ArchRecord

@ArchRecord@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The recipient doesn’t get any identifying data about you, because the data that shows the link was clicked does not identify you as an individual, since it’s passed through privacy-preserving protocols.

  To further clarify the exact data available to any party:

  • The ad marketplace only knows that someone, somewhere clicked the link.
  • Mozilla knows that roughly x users have clicked sponsored links overall.
  • The company you went to from that sponsored link knows that your IP/browser visited at X time, and you clicked through a sponsored link from the ad marketplace

  There isn’t much of a technical difference between this, and someone seeing an ad in-person where they type in a link, from a practical privacy perspective.

  Their implementation is completely different from traditional profile/tracking-based methods of advertising.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Ask the lawmakers who wrote the laws with vague language, because according to them, that kind of activity could be considered a sale.

  As a more specific example that is more one-sided, but still not technically a “sale,” Mozilla has sponsored links on the New Tab page. (they can be disabled of course)

  These links are provided by a third-party, relatively privacy protecting ad marketplace. Your browser downloads a list of links from them if you have sponsored links turned on, and no data is actually sent to their service about you. If you click a sponsored link, a request is sent using a protocol that anonymizes your identity, that tells them the link was clicked. That’s it, no other data about your identity, browser, etc.

  This generates revenue for Mozilla that isn’t reliant on Google’s subsidies, that doesn’t actually sell user data. Under these laws, that would be classified as a sale of user data, since Mozilla technically transferred data from your device (that you clicked the sponsored link) for a benefit. (financial compensation)

  However, I doubt anyone would call that feature “selling user data.” But, because the law could do so, they have to clarify that in their terms, otherwise someone could sue them saying “you sold my data” when all they did was send a small packet to a server saying that some user, somewhere clicked the sponsored link.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is already revising its new Firefox terms to clarify how it handles user data⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Some jurisdictions classify “sale” as broadly as “transfer of data to any other company, for a ‘benefit’ of any kind” Benefit could even be non-monetary in terms of money being transferred for the data, it could be something as broadly as “the browser generally improving using that data and thus being more likely to generate revenue.”

  To avoid frivolous lawsuits, Mozilla had to update their terms to clarify this in order to keep up with newer laws.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't we go back to small phones?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus they don’t support GrapheneOS. (or rather, GrapheneOS doesn’t support them due to it being too expensive to support more than one model while also not having the same hardware integrity measures that Pixels have) It’s the only thing stopping me from getting them for my next phone, because while I don’t necessarily need the fastest processor, highest resolution screen, etc, I do need a phone that won’t break over time until it becomes useless in a few years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  How are they getting our data?

  By setting up small pieces of code that trigger when you use a given feature, and send a network request to Mozilla’s servers with either a single flag set to just show a feature was used, in general, or more additional data with context (e.g. how long the text is that users are putting into their new AI sidebar feature)

  What is the nature of the data?

  This section of their Privacy Notice explains what categories of telemetry data they collect.

  Can we do anything in about:config?

  None needed. The normal settings menu has you covered. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Firefox Data Collection and Use > Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Those damn democRATS are just a bunch of SNOWFLAKES⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hasbro said they’d make it “genderless” naming it “Potato Head” and just provide parts so the kids playing with the toys can choose what attachments to put on in order to make it look more like a “Mr,” “Ms,” or just some mix of both.

  Apparently it would only be an addition to the existing Mr and Ms line, so it wouldn’t even be replacing them.

  Conservatives then went on a tirade online complaining that the left was trying to destroy traditional family roles and indoctrinate the children by preventing them from learning the valuable lesson of family from the Potato Head toys.

  No, this isn’t satire, they actually got mad over this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Democrats Panic over President Trump’s Talk of Reforming U.S. Postal Service⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Trump has not established a specific plan

  Democrats panic over guy with no plan saying we should magically make a thing different.

  We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money

  Even though the controllable loss was reduced by over $400m in just 2024, and the only increased uncontrolled losses were from things like pensions, y’know, the thing that people need to retire after doing work that serves the whole country, I guess we can always make it profitable by jacking up the cost of every single package delivery! Cuts for the working class!

