To some degree. When Wiley (old, big publisher) bought Hindawi (young, fast-growing upstart Open Access publisher), they quickly discovered that the entire publishing house was infiltrated by paper mills. They retracted thousands of papers, and closed many journals. However, some of their own journals are also heavily infiltrated by paper mills, and those had far fewer retractions.

Conversely, another young upstart, MDPI, has very few retractions even though they also have a high number of paper mill productions, including some that they know about very well and have "investigated".

Wiley is obviously a much more serious publisher than MDPI, albeit more hesitant to clean their old house than the newer that they bought.

Computer science, by the way, has a far higher rate of retractions for academic misconduct than other disciplines, and it's not because it's so easily replicated, it's because it's rampant with fraud. I'll give you an example of ridiculous verbiage that somehow stays in the academic literature thanks to the non-efforts of IEEE and an academic community that will publish anything but read nothing. You don't need a replication study to see that this isn't a serious academic work. It's most likely a patchwork of plagiarised text that's been fed through some paraphrasing filters to avoid automatic detection.

But yeah, psychology is surely not serious and computer science is very smart.

The title of the story is "GPT-Fabricated Scientific Papers Found on Google Scholar by Misinformation Researchers", you blithering imbecile. It's the starting point of the discussion.

Entirely untrue. The people dealing in fabricated papers are professionals. You can't just submit a generated paper to a journal, not even one published by MDPI, Frontiers or IEEE, and expect to have it published. You need to have friendly peer reviewers, i.e. a network of other crooks, preferably ones with credible credentials. And of course, these people will want something in return, perhaps citations to their own rubbish papers as much as money. And citations get you promoted, or a new job.

There are plenty of scam artists working as full professors, and they can do this because:
1) Publish and perish means no one has time to actually read their work, as they are too busy writing.
2) As productive and highly-cited researchers, they are particularly valuable to their institutions (as long as no one reads their work).
3) Reporting them is entirely ineffective. Publishers will ignore you, also see 2).

Oh, and did I mention that these guys cite each other? That means that a journal with a medium to strong papermill infestation will have a higher impact factor than one with editorial oversight. For instance, the most highly cited paper in IEEE Sensors Journal the last few years is obviously part of such a citation cartel. Removing the papermill presence would ruin their "impact" and hurt their credibility.

There is the Retraction Watch Database, which is directly supported by reference managers Zotero and EndNote. Whenever a reference in your library is retracted and shows up in the database (it's not complete), the reference manager notifies you.

If you're a researcher and aren't using a reference manager, you're probably not very good at your job.

Not really. Not at all, actually. There are still plenty of subscription journals, and many of them have the same problem with paper mills as open access journals have. They are also often as unwilling to fix their problems.

The problem is publish or perish – you need to publish to further your career, no matter how weak your findings are. Your quality as a researcher is usually evaluated on output, both in volume and in the supposed quality of the journals you publish in (ranked by the rate of citations to the papers published in the journals), and in some cases also on how many citations your publications have attained.

Paper mills take care of having your name put on publications. Then they publish other works citing your paper. Now you're a cited author! And also, the journal gets more citations, elevating it in the rankings (yes, this is how fucked things are). Some papers are pure gibberish: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22166...

Maybe, but we're in a transformative phase due to AI. Jobs under threat include coding, marketing, design, editorial, creative for art, generative video is coming along, as is music, finance can be accelerated, potentially also legal (accelerated, not replaced).

Some trades probably won't absorb a lot of people. You mentioned carpenters... people are very price sensitive and will import goods or buy premade items from big box suppliers.

Plumbers, mechanics... sure, but if everyone turns to that supply will outstrip demand. How many people do you know tried to become a realtor during the pandemic and can't sustain that now? The demand might always be there but the prices people will pay in a competitive and saturated market may not be.

Active tiles in the start menu. app suggestions (ads) in the start menu, Edge promos in the start menu, recently added in the start menu, meeting reminders in the start menu...

What else can we stuff in there?

I remember when the Start menu was quick and easy to use and organize. Now it's a giant list of junk.

It's actually even worse than this. If you try to use their website to cancel while their call center is closed, their website pretends to be having technical issues. Very deceptive. Even in California where you're supposed to be able to cancel online I believe if signing up online is an option.

Okay...

Ah, so like the option in Android Auto? Turns out products with settings and UIs that can support aftermarket functionality that can be expanded on are useful.

... so... like on Android Auto where you can stop the audio?

You can do it through your phone, but it sure is nice when you have a nice big display to have your navigation there, and some giant buttons to manage your streaming...

I've personally experienced some android auto glitches, and every time it's because I've worn out the cheap USB cable I bought out and I just swap it with another cheap USB cable, and then it works great for another year. The idea that this is a safety hazard is BS.

I hear what you're saying, a standardized upgradable generic screen would be nice, but some integration with the car to a known standard is necessary for a good experience, like voice commands, dipping the radio volume during prompts, managing the audio source if you want to play media from the app, limiting UI behavior while driving.

It's literally that simple.

I will not go back to an age of crappy OEM software that is buggy, lacking features, never updated, and/or expensive to update, and or impossible to update yourself.

That's nonsense. I don't like everything Google does, but they've hosted my email and various files securely for coming up on two decades, they make some of the cleanest Android phones on the market with regularly published factory images, OTAs, and verification mechanisms, they offer Workspace products for corporate that seem to be fairly secure - you don't often hear of massive breaches, their security team often does valuable work not only on their own products but also on other vendor's products. And they give us Chrome, and while certain aspects of it certainly aren't perfect, they keep pretty on top of vulnerabilities. Even projects like Signal are using electron.

You can't be considered serious with such hyperbolic commentary.

Yes, and they're exactly the same quality today as the potato cams of 1995.

Haven't you been able to reset the BIOS by shorting a jumper since like.. the 90s?