Advait Sarkar (in CACM) noticed how bad LLMs are at anything creative, and instead suggested we use them for things they’re good at , predicting what humans would say. Especially if they are asked what a critic would say.
And it sort of works!
Rest of the article: https://leaflessca.wordpress.c...
Elsevier are very susceptible to losing money through copyright breaches, and so put requirements on their authors' payment of other companies' licencing fees.
In principle, a publisher worries about false statements or the use of error-prone LLMs. Either of those lower the quality of the articles and reflect to the journal's discredit.
In this case they did an add-on, for the benefit of their bothers in industry. Not illegal, but definitely self-dealing.
Courts aren't after the Internet Archive, publishers are. Just like they were after he first public lending libraries in Britain.
And they still are to this day: see the reference to Kenneth Whyte’s “Overdue: Throwing the Book at Libraries”. in Are Libraries the Enemy of Authors and Publishers? in the Hugh Stephens Blog.
There are a gazillion ISPs out there running ancient TCP software, and we get to suffer from it. I wrote about it at https://cacm.acm.org/practice/... For a really short explanation, there's a 5-minute video there.
And yes, Hanlon's razor applies: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity...
Some years ago, Ontario proposed to change the law to allow that, and to put the services up for bid. I bid an unlimited amount of money for the Chatham water and sewerage service and noted that I would charge the residents commensurately.
Oddly enough, the law never passed.
It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. What’s notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement. Apple famously refused the FBI’s request to create a backdoor into iPhones to help access devices used by shooters in San Bernardino and Pensacola. The FBI was subsequently successful in accessing all the iPhones concerned without the assistance it sought. Our arguments against such backdoors predate both cases, when Apple spoke out on the issue in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris more than a decade ago.
Tabs used to be eight 10-point spaces, for just over one inch. That made using more than a small number of levels of indentation difficult: you went off the side of a 24 x 80-character screen quite quickly. That in turn helped C programmers avoid writing looooong FORTRAN-like functions.
Alas, we've forgotten that, and all sorts of modern folks are writing yards-long functions... and then losing track of what they were doing (:-))
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau
