However, to me, this reads more like human stupidity than AI slop. Certainly, my AIs would do a better job. Rather, the nonsequitors and errors are similar to what I've seen from lazy undergrads filling space.

I have had the misfortune of seeing many similar papers before the rise of AI.

My advice would be to read a non-Ukranian history book.

What Russia seems to be doing is trying to split Ukraine from the West. It's not true that "russians having much better positions, unfortunately, thanks to their network of agents covering entire planet." They don't have that scale. They do seem effective propaganda in Ukraine and in Poland.

Right now, it seems to be working. Russian propaganda leads to Ukrainians are acting like dicks, and international reactions to Ukrainians. Literally, all they need to do is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

That's what they're doing, and it's working.

US split off a year ago. EU is turning away. Polish support went from wholehearted, to holding their noses and helping. That's not a result of false information elsewhere, but within Ukraine. Ukrainians -- including politicians who ought to know better -- walk around talking nonsense which fully supports the Russian propaganda.

Right now, you're helping Russia win.

Proper history: Bandera absolutely fought for Ukrainian freedom and independence. He absolutely committed murders, terrorism, and atrocities to do so. Some of those were targeted at Poland, who now took in over a million of your refugees, and put itself at risk to give massive military support. Volhynia was 100,000 Poles killed -- about 0.5% of the Polish population at the time. Many of those were woman and children, and few had anything to do with destruction of churches or whatnot. You're glorifying him, while asking children of his victims for aid.

(As a footnote: No one cares if this were 10,000 or a million. Telling Poles it's 200,000 and Ukrainians that it's 40,000 is exactly a way of driving a divisive wedge on what's a non-issue at this point; everyone agrees it was a metric fuckload)

People like you are not much different than Southern Americans, who talk about the civil war about state rights, omitting slavery, or Germans who talk about post-WWI reparations, without mentioning the holocaust. Yes, WWI reparations were devastating to Germany. No, that didn't merit genocide.

Right now, the important problem is to get Russia out, get Crimea back, etc. For that, you need allies. Swallow your fucking pride, and learn proper history. Every nation that has had one of these events has to go through it, or else they fracture, like America did racially.

Russia's goals of keeping Ukraine out of the EU and NATO? All they needed to do is rile up a few folks like you with nationalist disinformation. Boom. Ukraine did for Russia what they couldn't accomplish with weapons.

This isn't hard to solve. But it requires swallowing pride, and coming to terms with a rather more complex history than presented in Ukrainian nationalist curricula.

I seriously thought this was the case, but looking at the post history, it's probably a question of Hanlon's Razor.

Poster appears to be Ukrainian, and clueless.

Russian trolls feed on these types, unfortunately, and they end up polarized quickly enough.

That's the amplification in these disinformation wars.

When a toddler does something inappropriate, "but he did it to me" is not an excuse. If both kids did something bad, I want both to apologize, and both to move on. It's also not a contest for who did something worse. I want Ukraine to apologize to Poland. I want Poland to apologize to Ukraine. I want both nations to move on.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Indeed, that's doubly the case when it's nations -- a civilian hit in a retaliatory strike often has nothing to do with an atrocity. I don't know where you are, but I'll pretend the US. If someone whose father died in Guantanamo, or whose child was killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan, killed your mother, would they be "right"? Would it be hypocritical of you to complain?

Or if you want to punish a dictator, does it make sense to starve the people in his nation -- most of whom probably want him out even more?

I am perfectly aware of all of Russia's wrongs. You missed most of the big ones, from holodomor, to about a half-millennium of other torment of people in Ukraine.

You try to do right for your own soul. Apologizing doesn't weaken you.

And you don't punish children for the sins of their fathers.

There were others as well. Most have at least some basis as well. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/422nd_Unmanned_Systems_Regimen...

And yes, it is still a really shitty set of pretexts.

The problems are:

1) Ambitious people are drawn to such institutions

2) There are $40B swishing around

3) Incentives align for fame and impact, but not for honesty or positive impact

Maintaining alignment would require checks-and-balances and transparency measures, which no one cared to put in. MIT -- much more so than competing schools -- relied on NDAs and non-disparage agreements to cover up scandals.

Incentive structures and market dynamics played out, as no one cared to act.

As a curiosity, MIT was not well-known to the public prior to Good Will Hunting, and did its best work while it was still a fairly niche institution, prior to 2000.

