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Comment Re:Sounds like a replay of the furor over VBA (Score 1) 63

Then add Azure getting hacked and being massively insecure, several times now. Add that many people are looking into leaving o365 because MS blocked a user for political reasons.

MS is done for. They just will take quite a while dying. But there is no realistic chance they can turn things around anymore.

AI

How An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study - Until It All Fell Apart (msn.com) 14

In May MIT announced "no confidence" in a preprint paper on how AI increased scientific discovery, asking arXiv to withdraw it. The paper, authored by 27-year-old grad student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, had claimed an AI-driven materials discovery tool helped 1,018 scientists at a U.S. R&D lab.

But within weeks his academic mentors "were asking an unthinkable question," reports the Wall Street Journal. Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up? Toner-Rodgers's illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all — for better or worse — assumed. He focused on AI, a field where peer-reviewed research is still in its infancy and the hunger for data is insatiable. What has stunned his former colleagues and mentors is the sheer breadth of his apparent deception. He didn't just tweak a few variables. It appears he invented the entire study. In the aftermath, MIT economics professors have been discussing ways to raise standards for graduate students' research papers, including scrutinizing raw data, and students are going out of their way to show their work isn't counterfeit, according to people at the school.

Since parting with the university, Toner-Rodgers has told other students that his paper's problems were essentially a mere issue with data rights. According to him, he had indeed burrowed into a trove of data from a large materials-science company, as his paper said he did. But instead of getting formal permission to use the data, he faked a data-use agreement after the company wanted to pull out, he told other students via a WhatsApp message in May... On Jan. 31, Corning filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization against the registrar of the domain name corningresearch.com. Someone who controlled that domain name could potentially create email addresses or webpages that gave the impression they were affiliated with the company. WIPO soon found that Toner-Rodgers had apparently registered the domain name, according to the organization's written decision on the case. Toner-Rodgers never responded to the complaint, and Corning successfully won the transfer of the domain name. WIPO declined to comment...

In the WhatsApp chat in May, in which Toner-Rodgers told other students he had faked the data-use agreement, he wrote, "This was a huge and embarrassing act of dishonesty on my part, and in hindsight it clearly would've been better to just abandon the paper." Both Corning and 3M told the Journal that they didn't roll out the experiment Toner-Rodgers described, and that they didn't share data with him.

Comment Re:Traditional lectures are obsolete (Score 1) 25

What nonsense. First, the most important part in teaching is to select the materials and structure them in a way that makes sense. Second is the actual teaching and anybody halfway competent does far more than just reading the slides. It is about demonstrating you know your stuff, the materials are worthwhile working through, you respect the time of the participants and any good lecture will also need a real entertainment factor.

I think you have never designed and then held a lecture. And if you ever have heard lectures, apparently they were not any good.

Comment Re:AI is terrible. (Score 1) 25

Indeed. As an example, I currently have a student looking at all the major AIs (including coding ones with paid subscriptions) for code security review. With small, well known samples they are good. With larger samples, they are >50% fail. With CVEs (the things that matter) they are so far almost 100% fail.

Add that using AI coding assistants makes you about 20% slower, and the only thing AI could be called for this application is "completely unsuitable".

Comment high-value scam (Score 1) 79

We see these ideas that are obviously nonsense all the time. This one has been picked apart by multiple people with industry experience already.

What these things are is essentially the venture capital version of the scam mails you get in your mailbox every day. If you make it big enough and insane enough, someone with more money than brains will think he spotted an opportunity that everyone else missed and will invest.

Why is it, you think, that 99% of these things vanish without a trace after an initial storm of publicity?

Comment Re:Look... kid... (Score 1) 25

Hahaha, in 4 years the collapse of the hallucination that LLMs are actually very useful will have concluded. Things are already mightily crumbling. Those that apply themselves and learn stuff will find something worthwhile in 4 years. Obviously, with this mockery of teaching, that will be impossible, but real teaching is still being done. You just need to insist on it.

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