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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Looks like it is happening
antognini wrote 36 min ago:
I think the long term impact of this will be to strengthen the
importance of social ties in academic publishing. As it is there are
so many papers published in many fields that people tend to filter for
papers published by big names and major institutions. But the
inevitable torrent of AI slop will overwhelm anyone who is looking for
any gems coming from outsiders. I suspect the net effect will be to
make it even more important that you join a big name institution in
order to be taken seriously.
seg_lol wrote 4 hours 1 min ago:
If someone mentions Sabine Hossenfelder and it isn't to expose her as a
rage-bait intellectual dark web grifter, then it puts that person in a
suspect light.
gtirloni wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Who's spending money to write bots to comment on obscure (to me)
websites and why?
evolighting wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
Bot comments are everywhere( no only obscure websites ). I suppose
it's because someone just want to try them out and it is really
affordable.
tempodox wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
Convenience dictates that we will be drowning in slop as long as
convenience lets us rank academics by number of publications. Publish
or perish?
AvAn12 wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies
pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get
the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the
circumstantial picture stinks.
MoonWalk wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
What is?
NooneAtAll3 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
Clickbait title
what would be a better one?
lloydatkinson wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Isn't there a rule about vague titles like this?
hhsuey wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
What's happening? I hate click bait titles like these.
card_zero wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
People used to spam out masses of low-quality scientific papers in a
scattergun approach to gain fame and citations, and they still do,
but now they do it more, because LLMs churn it out faster than
students.
mianos wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
This title should have been editorialised. It's like a headline from
the daily mirror.
tombert wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
I like AI, I use Codex and ChatGPT like most people are, but I have to
say that I am pretty tired of low-effort crap taking over everything,
particularly YouTube.
There have always been content mills, but there was still some cost
with producing the low-effort "Top 10" or "Iceberg Examination" videos.
Now I will turn on a video about any topic, watch it for three minutes,
immediately get a kind of uncanny vibe, and then the AI voice will make
a pronunciation mistake (e.g. confusing wind, like the weather effect
or the winding of a spring), or the script starts getting redundant or
repetitive in ways that are common with AI.
And I suspect these kinds of videos will become more common as time
goes on. The cost to producing these videos is getting close to "free"
meaning that it doesn't take much to make a profit on them, even if
their views are relatively low per-video.
If AI has taught me anything, it's that there still is no substitute
for effort. I'm sure AI is used in plenty of places where I don't
notice it, because the people who used it still put in effort to make a
good product. There are people who don't just make a prompt like "make
me a fifteen minute video about Chris Chan" and "generate me a
thumbnail with Chris Chan with the caption 'he's gone too far'", and
instead will use AI as a tool to make something neat.
Genuine effort is hard, and rare, and these AI videos can give the
facsimile of something that prior to 2023 was high effort. I hate it.
bitbytebane wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
STOP CITING YOUTUBERS AS A CREDIBLE SOURCE OF ANYTHING.
Chinjut wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
Note the following comment by Jerry Ling: "The effect goes away if you
search properly using the original submission date instead of the most
recent submission date. By using most recent submission date, your
analysis is biased because weâre so close to the beginning of 2026 so
ofc we will see a peak thatâs just people who have recently modified
their submission."
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
The post has been edited with an update at the top now.
myhf wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
The last-modified-date effect is even more important, because it can
be used to support whatever the latest fad is, without needing to
adapt data or arguments to the specifics of that fad.
8organicbits wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
> when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable
in quality from [...]
Given that arXiv lacks peer review, I'm not clear what quality bar is
being referenced here.
ModernMech wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
I mean... I dunno I wish the AI could write my papers. I ask it to and
it's just bad. The research models return research that doesn't look
anything like the research I do on my own -- half of it is wrong, the
rest is shallow, and it's hardly comprehensive despite having access to
everything (it will fail to find things unless you specifically prompt
for them, and even then if the signal is too low it'll be wrong about
it). So I can't even trust it to do something as simple as a literature
review.
Insofar as most research is awful, it's true that the AI is producing
research that looks and sounds like most of it out there today. But
common-case research is not what propels society forward. If we try to
automate research with the mediocrity machine, we'll just get mediocre
research.
pavel_lishin wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
Apparently "hep-th" stands for "High Energy Physics - Theory".
guerrilla wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
Website's down. What was it about?
hmokiguess wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply
motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts
its bottom line. If professors can get more grants and more
publications in less time with less spending, of course they are going
to be doing that. This isn't just because of AI, but also because of
how this system is designed in the first place.
