Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Zigbee sucks... (Score 2) 44

Addressable does not mean accessible.
IPv6 has link-local addresses which are unroutable outside of the local segment. Plus firewalls and VLANs exist so you can limit access however you want.

This is a _LOT_ better than the typical device that connects to someone else's hosted server that you have absolutely no control over.

Comment Re:questions about use (Score 1) 58

What, in your argument, is the difference between LLM copy-edited text, and for-hire human copy-edited text. The editorial services I have seen *sometimes* try to find editors that are kinda-sorta near the correct field of expertise, but there's no guarantee you'll get someone who even has a passing level of familiarity with your field, and for some services, all they have is a degree in English.

So, again, what's the difference between linguistic polishing by machine and linguistic polishing by semi-qualified human?

Comment Re:Not surprising it's more toxic (Score 4, Interesting) 85

The problem is operating on a blacklist approach...
One chemical gets a bad name and there's a campaign against it, so it gets replaced with something that hasn't attracted so much negative publicity yet. The replacements are often worse, or the side effects are not so well known and once use becomes widespread the side effects are found to be worse.

You've seen this with legislation that pushed vehicles from gasoline to diesel, reducing co2 while increasing other emissions.
You've seen this with food where fat/salt/sugar (that we've been consuming for thousands of years and which are perfectly safe and even needed in moderate quantities) has been demonised, leading to worse replacements where new negative side effects are regularly emerging.
Micro plastics, coolants and various other things are also getting worse.

Comment Re:What is a fingerprint? (Score 2) 58

Following up on that idea, there are various copy-editing services that many non-native English speakers use, and are encouraged to use, to help improve their writing. The main difference from the perspective of forensic detection with AI-copy-edited text is that there are a very small number of such styles compared to the likely thousands of copy-editors' individual styles, making automated copy-editing easier to detect. I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you trained an LLM on the output of a single human copy-editor, you'd be able to identify all papers that used their services.

Comment questions about use (Score 5, Interesting) 58

We use AI to help with paper writing in my lab, mostly because there are only two native English speakers, and it relieves me, the lab head (and one of the two native speakers), of having to do extensive copy-editing in order to make stilted English more readable. I still read every word that gets published from the lab, but using AI for copy-editing is no different from using a human-based writing service to fix poor language. It's just cheaper and orders of magnitude faster.

So, for us, the response would be a big, "so what?" to this report.

But, if people are starting to use AI to write entire papers, that's a different story. My experience is that current models hallucinate ideas and, especially, references, at far, far to high a rate to be seriously useful as anything other than a tool that requires full, manual verification. I half-jokingly say that if a paper is hallucinated, that means the AI was unable to find the right citation, and it represents a gap in the field's knowledge that we could address. The amazing thing about the hallucinations is how convincingly real they sound: the right authors, the right titles, the right journals. These are publications that *should* exist, but don't, at least in my experience.

As a most recent example, when writing a grant application, I tried to find citations using an LLM for an idea that is widely-held in the field. Everyone knows it to be true. It's obvious that it should be true. And, yet, there have been no publications as of yet that have actually discussed the idea, so the LLM dutifully hallucinated a citation with exactly the author list you would expect to have studied the question, a title that hits the nail on the head, and a journal exactly where you might expect the paper to appear. I've told my staff that we need to get that paper written and submitted, immediately, to fill that obvious gap, before someone else does. It will likely be cited widely.

Comment Re:Teach code reviewing (Score 1) 177

It's almost certainly because you didn't do enough programming in college.

I agree entirely. I teach an intro to programming course at one of the well-known universities. It is a lab course with 2 hours of teaching contact time per week, 2 hours of reading time per week, and 8 hours of expected programming time per week. The students learn by doing.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 273

So, specifically, from which scientific fields will we lose all of this talent

Microbiology, neuroscience, solid physics, particle physics, robotics, ...

and to which countries will these people be moving?

Canada, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, primarily. Portugal has gone on a hiring spree, as has Poland and Australia. I haven't seen any postings from Spain or Italy, but maybe that's my field.

Further, in what ways will the NSF counterparts in these supposed other countries benefit R&D by foreign researchers?

I guess you don't understand how IP works. When a researcher works at an institution, the IP they generate is owned by that institution. The society where that institution is located typically is the big winner, as a result. Have you ever looked, for example, how much the US government gets in royalties from PCR?

No scientific talent will be "lost to overseas competitors".

The issue is that it isn't just DEI funding that's being cancelled. DEI is just the focus of the most bitter ire. There is a broad anti-science, anti-knowledge tone to the current administration, and I have many colleagues who have already left the US because of it. The number of available post-docs far outstrips the current number of open positions, and that talent is quickly leaving the US shores for greener pastures.

Comment Re:It's hard to draw an audience for laptop conten (Score 1) 29

Exactly this... Nowadays everyone already has a portable device capable of reading up to date content anytime anyplace. Buying a paper magazine or newspaper from the few places that still sell them and then carrying it around is massively less convenient. The only people doing this are generally the elderly who dont know how to use the newer technology, and obviously those people become fewer every year.

Comment Re:Arrrrrr (Score 1) 183

You don't have a 90ft wide screen at home with dual laser projects in a perfectly dark room and a real Atmos (as opposed to the gimped consumer version) sound system.

No i have a smaller room so i sit closer, so i have no need for such a large screen.
Plus i can sit in exactly the ideal location for the sound system and screen, whereas most of the theatre audience are sitting outside of the optimal seats.

Also theatre experiences differ significantly. Some of them have much smaller screens, lousy sound systems, dirty, smelly, crowds of kids, uncomfortable seating etc. There isn't a decent one around here, i have to travel a significant distance for a decent theatre experience.

Slashdot Top Deals

HEAD CRASH!! FILES LOST!! Details at 11.

Working...