  And it will be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.

  Merger! Business words! We’ve fixed the system! If it remains the same Postal Service, but undergoes a merger, then that just implies the US government buying another entity to merge it into USPS. And if that’s not what he meant, then we get privatization with private shareholders demanding costs must rise to pay them profits on top of the existing cost to provide the service. Cost cutting!

  Following his remarks, Democrat members of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Trump urging him to abandon any plans to reform USPS (emphasis added)

  “Your reported efforts to dismantle the Postal Service as an independent agency would directly undermine the affordability and reliability of the U.S. postal system”

  “We urge you to abandon immediately any plans that would either privatize the Postal Service or undermine the independence of the Postal Service.”

  “Don’t reform this thing” is the same as “don’t dismantle, privatize, or undermine the independence of this agency” now? What a conflation.

  Seriously, this entire article is just “Trump says he wants to do things to take an existing system that already works and either privatize or cut funding for it” and Democrats going “don’t do that we all still need to get our mail at a reasonable rate”

  Don’t forget, private companies are under no obligation to provide service to any area deemed unprofitable, whereas the USPS is required to do so. And what areas are the most likely to be unprofitable for delivery companies? Rural areas. Which areas have the highest population of conservatives? Rural areas. If Trump manages to successfully implement his plan, don’t be surprised and come out with the whole “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face” argument.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  See:

  • MindShift
  • Cox Media Group (Alternative non-subscriberwalled link here)
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the same Obsidian Canvas document open in Obsidian, and Hi-Canvas:

  Image

  Image

  They’re not fully cross compatible, but as another user mentioned, the open source spec being worked on is picking up steam as the Open Canvas Working Group (OCWG) and even larger industry canvas platforms are trying to make the format something they can easily import and export in that open format.

  So hopefully you won’t have to worry about migration much longer :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While that’s technically possible, it’s very difficult, and in my opinion, highly unlikely.

  • All notes are stored in markdown, which is compatible with any other markdown-compatible app. It’s not just a note format, it’s a fire exit.
  • Even the canvas files are now having an interoperable format created, with other industry-leading canvas style software, and that whole process was started by the Obsidian team voluntarily
  • All plugins must be open-source unless explicitly and clearly stated, and such plugins are only listed on a case-by-case basis, which makes even additional plugin-specific functionality added to Obsidian easier to port over to other software if Obsidian ever does lock things down
  • They don’t have VC investors, and have mentioned a few times that they won’t be accepting investment in the future, since they don’t exactly have very high costs. They’re explicitly anti “VCware.” Features like Sync that depend on their server hosting bill being paid are only used by paying users, and most users will never have to use Obsidian servers past downloading and updating the app, and installing a few plugins of a few megabytes in size. Costs aren’t likely to rise in any substantial way, and their team is small enough to make it profitable to operate at their existing scale.
  • Actions like this are literally proactively recognizing that something wasn’t in line with their manifesto, and wasn’t beneficial for users, so they’re removing it. Companies planning to enshittify don’t usually remove enshittified/negative features they already have before re-enshittifying. They want you used to the enshittification from the start.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A few reasons:

  1. Market prices are more often determined by speculation than actual intrinsic value. People will say that the market is “efficient” in the sense that everything is valued efficiently based on the value it’s worth, but take one look at meme stocks and you’ll see that prices can easily be influenced by large volumes of purchases instead of any actual intrinsic value in the corporation being invested in. A lot of money being funneled into index funds can lead to the price of stocks continually increasing without actual value of the underlying companies being taken into account as much as you would think.

  2. Fascism is supported by, and continues to support capitalism. Corporations benefit from capitalism, especially under a system where safeguards are removed and businesses can make larger profit margins as a result.