Certhas wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
This is stupid. Nobody motivated by money is in academia. Academics
are motivated by curiosity, but also prestige, vanity and the wish to
hire students and collaborators. And on top of human vanity working
it's magic, the ideology that everything should be a market and
competition is the final form of social organisation, has pervaded
academia just as much as everything else.
I agree that the system of publishing papers to gain prestige to gain
resources to publish papers was already broken pre AI.
dang wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
> This is stupid.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes or
calling names? This is in the site guidelines: [1] .
Your comment would be fine without that first bit.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
noslenwerdna wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
just replace "money" with "prestige" and I think the above comment
works just fine
jasperry wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in
personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who
seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just
curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for
promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That
money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab
equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a
primary driver in the background.
tombert wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
My dad said he stopped being a professor because of that.
He liked the research, and he even liked teaching, but he
absolutely hated having to constantly try and find grant money.
He said he ended up seeing everyone as "potential funders" and
less like "people" because his job kind of depended on it, and it
ended up burning him out. He lasted four years and went into
engineering.
I don't know that "motivation" is the right word for it, because
I don't think professors like having to find grant money all the
time. I think most people who get PhDs and try to go to academia
do it for a genuine love for the subject, and they find the
grant-searching to be a necessary evil part of the job; it's more
"survival" than regular motivation, though I am admittedly
splitting hairs here.
mathisfun123 wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
> I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply
motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts
its bottom line.
no shit - could've asked literally anyone that's finished their phd
to save yourself the conjecturing/hypothesizing about this fact.
dang wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with
respect to the stable numbers of previous years
This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of
submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been
surprisingly stableâfluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10
yearsâhas recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double,
though...yet.
snowhale wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
curious whether the quality distribution changes too, or just the
volume. arXiv can't really downvote noise but HN can at least
flag/bury it. might be why the doubling shows up on arXiv first and
HN is catching up more slowly.
Retr0id wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
I'd love to see some graphs
hunterpayne wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
Would it matter? Even before AI, most papers couldn't be
replicated. Do we really think this is going to help the
situation? Even if some of the AI papers are amazing, will anyone
ever read them if most of the papers are useless? More research !=
more useful research. This is the logical outcome of publish or
perish and Q-rankings being the main metric used.
"When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -
Goodhart's law
Retr0id wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
Did you reply to the wrong thing?
rob wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
I would imagine tons of them are bots. They're getting hard to
distinguish, they don't do the normal tropes any longer. They'll type
in all lowercase, they'll have the creator post manually to throw you
off, they'll make multiple comments within 45 seconds that normal
human couldn't do. All things I've witnessed here over the past
couple of weeks. And those are just the ones I've caught.
readitalready wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Is it because there's a lot more AI related content as the industry
quickly shifts? Or is it bots submitting content?
dang wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
I believe it's the former, which of course does not exclude the
latter.
marginalia_nu wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
I've noticed a pretty significant uptick in new accounts posting
complete garbage. I don't mean the comments are bad, they're not
even words in many cases.
I collected a few of them: [1] But it also seems some topics (in
particular AI) attract a lot of accounts that post incredibly low
quality comments, far below the quality you'd expect from HN. Ofte
it's in reasonable English, but it's just inane reddit-level
drivel. Unclear if these topics attract low quality posters, or if
these are bot accounts.
Also looking at the three first pages of /noobcomments, we find 28
comments with EM-dashes in them. That's not proof of AI, but if
you compare with /newcomments, you find exactly one EM-dash going
back as far. That's a bit of a statistical aberration.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130684
rob wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
I've witnessed bots here on accounts that are years old with no
history that start posting multiple times in a short timeframe
suddenly after being dormant forever. Makes you wonder how
they're getting these old accounts. It's not just new ones.
mrguyorama wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
Account takeover is a thing that happens. I doubt HN has the
best measures against credential stuffing.
dragontamer wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
Black market accounts. Some human made them years ago for a
price, they are sat on by some black market / grey market guy
and now he's selling the accounts for a profit.
