Today on the train-ride into work there was a group of what looked to be men in their mid 50s joking about who in their friend group was “alpha”, “beta” or “sigma”. I think that if, at this point in history, even a near-retirement age group of commuters is using the lingo then internet culture is just culture.

I did have to resist the urge to tell them to touch grass.

In conclusion, putting the internet on everyone’s phones was a huge mistake and we should go back to the way it was in the before-times.

Andrew German wrote about this. From his blog post I got the impression that this issue is mostly impacting compsci. Maybe it’s more widespread than that field, but my experience with compsci research is that a lot more emphasis is placed on conferences compared to journals and the general vibe I got from working with compsci folks was that volume mattered a lot more than quality when it came to publication. So maybe those quirks of the field left them more vulnerable to ai slop in the review process.

How can this be projection? Silicon Valley’s culture brought us fraudulent medical tech, cryptocurrency scams, industrialized wire fraud, illegal taxis, and DRM juice machines. A paragon of honesty and integrity if I ever saw one.

I’ve got a buddy who is a professor and he catches llm cheaters by asking them difficult questions like “what was your essay about?” and “what were the three points you made in your essay?”. I’m sure llm proponents will offer some bromide about “tools aren’t inherently good or bad”, but it seems like the reality in college is llm tools are used for cheating.