  3. A lot of the changes Trump is making hurt working people, but don’t hurt corporations. (and often even help corporations directly) For instance, he’s making union busting easier, knows that any tariffs can simply be passed on by the companies without shrinking their margins, (just costing you more), is cracking down on legal immigration to the point that illegal migrant workers are even easier to exploit with the threat of deportation, etc. A lot of the bad things Trump is doing will only affect us, not corporations or the capital owning class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, whether or not someone believes they have gender dysphoria shouldn’t affect if they get therapy or not. I’d recommend it regardless, it helps a bunch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Study Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The only beneficial use I’ve had for “AI” (LLMs) has just been rewriting text, whether that be to re-explain a topic based on a source, or, for instance, sort and shorten/condense a list.

  Everything other than that has been completely incorrect, unreadably long, context-lacking slop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepSeek Proves It: Open Source is the Secret to Dominating Tech Markets (and Wall Street has it wrong).⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So are these techiques so novel and breaktrough?

  The general concept, no. (it’s reinforcement learning, something that’s existed for ages)

  The actual implementation, yes. (training a model to think using a separate XML section, reinforcing with the highest quality results from previous iterations using reinforcement learning that naturally pushes responses to the highest rewarded outputs) Most other companies just didn’t assume this would work as well as throwing more data at the problem.

  This is actually how people believe some of OpenAI’s newest models were developed, but the difference is that OpenAI was under the impression that more data would be necessary for the improvements, and thus had to continue training the entire model with ** additional new information**, whereas DeepSeek decided to simply scrap that part altogether and go solely for reinforcement learning.

  Will we now have a burst of deepseek like models everywhere?

  Probably, yes. Companies and researchers are already beginning to use this same methodology. Here’s a writeup about S1, a model that performs up to 27% better than OpenAI’s best model. S1 used Supervised Fine Tuning, and did something so basic, that people hadn’t previously thought to try it: Just making the model think longer by modifying terminating XML tags.

  This was released days after R1, based on R1’s initial premise, and creates better quality responses. Oh, and of course, it cost $6 to train.

  So yes, I think it’s highly probable that we see a burst of new models, or at least improvements to existing ones. (Nobody has a very good reason to make a whole new model of a different name/type when they can simply improve the one they’re already using and have implemented)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course there are, but as has already been shown through many attempts at creating welfare programs that directly test the means of the recipients, the administrative cost to provide funds to people based on highly specific factors about themselves (e.g. total net worth, rate of income, spending, cost to employ farm employees, profit margins, etc etc etc) can cost significantly more than blanket assistance.

  It’s one of the reasons why UBI works so well compared to traditional welfare in administrative costs, since it doesn’t need to be means tested.

  Now obviously this isn’t a one-to-one comparison, but let’s say we create an index just like the one at question here, but it’s specifically the “poor farmer’s index.” To do so, we need to:

  1. Request extensive documentation from all farmers applying
  2. Somebody then has to verify the net assets, income, expenses, etc of all farmers who apply to be listed in the index via that paperwork…
  3. …and continue to verify that data over time, as it obviously changes year-to-year. The eligibility of every participant would have to be re-verified regularly, otherwise someone could become not poor, but stay in the index. This is a perpetual expense that grows linearly over time as more people are added to the index.

  Who will do that work? Now somebody needs to be paid to do this, or spend many hours doing volunteer work just to verify eligibility. Now, in the end yes, that kind of system would be ideal for determining who needs the most help, and I would pick that system every time over a “black farmers index” if it existed in a functional form.

  The problem is that it has significantly higher costs and requires consistent administration over time, something that is obviously hard to expect from a random volunteer project that, based on their staff information, only has 2 “Data Entry and Logistics” roles that are currently filled. Imagine two people handling the ingesting, data entry, and administrative tasks for all the farmers applying to this index across the entire United States, having to verify every single individual’s financial situation. It’s difficult, and costly.

  So yes, as I stated just earlier in this comment, and in my original post, of course I’d prefer an index that directly assesses the economic viability of every individual. However, because doing so is costly, and we know that race is a good proxy for the estimation of general wealth, it makes sense to use that for a small, relatively inexpensive, independently run online site, that now only needs to verify one factor, that doesn’t change over time, to get a good enough approximation of lack of wealth.

  This entire discussion revolves not around the ideals of what we should have, but what is feasible. If it is not feasible at the current point in time for such an organization to directly assess the needs of individuals, it makes sense to use a substantially cheaper to assess proxy, instead of not being able to have any index at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Group A is historically not discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $100,000.