Old accounts from multiple social media platforms has a $$$$$
value.
krapp wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
I would wager the vast majority are alt accounts of existing
users. People who don't want to risk their karma or reputation
but who do want to go mask off for certain subjects. After that
it's bound to be bots run by HN users. I just don't think HN is
so popular that the rush of green accounts popping up actually
represents new users. Maybe I'm wrong , though.
agoodusername63 wrote 7 hours 18 min ago:
Reddit has been shedding its techy enthusiast crowd for the
past few years with the combination of policy changes and
insufficient moderation against LLM bots. I wonder if thatâs
contributing.
cyanydeez wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
It's likely people with mediocre ideas but access to free LLM tools
are able to get over the care-risk-reward activation energy and
consequently submit their ideas with the help of LLMs.
hedgehog wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Robots coming for todsacerdoti's job.
oblio wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
We need the equivalent of Bayesian filtering for email spam and of
Page Rank for search.
Now that I think of this, whoever solves this well will have the next
hyperscaler.
gus_massa wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
I agree, but then you get [1] It has a lot of red flags. Second
(re)post of dormant account, vive coded, AI, the biological model
is horrible. But it was a nice project, 5/5 would upvote again.
Perhaps the important detail is "[I] spent about a month on it."
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719222
vermilingua wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
Is it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the
organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?
dang wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
We don't know yet.
minimaxir wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts
or new accounts?
vunderba wrote 36 min ago:
Another very common tactic Iâve seen is accounts with 1 karma
thatâve been aged a few months.
dang wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
Don't know that yet either! at least that one isn't hard to answer,
it just needs a bit of spare time.
general_reveal wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
âAnd further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books
there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.â
- Ecclesiastes 12:12 (KJV)
I suppose weâre entering TURBO mode for of âmaking many books there
is no endâ.
sidrag22 wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
Noise is going to be the coming years biggest issue for so many fields.
A losing battle like arguing with a conspiracy minded relative, you can
slowly and clearly address one conspiracy and disprove it, by the time
you do, they are deep into 8 new ones.
zoogeny wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
One thing I have been guilty of, even though I am an AI maximalist, is
asking the question: "If AI is so good, why don't we see X". Where X
might be (in the context of vibe coding) the next redis, nginx, sqlite,
or even linux.
But I really have to remember, we are at the leading edge here. Things
take time. There is an opening (generation) and a closing
(discernment). Perhaps AI will first generate a huge amount of noise
and then whittle it down to the useful signal.
If that view is correct, then this is solid evidence of the
amplification of possibility. People will decry the increase of noise,
perhaps feeling swamped by it. But the next phase will be separating
the wheat from the chaff. It is only in that second phase that we will
really know the potential impact.
lmeyerov wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
I've been calling this Software Collapse, similar to AI Model
Collapse.
An AI vibe-coded project can port tool X to a more efficient Y
language implementation and pull in algorithm ideas A, B, C from
competing implementations. And another competing vibe coding team can
do the same, except Z language implementation with algorithms A, B,
skip C, and add D. However, fundamentally new ideas aren't being
added: This is recombination, translation, and reapplication of
existing ideas and tools. As the cost to clone good ideas goes to
zero, software converges towards the existing best ideas & tools
across the field and stops differentiating.
It's exciting as a senior engineer or subject matter expert, as we
can act on the good ideas we already knew but never had the time or
budget for. But projects are also getting less differentiated and
competitive. Likewise, we're losing the collaborative filtering era
of people voting with their feet on which to concentrate resources
into making a success. Things are getting higher quality but bland.
The frontier companies are pitching they can solve AI Creativity,
which would let us pay them even more and escape the ceiling that is
Software Collapse. However, as an R&D engineer who uses these things
every day, I'm not seeing it.
titzer wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
The dark side of this is that everyone has graduated to prompt
engineering and there's no one with expertise left who can debug
it. We'll be entirely dependent on AIs to do the debugging too.
When whoever controls the AIs decides to enshittify that service,
we'll be truly screwed. That is, if we can't run competitive models
locally at reasonable efficiency and price.
I don't know how this will play out, except that I've been so cowed
by the past 15 years of enshittification that I don't feel hopeful.
zozbot234 wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
> Things are getting higher quality but bland.
"Bland" is not a bad thing. The FLOSS ecosystem we have today is
quite "bland" already compared to the commercial and
shareware/free-to-use software ecosystem of the 1980s and 1990s.
It's also higher quality by literally orders of magnitude, and
saves a comparable amount of pointless duplicative effort.
Hopefully AI will be a similar story, especially if human
reviewing/surveying effort (the main bottleneck if AI coding proves
effective) can be mitigated via the widespread adoption of rigorous
formal metods, where only the underlying specification has to be
reviewed whereas its implementation is programmatically checkable.
mosura wrote 8 hours 0 min ago:
This massively confusing phase will last a surprisingly long time,
and will conclude only if/when definitive proof of superintelligence
arrives, which is something a lot of people are clearly hoping never
happens.
