I have had so many "why don't you just" conversations with academics about this. I know the "why don't you just" guy is such an annoying person to talk to, but I still don't really understand why they don't just.
This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound like a solid attempt to do the thing. This shows that people care and are somewhat willing to organise about it.
But the thing I don't understand is why this can't happen at the department level? If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field, you're friends with your counterparts at the other 4. You see them in person every year. You all hate $journal. Why don't you club together and say "why don't we all have moratorium on publishing in $journal for our departments?"
No temptation for individual research groups to violate the pledge. No dependence on individual funding channels to influence the policy. Just, suddenly, $journal isn't the top publication in that field any more?
I'm sure there are lots of varied reasons why this is difficult but fundamentally it seems like the obvious approach?
> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal.
That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)
This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and therefore mine".
Maybe I am underestimating the gap in status between the "influential figures" I imagine and the people I actually know.
I see: my friend has 10-15 years of experience in their field, they have enjoyed success and basically got the equivalent of a steady stream of promotions.
I map this onto my big tech/startup experience. I mentally model them as: they are "on top of the pile" of people that still do technical work. Everyone who still has the ability to boss them around, is a manager/institutional politician type figure who wouldn't interfere in such decisions as which journal to publish in.
But probably this mapping is wrong.
Also, I probably have a poor model of what agency and independence looks like in academia. In my big tech world, I have a pretty detailed model in my head of what things I can and can't influence. I don't have this model for academia which is gonna inevitably lead to a lot of "why don't you just".
Same thing happens to me when I moan about work to my friends. They say "I thought you were the tech lead, can't you just decree a change?" and I kinda mumble "er yeah but it doesn't really work like that". So here I'm probably doing that in reverse.
For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors feel obligated towards their students, who need to get jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring decisions may not update for a few years which hurts students in the job market.
I think the call for top-down policy makes sense b/c otherwise this is like every other tragedy of the commons situation. Each of those top-level researchers also has to think, "my department has junior faculty trying to build their publications list for tenure, we have post-docs and grad-students trying to get a high-impact publication to help them land a faculty job, we have research program X which is kind of in a race with a program at that other school lower down in the top 20. If we close off opportunities with the top journals, we put all of those at a competitive disadvantage."
For the grad students especially, there’d be a career advancement incentive to still publish in the top journals. The professors might still want to publish in them just out of familiarity (with a little career incentive as well, although less pronounced than the grad students).
I think it’d be a big ask from someone whose role doesn’t typically cover that sort of decision.
There are hundreds of reputable research universities around the world. Top-5 departments can't meaningfully change the culture of a field on their own. Top-100 perhaps could, but the coordination problem is much bigger on that level.
Grant funding reporting requirements. It would be easy to say self publish for free via the institutional library. But the NIH would not like that use of their money.
> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled.
The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so much sense as a first step.
I'm no expert here and there are probably unintended consequences or other ways to game that system for profit, but even if so wouldn't that still be a better starting point?
I think that's also a good proposal, and I don't think it conflicts with the "prestigious departments stop publishing in $journal" idea at all. Probably we want both.
Only difference is that the author is writing for a wide audience and his best angle to change the world is probably to influence the thinking of future policymakers. While I am just an annoying "why don't you just" guy, my "audience" is just the friends I happen to have in prestigious research groups.
Adam M also probably has lots of friends in prestigious research groups (IIUC although he complains a lot about academia he was quite successful within it, at least on its own terms). And the fact that he instead chooses to advocate government policy changes instead of what I'm proposing, is probably a good indication that he knows something I don't about the motivatioms of influential academics.
Imagine being a scientist and reading “if you take this grant, you cannot publish your results in any of the most prominent journals in your field.” Sounds good?
But IIUC there are entire fields where basically the whole US ecosystem is funded by federal grants. So if this policy gets enacted those journals are no longer prominent.
(Maybe you'd need an exception for fields where the centre of mass for funding is well outside of the US, though).