  Group B is historically discriminated against, and now on average, has a net worth of $80,000.

  In both groups, some will own more or less than the average, but the largest number of poorer individuals reside in Group B, because the average is lower.

  On a per person basis, everyone has $20,000 to spend. Should they give it:

  1. Exclusively to Group A? (and “discriminate” against Group B, but raise their average net worth to $120,000)
  2. Exclusively to Group B? (and “discriminate” against Group A, but raise their average net worth to $100,000)
  3. Split evenly between the two? (bringing Group A’s average to $110,000, and Group B’s average to $90,000)

  Which option is most likely to uplift the most poor people to a less poor status?

  This is why your argument of “discrimination” doesn’t hold up. The choice to make a purchase from Group A while ignoring Group B only entrenches existing wealth disparities. The choice to make a purchase from both evenly keeps the wealth disparity where it is. The choice to buy exclusively from Group B eliminates the disparity.

  This decision is not being made because of race on its own, it is being made because of the common socioeconomic context within which people of color often reside. If white people were the ones who had a history of economic discrimination, even if all other actions regarding past and current racism remained equal, then economically supporting the white farmers specifically would make the most sense, because they would be most economically disadvantaged.

  You cannot have a meritocracy when people start on uneven ground, and there is a very demonstrable difference in existing generational wealth between the races, as a direct consequence of past injustices. The way we fix that as individuals, and as a society, is by doing what we can to elevate groups experiencing a disparity until they no longer do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Should we just stop using statistics then? Numbers don’t matter if they are about people? (I genuinely want an answer here. Should we?)

  Statistically, one societal class of people needs more support than the other to have the exact same quality of life, generational wealth, and opportunities. Thus, when deciding who to buy, in this case, produce from, it simply makes sense to purchase from the group most disadvantaged, until their disadvantage is no bigger than the other group, and we can then switch from buying from “small black farmers directly” to “all small farmers directly,” because all of them would then need a near identical level of support, financially speaking, to get the same outcomes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky now has 30 million users.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It actually does exist, at least on Mastodon, but is still very janky (e.g. old posts aren’t moved over due to “technical limitations”)

  Automatically makes people unfollow your old account and re-follow your new account, then makes your old instance’s link redirect to your new instance’s one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky now has 30 million users.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t personally think it’s because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but… everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren’t averse to federation, in concept or practice.

  Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter’s UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.

  “Bluesky” feels like a breath of fresh air, while “Mastodon” just sounds like… well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.

  So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky now has 30 million users.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.

  It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.

  They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK in the U.S., you can buy produce directly from black farmers and they will ship it to you. It can cost less than your supermarket and will piss off people in power.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because, on average, black people are more economically disadvantaged than white people.

  Choosing to explicitly buy from black farmers will, on average, tend to support those with the least financial means out of the general population of farmers, whereas choosing to explicitly buy from white farmers will, on average, tend to support those who are already more financially advantaged.

  One side is directly choosing to help those most likely to be economically disadvantaged, the other would be explicitly ignoring those with the least means in order to help those who already have the most, thus the situations are not quite comparable.

  I personally would prefer an index that directly assessed farmers based on overall wealth to determine who you should buy from, but because that’s extraordinarily difficult to constantly update & maintain, verify, etc, it can just be easier to divide among racial lines since that still tends to produce a grouping that is relatively similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Edward Snowden slams Nvidia's RTX 50-series 'F-tier value,' whistleblows on lackluster VRAM capacity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  An infamous former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower has unexpectedly shared his opinion on the state of the graphics card market.

  Man who did big cool thing once also has opinions on unrelated thing, news at 11.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Find Old Accounts for Deletion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been checking my password manager for over a year now, and I’m still finding more old accounts I have to delete!