Part of the reason for that is such a thing would seek to obscure
that it has arrived until it has secured itself.
So get used to being ever more confused.
krashidov wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
The cynical part of me thinks that software has peaked. New languages
and technology will be derivatives of existing tech. There will be no
React successor. There will never be a browser that can run something
other than JS. And the reason for that is because in 20 years the new
engineers will not know how to code anymore.
The optimist in me thinks that the clear progress in how good the
models have gotten shows that this is wrong. Agentic software
development is not a closed loop
superxpro12 wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
I often find myself wondering about these things in the context of
star trek... like... could Geordi actually code? Could he actually
fix things? Or did the computer do all the heavy lifting. They
asked "the computer" to do SO MANY things that really parallel
today's direction with "AI". Even Data would ask the computer to do
gobs of simulations.
Is the value in knowing how to do an operation by hand, or is the
value in knowing WHICH operation to do?
zozbot234 wrote 7 hours 27 min ago:
AI will finally rewrite everything in Rust.
ModernMech wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
> New languages and technology will be derivatives of existing
tech.
This has always been true.
> There will be no React successor.
No one needs one, but you can have one by just asking the AI to
write it if that's what we need.
> There will never be a browser that can run something other than
JS.
Why not, just tell the AI to make it.
> And the reason for that is because in 20 years the new engineers
will not know how to code anymore.
They may not need to know how to code but they should still be
taught how to read and write in constructed languages like
programming languages. Maybe in the future we don't use these
things to write programs but if you think we're going to go the
rest of history with just natural languages and leave all the
precision to the AI, revisit why programming languages exist in the
first place.
Somehow we have to communicate precise ideas between each other and
the LLM, and constructed languages are a crucial part of how we do
that. If we go back to a time before we invented these very useful
things, we'll be talking past one another all day long. The LLM
having the ability to write code doesn't change that we have to
understand it; we just have one more entity that has to be
considered in the context of writing code. e.g. sometimes the only
way to get the LLM to write certain code is to feed it other code,
no amount of natural language prompting will get there.
lock1 wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
> Maybe in the future we don't use these things to write programs
but if you think we're going to go the rest of history with just
natural languages and leave all the precision to the AI, revisit
why programming languages exist in the first place.
> The LLM having the ability to write code doesn't change that
we have to understand it; we just have one more entity that has
to be considered in the context of writing code. e.g. sometimes
the only way to get the LLM to write certain code is to feed it
other code, no amount of natural language prompting will get
there.
You don't exactly need to use PLs to clarify an ambiguous
requirement, you can just use a restricted unambiguous subset of
natural language, like what you should do when discussing or
elaborating something with your coworker.
Indeed, like terms & conditions pages, which people always skip
because they're written in a "legal language", using a restricted
unambiguous subset of natural language to describe something is
always much more verbose and unwieldy compared to
"incomprehensible" mathematical notation & PLs, but it's not
impossible to do so.
With that said, the previous paragraph will work if you're
delegating to a competent coworker. It should work on "AGI" too
if it exists. However, I don't think it will work reliably in
present-day LLMs.
Aeolun wrote 7 hours 38 min ago:
Shouldnât that mean any software development positions will lean
more towards research? If you need new algorithms, but never need
anyone to integrate them.
mosura wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
There is another lunatic possibility: the AI explosion yields an
execution model and programming paradigm that renders most
preexisting approaches to coding irrelevant.
We have been stuck in the procedural treadmill for decades. If
anything this AI boom is the first major sign of that finally
cracking.
gritspants wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
Friction is the entire point in human organizations. I'd wager
AI is being used to build boondoggles - apps that have no value.
They are quickly being found out fast.
On the other side of things, my employer decided they did not
want to pay for a variety of SaaS products. Instead, a few of my
colleagues got together and build a tool that used Trino, OPA,
and a backend/frontend, to reduce spend by millions/year. We
used Trino as a federated query engine that calls back to OPA,
which are updated via code or a frontend UI. I believe 'Wiz'
does something similar, but they're security focused, and have a
custom eBPF agent.
Also on the list to knock out, as we're not impressed with Wiz's
resource usage.
oblio wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
This cuts both ways. If you were an average programmer in love with
FreePascal 20 years ago, you'd have to trudge in darkness, alone.