It was exceptionally well-know in specific communities (computer science, physics, electronics, etc.), and was at or near the top in most hard fields, but that didn't translate to public recognition. If you asked a random waitress or sales-person, they'd typically confuse MIT for ITT (which had ads running all the time).

For public opinion, the undisputed #1 university in the US was Harvard, followed by Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, followed by the rest of the Ivy League

For universities, public reputation follows performance by several decades.

For most of the past five years, I've known ways to do better than Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends in many ways, at least on paper. I know I was right about many of them since many would show up 6-24 months later tools from the major providers, or otherwise become standard practice.

A central problem is the Mythical Man-Month. True, I could do those, beating then-state-of-the-art, but only given 2-5 years. I suspect many other people knew about them too and could do so as well. As I noted above, throwing people and dollars caused many of those to be built in less time than I could have regardless.

Other methods, I'm less confident about (>50%, <80%), but would lead to similar improvements orders-of-magnitude as you're predicting, but mine would need $$$$$ in compute and engineering infrastructure to build out. E.g. they need to not just theoretically work, but to try, I would need to convince someone to invest in them working.

So the TL;DR is that my knowledge was not at all helpful towards e.g. competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, or even building a small business.

However, where it was useful was in predicting where the industry was going. This is true in investing (but not easily, at least with my skill set), but in developing startups and systems, there were capabilities which I (correctly) assumed would be there, whereas there were many arguments that "AI will never be able to ____."

If I know how to do something, it will almost certainly happen, regardless of whether I'm the one who does it.

To be clear, my expertise is almost certainly nowhere as deep as yours. I'm not providing a direct analogy, or claiming others know what you do or can do the same. My point was really that if you believe you can have these models be 0.1 percent sparse for same capabilities we associate with them today:

a) You're probably right. They were built quickly for capabilities. A slower process can almost certainly lead to much smaller models too. That's a radical statement: Historically people claiming a 1000x improvement somewhere were crackpots, but that's very possible in an industry as fast-changing as this one.

b) Someone at Anthropic or OpenAI might be working on building out extent tools right now. Even if so, there are indirect ways to capitalize on that knowledge.

c) Critically, that predicts a future where Fable is $1/month instead of $100/month, and that's something which CAN be acted upon in planning.

It also suggests -- much less strongly -- the existence of much more sophisticated models at $100/month. There are open discussion in planning about whether models plateau, continue improving, singularity, or otherwise. That changes the biases there.

I don't think you've read GDPR. In Europe (at least my part), *every* organization has a GDPR policy you need to agree to. Your child's school. Summer camps. Etc. Most are also conservative and reasonable.

What's broken is the GDPR popup with a dozen "legitimate interest" toggles for spying on you.

Curiously enough, the git data model is ideal for handling large binaries. The place it crashes-and-burns is the user space.

I believe you entirely. That comes across in everything you say. Huge harm has been done in education precisely by people with similarly amoral motivation. History of education is filled with case after case of amoral motivations leading to immoral behavior.

Other industries have this more extreme. Fritz Haber is a biography worth reading.

The comments you're making aren't very honest -- I suspect with yourself more than with anyone else. For example:

> Maintaining an open-source project requires significant time and effort.

No. It doesn't. You need to flip the "public" bit on github and post a "caveat emptor" shingle. The effort you're cloning -- manim -- did exactly that. The result was a synergistic, friendly, manim-ce.

And the author has been able to work full-time in this space, his entire career, without doing anything evil, unethical, harmful, or unpleasant, and strictly advancing the world.

You're competing -- rather than cooperating -- with folks like him.

> I simply need enough protected space to innovate competitively and give the company the best chance to succeed.

You don't seem to understand how this works. A few points:

- Education is a highly-regulated industry for good reasons (student harm, societal harm, privacy risks, etc.), and education research goes through IRBs for similar reasons.

- Startups can work on IP, but usually -- and especially in education -- networks, connections, support, etc. are more important. It's hard to build an IP moat.

- Startups have a 95% failure rate. I'd give this one more than that.

A few corollaries:

a) With the current model, you'll have a hard time building partnerships with the people you need, and indeed, people (myself included!) will be rooting for you to fail. That weakens, not strengthens, your odds of success.

b) An example of another way to accomplish your stated goal is a five-year research grant, or a position which supports doing this kind of work (e.g. instructional staff at your university). Those have >> 5% success rates.

c) Open business models aren't less likely to be successful here than closed ones. Red Hat sold for $34B.