  My 120 deleted or pending deletion accounts only make up about 1/2 of the ones I need to delete overall. 😶

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to Find Old Accounts for Deletion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  TLDR;

  • Check your Password Manager/Stored Browser Credentials
  • If on Apple devices, check your Keychain
  • If on Android or using/used Chrome, check your Google Password Manager (enabled if you chose to save passwords to your Google account)
  • Search old email inboxes
  • Search for your email in data breaches
  • Search for old usernames you re-used across sites

  I personally would also add searching your browser cookies, since some browsers will keep around old cookies for years if you don’t clear them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meet Orbit, Mozilla's AI Assistant Extension for Firefox⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I can understand the feature for “asking a question,” since if you’re looking at some gigantic paper, or something where specific information is scattered and you just don’t want to scroll too much constantly searching for it, that could speed it up, but I can’t for the life of me understand why you’d want to just summarize the content itself, presumably for the purpose of just shortening the read.

  Most content you read is going to be long for a reason, usually because there’s these little things called context and nuance in there. Shocking. And if the content you’re reading is deliberately long and obtuse to gain more read time to keep your eyes on the ads… don’t read that content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.

  They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.

  For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Haha SO TRUE!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha so true!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s definitely true, I probably should have been a little more clear in my response, specifying that it can run at startup, but doesn’t always do so.

  I’ll edit my comment so nobody gets the wrong idea. Thanks for pointing that out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To put it very simply, the ‘kernel’ has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

  It runs at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game’s publisher has software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system’s activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

  It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Computers are a fundamental part of that process in modern times.

  If you were taking a test to assess how much weight you could lift, and you got a robot to lift 2,000 lbs for you, saying you should pass for lifting 2000 lbs would be stupid. The argument wouldn’t make sense. Why? Because the same exact logic applies. The test is to assess you, not the machine.

  Just because computers exist, can do things, and are available to you, doesn’t mean that anything to assess your capabilities can now just assess the best available technology instead of you.

  Like spell check? Or grammar check?

  Spell/Grammar check doesn’t generate large parts of a paper, it refines what you already wrote, by simply rephrasing or fixing typos. If I write a paragraph of text and run it through spell & grammar check, the most you’d get is a paper without spelling errors, and maybe a couple different phrases used to link some words together.

  If I asked an LLM to write a paragraph of text about a particular topic, even if I gave it some references of what I knew, I’d likely get a paper written entirely differently from my original mental picture of it, that might include more or less information than I’d intended, with different turns of phrase than I’d use, and no cohesion with whatever I might generate later in a different session with the LLM.

  These are not even remotely comparable.

  Assuming the point is how well someone conveys information, then wouldn’t many people better be better at conveying info by using machines as much as reasonable? Why should they be punished for this? Or forced to pretend that they’re not using machines their whole lives?

  This is an interesting question, but I think it mistakes a replacement for a tool on a fundamental level.

  I use LLMs from time to time to better explain a concept to myself, or to get ideas for how to rephrase some text I’m writing. But if I used the LLM all the time, for all my work, then me being there is sort of pointless.

  Because, the thing is, most LLMs aren’t used in a way that conveys info you already know. They primarily operate by simply regurgitating existing information (rather, associations between words) within their model weights. You don’t easily draw out any new insights, perspectives, or content, from something that doesn’t have the capability to do so.

  On top of that, let’s use a simple analogy. Let’s say I’m in charge of calculating the math required for a rocket launch. I designate all the work to an automated calculator, which does all the work for me. I don’t know math, since I’ve used a calculator for all math all my life, but the calculator should know.

  I am incapable of ever checking, proofreading, or even conceptualizing the output.

  If asked about the calculations, I can provide no answer. If they don’t work out, I have no clue why. And if I ever want to compute something more complicated than the calculator can, I can’t, because I don’t even know what the calculator does. I have to then learn everything it knows, before I can exceed its capabilities.

  We’ve always used technology to augment human capabilities, but replacing them often just means we can’t progress as easily in the long-term.

  Short-term, sure, these papers could be written and replaced by an LLM. Long-term, nobody knows how to write papers. If nobody knows how to properly convey information, where does an LLM get its training data on modern information? How do you properly explain to it what you want? How do you proofread the output?

  If you entirely replace human work with that of a machine, you also lose the ability to truly understand, check, and build upon the very thing that replaced you.