I explain here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250811) but tl;dr it's because Universities need this system to get money and to give money. Nobody has yet proposed a solution which solves the money/prestige problem. With no money there's no research.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. It’s not (typically, as far as we know) a secret designation. We know of other companies designated as supply chain risks: Huawei, ZTE, and Kapersky are the first ones that come to mind.
> there are at least a dozen companies that provide non-Anthropic/non-OpenAI models in the cloud, many of which are dirt cheap because of how fast and good open weights are now.
Oh yeah, seems obvious now you said it, but this is a great point.
I'm constantly thinking "I need to get into local models but I dread spending all that time and money without having any idea if the end result would be useful".
But obviously the answer is to start playing with open models in the cloud!
Well they are doing that because of the nature of matrix multiplication. Specifically, LLM costs scale in the square length of a single input, let's call it N, but only linearly in the number of batched inputs.
O(M * N^2 * d)
d is a constant related to the network you're running. Batching, btw, is the reason many tools like Ollama require you to set the context length before serving requests.
Having many more inputs is way cheaper than having longer inputs. In fact, that this is the case is the reason we went for LLMs in the first place: as this allows training to proceed quickly, batching/"serving many customers" is exactly what you do during training. GPUs came in because taking 10k triangles, and then doing almost the exact same calculation batched 1920*1080 times on them is exactly what happens behind the eyes of Lara Croft.
And this is simplified because a vector input (ie. M=1) is the worst case for the hardware, so they just don't do it (and certainly not in published benchmark results). Often even older chips are hardwired to work with M set to 8 (and these days 24 or 32) for every calculation. So until you hit 20 customers/requests at the same time, it's almost entirely free in practice.
Hence: the optimization of subagents. Let's say you need an LLM to process 1 million words (let's say 1 word = 1 token for simplicity)
O(1 million words in one go) ~ 1e12 or 1 trillion operations
O(1000 times 1000 words) ~ 1e9 or 1 billion operations
O(10000 times 100 words) ~ 1e8 or 100 million operations
O(100000 times 10 words) ~ 1e7 or 10 million operations
O(one word at a time) ~ 1e6 or 1 million operations
Of course, to an extent this last way of doing things is the long known case of a recurrent neural network. Very difficult to train, but if you get it working, it speeds away like professor Snape confronted with a bar of soap (to steal a Harry Potter joke)
Nobody is saying it makes "financial sense", it's about control.
I have always taken plenty of care to try and avoid becoming dependent on big tech for my lifestyle. Succeeded in some areas failed in others.
But now AI is a part of so many things I do and I'm concerned about it. I'm dependent on Android but I know with a bit of focus I have a clear route to escape it. Ditto with GMail. But I don't actually know what I'd do tomorrow if Gemini stopped serving my needs.
I think for those of us that _can_ afford the hardware it is probably a good investment to start learning and exploring.
One particular thing I'm concerned about is that right now I use AI exclusively through the clients Google picked for me, coz it makes financial sense. (You don't seem to get free bubble money if you buy tokens via API billing, only consumer accounts). This makes me a bit of a sheep and it feels bad. There's so much innovation happening and basically I only benefit from it in the ways Google chooses.
(Admittedly I don't need local models to fix that particular issue, maybe I should just start paying the actual cost for tokens).
The law is an expression of our desire that our industry doesn't exploit forced labour. The fact that this mostly only counts when the forced labour takes place in our own country is a weird historical detail, long outdated by globalisation.
Either you think that forced labour in Malaysia is OK in which case this seems bizarre, or you think it's not OK in which case we need a way for the law to discourage forced labour in Malaysia. The only way it can do that is through the supply chain.
I think revealed preferences are more useful than a poll would be.
"Do you think forced labour in Malaysia is OK" - nobody answers yes to this.
"Are you willing to make sacrifices, such as imposing liability on local business, in order to discourage forced labour in Malaysia?" - this is the question.
This pattern applies to a lot of stuff. All politicians claim to have a solution to the housing crisis. But most "solutions" are suspiciously absent of downsides. If nothing you propose involves sacrificing anything or creating any losers I conclude you don't actually care about the housing crisis.
You can use this on your managers too. "What are we gonna do about the tech debt?" If the answer doesn't involve delaying features then you should interpret it as "nothing".
> The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
Football anime doesn’t involve real people or stakes. AI can introduce a storyline, characters, etc. It won't necessarily be as popular as the real sport but I doubt the audience is zero.
I'm aware this sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument, but I said "would a football fan watch" and the people who would watch that are not football fans.
I don't mean to denigrate it though, what I'm saying is that media would be serving a totally different purpose than the one served by professional sport today.
I guess, people are very varied, there are probably SOME strange people who watch football today with a motivation that's compatible with AI.
Also, this doesn't mean AI football wouldn't be useless. And there could even be people who watch both, since they could scratch different itches. I said I "don't give a shit" about AI art but that's not really true, it's useful, I'm glad kebab shops get a cheap way to decorate their menus. I'm sure people are getting porn generated that matches their incredibly bizarre kinks and I'm glad they get to jerk off better than they used to.
But I guess what I really am sure of is that AI can't REPLACE human art any more than it can replace football.
The problem is, we have no real understanding of what people will or will not do with this technology. Will humans only be interested in “real“ activity?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
IIUC to reliably use 3P tools you need to use API billing, right? Based on my limited experimentation this is an order of magnitude more expensive than consumer subscriptions like Claude Pro, do I have that right?
("Limited experimentation" = a few months ago I threw $10 into the Anthropic console and did a bit of vibe coding and found my $10 disappeared within a couple of hours).
If so, that would support your concern, it does kinda sound like they're selling marginal Claude Code / Gemini CLI tokens at a loss. Which definitely smells like an aggressive lockin strategy.
Technically you're still using claude CLI with this pattern so it's not 3P app calling Anthropic APIs via your OAuth token. Even if you would use Claude Code SDK, your app is 3P so it's in a gray area.
Anthropic docs is intentionally not clear about how 3P tools are defined, is it calling Claude app or the Anthropic API with the OAuth tokens?
I find the attitude of the Ladybird devs refreshing though, and it kinda aligns with my opinions about Rust.
I never fell in love with Rust or got particularly excited about adopting it. But, I just don't see a serious alternative (maybe Swift is fine for some cases but not in my field).
I believe Google's Rust journey was even more closely aligned with Ladybird: "we want memory safety, but with low impedance mismatch from C++". After like 5 years of trying to figure something like that out they seemed to go "OK actually fuck that we just have to use Rust and deal with the challenges it brings for a C++ shop".
If there are people filming on their dancefloor you're in a shitty club.
OK, so the author and a handful of people they quite (including some global superstars who obviously don't represent any kind of norm) seem to be finding themselves in shitty clubs more often than they used to. And therefore we conclude all clubs are shitty now?
Nightlife is the least heterogeneous and least globalised form of public life that exists in "the west". If someone thinks they can make sweeping statements about the state of raving writ large, I don't really take them seriously.
Anyone else that has been outside in the past 10 years can see it. Doesn’t have to be dancing it can be eating in a restaurant, going to a public pool, walking down the street. Younger folks absolutely are feeling the sense of everything being recorded. It sucks because you don’t know what will pop up online so a lot will not do anything (swim, dance, do anything moderately weird).
This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound like a solid attempt to do the thing. This shows that people care and are somewhat willing to organise about it.
But the thing I don't understand is why this can't happen at the department level? If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field, you're friends with your counterparts at the other 4. You see them in person every year. You all hate $journal. Why don't you club together and say "why don't we all have moratorium on publishing in $journal for our departments?"
No temptation for individual research groups to violate the pledge. No dependence on individual funding channels to influence the policy. Just, suddenly, $journal isn't the top publication in that field any more?
I'm sure there are lots of varied reasons why this is difficult but fundamentally it seems like the obvious approach?
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