25

Retraction Watch reports:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

The resignation statement reads in part,

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.

(Via Pharyngula.)

Related:

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago

Governments have criminalized the practice of managing your own health.

I have the feeling that they're not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago

I must have been living under a rock/a different kind of terminally online, because I had only ever heard of Honey through Dan Olson's riposte to Doug Walker's The Wall, which describes Doug Walker delivering "an uncomfortably over-acted ad for online data harvesting scam Honey" (35:43).

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago

I saw this floating around fedi (sorry, don't have the link at hand right now) and found it an interesting read, partly because it helped codify why editing Wikipedia is not the hobby for me. Even when I'm covering basic, established material, I'm always tempted to introduce new terminology that I think is an improvement, or to highlight an aspect of the history that I feel is underappreciated, or just to make a joke. My passion project — apart from the increasingly deranged fanfiction, of course — would be something more like filling in the gaps in open-access textbook coverage.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

"I'm extremely left-leaning, but I do have concerns about the (((globalists))) in finance"

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

As a person whose job has involved teaching undergrads, I can say that the ones who are honestly puzzled are helpful, but the ones who are confidently wrong are exasperating for the teacher and bad for their classmates.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I am too tired to put up with people complaining about "angies" and "woke lingo" while trying to excuse their eugenicist drivel with claims of being "extremely left leaning". Please enjoy your trip to the scenic TechTakes egress.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

"If you don't know the subject, you can't tell if the summary is good" is a basic lesson that so many people refuse to learn.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago

From the replies:

In cGMP and cGLP you have to be able to document EVERYTHING. If someone, somewhere messes up the company and authorities theoretically should be able to trace it back to that incident. Generative AI is more-or-less a black box by comparison; plus how often it’s confidently incorrect is well known and well documented. To use it in a pharmaceutical industry would be teetering on gross negligence and asking for trouble.

Also suppose that you use it in such a way that it helps your company profit immensely and—uh oh! The data it used was the patented IP of a competitor! How would your company legally defend itself? Normally it would use the documentation trail to prove that they were not infringing on the other company’s IP, but you don’t have that here. What if someone gets hurt? Do you really want to make the case that you just gave Chatgpt a list of results and it gave a recommended dosage for your drug? Probably not. When validating SOPs are they going to include listening to Chatgpt in it? If you do, then you need to make sure that OpenAI has their program to the same documentation standards and certifications that you have, and I don’t think they want to tangle with the FDA at the moment.

There’s just so, SO many things that can go wrong using AI casually in a GMP environment that end with your company getting sued and humiliated.

And a good sneer:

With a few years and a couple billion dollars of investment, it’ll be unreliable much faster.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 44 points 1 week ago

Wojciakowski took the critiques on board. “Wow, tough crowd … I’ve learned today that you are sensitive to ensuring human readability.”

Christ, what an asshole.

27
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

The UCLA news office boasts, "Comparative lit class will be first in Humanities Division to use UCLA-developed AI system".

The logic the professor gives completely baffles me:

"Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically."

I'm trying to parse that. Really and truly I am. But it just sounds like this: "Normally, I would [do work]. But now, I can actually [do the same work]."

I mean, was this person somehow teaching comparative literature in a way that didn't involve reading the primary sources and, I'unno, comparing them?

The sales talk in the news release is really going all in selling that undercoat.

Now that her teaching materials are organized into a coherent text, another instructor could lead the course during the quarters when Stahuljak isn’t teaching — and offer students a very similar experience. And with AI-generated lesson plans and writing exercises for TAs, students in each discussion section can be assured they’re receiving comparable instruction to those in other sections.

Back in my day, we called that "having a book" and "writing a lesson plan".

Yeah, going from lecture notes and slides to something shaped like a book is hard. I know because I've fuckin' done it. And because I put in the work, I got the benefit of improving my own understanding by refining my presentation. As the old saying goes, "Want to learn a subject? Teach it." Moreover, doing the work means that I can take a little pride in the result. Serving slop is the cafeteria's job.

(Hat tip.)