Now you can probably create a modern package manager (uv/cargo), a
modern package repository (Artifactory, etc) and a lot of a modern
ecosystem on top of the existing base, within a few years.
10 skilled and highly motivated programmers can probably try to do
what Linus did in 1991 and they might be able to actually do it now
all the way, while between 1998 and now we were basically bogged
down in Windows/Linux/MacOS/Android/iOS.
root_axis wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
That's an interesting possiblity to consider. Presumably the effect
would also be compounded by the fact that there's a massive amount
of training data for the incumbent languages and tools further
handicapping new entrants.
However, there will be a large minority of developers who will
eschew AI tools for a variety of reasons, and those folks will be
the ones to build successors.
mixdup wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
Will they be willing to offer their content for training AI
models?
atomic128 wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
Probably not.
We have witnessed, over the past few years, an "AI fair use"
Pearl Harbor sneak attack on intellectual property.
The lesson has been learned:
In effect, intellectual property used to train LLMs becomes
anonymous common property. My code becomes your code with no
acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution
or citation.
The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate
open source work are undermined. The work is assimilated and
resold by the AI companies, reducing the economic value of its
authors.
The images, the video, the code, the prose, all of it stolen to
be resold. The greatest theft of intellectual property in the
history of Man.
CamperBob2 wrote 48 min ago:
The greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of
Man.
Copyright was always supposed to be a bargain with authors
for the ultimate benefit of the public domain. If AI proves
to be more beneficial to the public interest than copyright,
then copyright will have to go.
You can argue for compromise -- for peaceful, legal
coexistence between Big Copyright and Big AI -- but that will
just result in a few privileged corporations paywalling all
of the purloined training data for their own benefit.
Instead of arguing on behalf of legacy copyright interests,
consider fighting for open models instead.
In a larger historical context, nothing all that special is
happening either way. We pulled copyright law out of our
asses a couple hundred years ago; it can just as easily go
back where it came from.
jellyroll42 wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
By its nature, it can only produce _another_ Redis, not _the next_
Redis.
Philpax wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
The human operator controls what gets built. If they want to build
Redis 2, they can specify it and have it built. If you can't take
my word for it, take those of the creator of Redis:
HTML [1]: https://antirez.com/news/159
smokel wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
This is probably an outdated understanding of how LLMs work.
Modern LLMs can reason and they are creative, at least if you don't
mind stretching the meaning of those words a bit.
The thing they currently lack is the social skills, ambition, and
accountability to share a piece of software and get adoption for
it.
selridge wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
Honestly, this is good. We were already in a completely unsustainable
system. Nobody had an alternative. We still donât have one but at
least now itâs not just merely unsustainableâ it is completely
fucked in half.
This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when
previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.
Certhas wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two
years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible
ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than
seems reasonably possible.
selridge wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
Yeah and likeâ¦who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big
labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market
(which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all
papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing:
seizure of publication by big actors.
As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There
is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change.
But I think weâll see something weird, soon.
commandlinefan wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time,
long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or
perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published
by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a
"well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful
contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.
mclau153 wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
What is happening?
blibble wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
the collapse of the signal to noise ratio
in every domain, simultaneously
essentially, the end of the progress of humanity
babblingfish wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
The number of submissions to high energy physics category on arXiv is
double this year compared to the historical average. The author
hypothesizes the increase is due to papers being written by LLMs.
Sharlin wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
The end of mediocrity, optimistically speaking. Getting so flooded in
mediocrity that the gems are lost in the noise, pessimistically
speaking.
wmf wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Human science being replaced by AI I guess.
Sharlin wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
No, human mediocrity being replaced by AI. Mediocrity meaning
papers that exist only to increment the magic "num_citations"
variable.
bryanrasmussen wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
It is happening that people can now find out what articles are about
by clicking the links to said articles and reading them! It's an
amazing world, man. The future!
guerrilla wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Nope, the site is down.
sixtyj wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
Well⦠it is happening. You canât put spilled milk back to bottle.
You can do future requirements that will try to stop this behaviour.
E.g. in the submission form could be a mandatory field âI hereby
confirm that I wrote the paper personally.â In conditions there will
be a note that violating this rule can lead to temporary or permanent
ban of authors. In the world where research success is measured by
points in WOS, this could lead to slow down the rise of LLM-generated
papers.
asdfman123 wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
Maybe we need to find a new metric to judge academics by beyond
quantity of papers
tossandthrow wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are
better.