Otherwise, my best wish for you is to fail fast, and to learn a lot from the process.

I'd provide feedback on how to make this better, but to be frank, I don't want to see this made better. I'd like open education made better. I'm on the other side here. Even if I did, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't listen.

In my career, I've done both open and closed models (more of the former in recently, more of the latter early career). I'm open to both, but education should be open, for a whole slew of reasons I can enumerate.

That's very clear. That's why we have spyware, ad tech, WWII-era German chemical weapons, the East India Company, Oracle's business model, fintech, ...

Ask anyone 40 years older. Regrets focus on time with family and meaningful work. Few people think: "Did I innovate enough?"

> We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day.

I don't quite see the logical connection in this sentence.

Everything I've worked on in the past 15 years is open-source. I suspect you'd:

- Be able to find modest amounts of funding to do this in the open space (e.g. within the academy, as a teaching professor, adjunct, or similar) -- enough to sustain yourself, but without a promise of riches

- Be able to "innovate," make more E($), and do less harm in corporate America

With manim, it's probably legal (I think MIT license?), but in general, it makes the world a worse place.

At the same time, thousands of low-quality resources overwhelm good content.

Integrating with an existing resources like MOOCulus could add a ton of value, in contrast, but wouldn't have the promise of making the creators money.

Being able to create manim animations at scale is a value-add, but doesn't seem enough of a value-add to create a business which does anything other than active harm. But it seems to be trying to be one.

I doubt people are incentivized the way you think they are. Smug attitude aside, everyone wants best for their kids. Many people don't know how. They don't know how because their parents, grandparents, and no one in their community knows how. You end up in what research calls a culture of poverty.

That common among, but not exclusive to, many low-income black communities, due to a history of Jim Crow and slavery, but also in many immigrant communities, and white communities in places like, again, where our vice president comes from.

Improving outcomes for such communities means:

1) Improved economic growth

2) Improved social stability

Representation at Harvard means such communities might trust science. I have very little sympathy for white liberal university faculty complaining how some groups don't believe in climate change when those same faculty are giving those same groups every reason to distrust the academic establishment.

There's also no law which says schools should be meritocratic.

Admissions departments can and do optimize for things like future donations, political influence, and so on.

However, there are *many* such effects. Whack one, and I can point to a dozen others.

Until and unless they're systematically addressed, it's actually very hard to either make progress or even draw good conclusions.

What's needed is a project to address *all* of the obvious ones, comprehensively, ideally on a national scale, but initially, at least on a pilot scale.

If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate.

There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't.

The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.

- One which maximizes Harvard's power network?

- Most likely to succeed in the future?

- Representative of the general public by race?

- Representative of the general public in other ways (e.g. religion, political affiliation)?

- Academically, best-qualified right now?

- Academically, most potential? At birth? Now?

- Most likely to donate?

Etc.

However defined, Harvard has much modest discrimination by race compared to discrimination by religion, political affiliation, or home town.

Harvard is 95% liberal, and much more so at the faculty level. If you look at the further-out evangelical, born-again Christian groups, or more conservative Muslim groups, the discrimination is even more extreme. Atheists are vastly over-represented, in contrast.

Until one is aligned on goals and definitions, one can't speak of goals being met or unmet. Harvard can be -- and indeed, is -- racist against blacks by one definition, against whites by another, against Asians by a third, and so on.

In well-designed microelectronics, they will.

The standard circuit involves a fuse, a fast Zener clamp, and sometimes a small resistor (e.g. 1 ohm) and/or capacitor. The design parameter is that, with the current limit from the resistor, the Zener should not blow out before the fuse.

The resistor needs to be small enough to not lose a lot of voltage under normal operations, but to still protect the Zener during the short surge during which the fuse blows. For most microelectronics, that's not hard. A 0.5W USB device might have 100mA of current max, which across 1 ohm is 100mV, so negligible for most purposes.

With high-power devices, it gets more complex.

Of course, consumer devices (a) will never be fixed (b) don't sell on this (c) every penny counts, so there's no market pressure to do things right.

But that's how we used to do it, and how it's still done many places where things count. If I'm building a one-off or few-off, it definitely will have proper protection.