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 44 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Those are the actors who played Duncan Idaho in the David Lynch adaptation and in the two Syfy miniseries. So, yeah, it's not wrong, just incomplete — though I have no idea why it only serves up those three. There's certainly no limitation to three images, as can be verified by searching for "Sherlock Holmes actor" or the like.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 75 points 1 month ago

"When I have a disagreement with a girl, I hit my balls with a hammer. There is absolutely nothing she can do; it's a brutal mog."

14
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/morewrite@awful.systems

So, after the Routledge thing, I got to wondering. I've had experience with a few noble projects that fizzled for lacking a clear goal, or at least a clear breathing point where we could say, "Having done this, we're in a good place. Stage One complete." And a project driven by volunteer idealism — the usual mix of spite and whimsy — can splutter out if it requires more than one person to be making it a high/top priority. If half a dozen people all like the idea but each of them ranks it 5th or 6th among things to do, academic life will ensure that it never gets done.

With all that in mind, here is where my thinking went. I provisionally tagged the idea "Harmonice Mundi Books", because Kepler writing about the harmony of the world at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War is particularly resonant to me. It would be a micro-publisher with the tagline "By scholars, for scholars; by humans, for humans."

The Stage One goal would be six books. At least one would be by a "big name" (e.g., someone with a Wikipedia article that they didn't write themselves). At least one would be suitable for undergraduates: a supplemental text for a standard course, or even a drop-in replacement for one of those books that's so famous it's known by the author's last name. The idea is to be both reputable and useful in a readily apparent way.

Why six books? I want the authors to get paid, and I looked at the standard flat fee that a major publisher paid me for a monograph. Multiplying a figure in that range by 6 is a budget that I can imagine cobbling together. Not to make any binding promises here, but I think that authors should also get a chunk of the proceeds (printing will likely be on demand), which would be a deal that I didn't get for my monograph.

Possible entries in the Harmonice Mundi series:

  • anything you were going to send to a publisher that has since made a deal with the LLM devil

  • doctoral theses

  • lecture notes (I find these often fall short of being full-fledged textbooks, chiefly by lacking exercises, but perhaps a stipend is motivation to go the extra km)

  • collections of existing long-form online writing, like the science blogs of yore

  • text versions of video essays — zany, perhaps, but the intense essayists already have manual subtitles, so maybe one would be willing to take the next, highly experimental step

Skills necessary for this project to take off:

  • subject-matter editor(s) — making the call about what books to accept, in the case we end up with the problem we'd like to have, i.e., too many books; and supervising the revision of drafts

  • production editing — everything from the final spellcheck to a print-ready PDF

  • website person — the site could practically be static, but some kind of storefront integration would be necessary (and, e.g., rigging the server to provide LLM scrapers with garbled material would be pleasingly Puckish)

  • visuals — logo, website design, book covers, etc. We could have all the cover art be pictures of flowers that I have taken around town, but we probably shouldn't.

  • publicity — getting authors to hear about us, and getting our books into libraries and in front of reviewers

Anyway, I have just barely started looking into all the various pieces here. An unknown but probably large amount of volunteer enthusiasm will be needed to get the ball rolling. And cultures will have to be juggled. I know that there are some tasks I am willing to do pro bono because they are part of advancing the scientific community, I am already getting a salary and nobody else is profiting. I suspect that other academics have made similar mental calculations (e.g., about which journals to peer review for). But I am not going to go around asking creative folks to work "for exposure".

41

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

33
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

27
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

20

Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be?

When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about "artificial life" — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like "when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant," I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!

23

So, here I am, listening to the Cosmos soundtrack and strangely not stoned. And I realize that it's been a while since we've had a random music recommendation thread. What's the musical haps in your worlds, friends?

31

Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

34
Honest Government Ad | AI (www.youtube.com)

Bumping this up from the comments.

31

Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

22

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 46 points 7 months ago

To date, the largest working nuclear reactor constructed entirely of cheese is the 160 MWe Unit 1 reactor of the French nuclear plant École nationale de technologie supérieure (ENTS).

"That's it! Gromit, we'll make the reactor out of cheese!"

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blakestacey

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