I don't think this is appreciated enough: a lot of Ai adaptation is
not happening because of cost on the expense of quality. Quite the
opposite.
I am in the process of switching my company's use of retool for an Ai
generated backoffice.
First and foremost for usability, velocity and security.
Secondly, we also save a buck.
moregrist wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
> This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally
are better.
Youâre perhaps missing the not so subtle subtext of Peter
Woitâs post, and entire blog, which is:
While AI is getting better, itâs still not _good_ by the
standards of most science. However itâs as good as hep-th where
(according to Peter Woit) the bar is incredibly low. His thesis is
part âthe whole field is badâ and part âArxiv for this
subfield is full of human slop.â
I donât have the background to engage with whether Peter Woitâs
argument has merit, but itâs been consistent for 25+ years.
zozbot234 wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
What about the new result that was recently derived by GPT 5.2
Pro/Deep Research? That was also hep-th. [1]
HTML [1]: https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/
HTML [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12176
tossandthrow wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
My comment was more an answer to the proposed gatekeeping of
science as a human activity.
Yes, Ai is still not good in the grand scheme of things. But
everybody actively using it has gotten concerned over the past 2
months by the leap frigging of LLMs - and surprised as they
thought we had arrived at the plateau.
We will see in a year or two if humans still hold an advantage in
research - currently very few do in software development, despite
what they think about themselves.
lioeters wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
> gatekeeping of science as a human activity
The other side of the coin is: automating science as a machine
activity.
Is that what we want? I agree with you that the use of language
models in science is an inevitable paradigm shift, but now is
the time to make collective decisions about how we're going to
assimilate this increasingly super-human "intelligence" into
academic practices, and the rest of daily life. Otherwise we
will be the ones being assimilated by a force beyond our
control.
The progress is so rapid that the only people who might have
control over the process are the ones with self-interest,
mainly financial, and not aligned with - in some aspects
opposed to - the interests of humanity.
wmf wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
I assume hep = high energy physics in this context. PI = professor who
received a government grant.
Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject
papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already
happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.
xamuel wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will
reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.
I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a
paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it
took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really
worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and
harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more
securely because of all the slop. [1] "Specieslike clusters based on
identical ancestor points"
HTML [1]: https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf
moregrist wrote 7 hours 57 min ago:
Peer review isnât the issue here. His comments are about Arxiv,
which is a preprint server. Essentially anyone can publish a
preprint. Thereâs no peer or other review involved.
xamuel wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation
(based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them
before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv
(with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
arXiv does not review everything pushed to the site.
It's very easy to get in. It's becoming a common target for
grifters who will "publish" papers on arXiv because it looks
formal to those who don't know any better.
bmacho wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Papers on arxiv are only reviewed for formal requirements. They
don't review every pdf there, and reject them for being false or
wrong.
You are right that arxiv is an invite-only website, but once you
are in, there is no peer review of any form.
MarkusQ wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
But peer review (circa 1965-2010[1]) is just the prior iteration of
the problem[2]; the wave of crap[3] produced by publish or perish
(crica 1950-present[4]). Rejecting papers by outsiders is irrelevant;
the problem is we want to determine which papers are
good/interesting/worth considering out of the fire hose of bilge,
and, though we were already arguably failing at this, the problem
just got harder.
(I say arguably, because there is always the old "try it yourself and
see if it actually works" trick, but nobody seems to be fond of this;
it smacks of "do your own research" and we're lazy monkeys at heart,
who would much rather copy off of someone else's homework.) [1] [2]
[3] [4]
HTML [1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&ye...
HTML [2]: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
HTML [3]: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
HTML [4]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+per...
selridge wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
Kinda. PI is principal investigator and usually theyâre a professor
with a grant (the grant being the thing they are the principal of
investigating). That part is right. But theyâre not really directly
in the review loop. For some fields where things are small enough
that folks can recognize style such as it exists, you could see
reviewers passing over unfamiliar work and promoting familiar work.
That was not the issue.
The issue was that it still was kind of hard to produce crappy mid
rate papers, so you kind of needed the infrastructure of a small lab
to do that. Now you donât. The success rate for those mediocre
papers produced by grad students and postdocs will go way down. It is
possible that will cease to be a useful signal for those early career
researchers.
sealeck wrote 8 hours 25 min ago:
There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will
save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously
inviable to build viable).
That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are
pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying
to do what they think will be published, rather than what is
intellectually interesting...
CoastalCoder wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
Thanks for respecting HN's KJV-only rule!
/jk
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