts that retweet the bots.