Also, please see the community guides. Treat comments in good faith (i.e. the strongest interpretation of their comment) and try to encourage productive conversations. IMO just quoting is degenerative to the conversation. Quote, but say more. Put your actual voice in the comment

But you turn a democracy into a dictatorship through tribalism. So forgive me if I get mad at you trying to place me into a nice well defined box. You're helping erode the democracy I (and so many others) desperately want to maintain (and improve).

What would Worf do?

I'm certain he wouldn't have done what you did

To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic

Do you support everything the Klingon Empire does? That doesn't seem like the Worf I know. The Worf I know can distinguish the people of a civilization from the leaders of their societies. To conflate them just creates the problems you are criticizing

So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large

  > If I spoke freely about how I feel about the US right now

  > It is inconsequential if the US or China have my data

But the main point is really that 2 > 1. 1 country scraping your data is bad. 2 is worse.

  > Why not?

Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.

[0] It works enough for some demo to some person

[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.

  > They want velocity

  > As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data

Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China? Them being more allied with the US and all? Not to mention the whole nuclear sub issue. Having data stolen is shitty either way but isn't data taken by an adversarial country a worse situation?

There's also the old saying about how a good programmer is lazy. There's two ways to interpret that. Seems we've shifted to the bad kind of lazy (i.e. easy/minimal upfront work)

Even if I ended up moving to something not hand written the learning helped me find which tools are actually the tools I want to use. Helps me reason about what's necessary.

I fully believe you can't reason about things unless you have some understanding beyond the minimum needed to reason about them. Otherwise you just have unknown unknowns.

Then AI entered the public lexicon with GPT becoming popular. So people shifted to saying AI because everyone was confused when saying ML. Still "ML" is used commonly in researcher to researcher conversations (depending on the niche, but I think the flag is still a good indicator here)

  > Of course, this is an extreme success story; most yak shaving fails.

I think we often make a mistake by assuming that when there's no visible output that time was wasted.

When I was in grad school this hit me, and everyone I knew, pretty hard. But when looking back I think most of the progress I made was entirely invisible. Those "failures" are not so much failures as narrowing the search space. Unless you have a full understanding of the problem before you begin (lol[0]), then this is always going to be true.

Which made me change my view on a lot of things and realize you just need to trust people. Help people get unstuck and out of rabbit holes but just because there isn't visible progress doesn't mean there isn't progress. If we try to make all progress visible then the reality is we just misalign from our actual goals.

So Yak Shave. There's lots of hidden treasures, even if you don't think it's a treasure at the time

[0] bahahaha I'd love to live in that fantasy world. Nothing is so well defined, even when using formal languages like math. Exploration is always required (yes, even in research. No one plans everything before they start working. The difference between researchers and industry is just how much up front strategizing they do. But exploration always happens, even if through different mediums)

  > The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do.

What AI is being sold as is incredibly different than what it actually does. I love AI. I spent years in grad school researching it because I loved it so much (it was never about the money to me). But what it is and what it can do is so different from what it is being sold as.

Snake Oil is an apt comparison because it is being sold as a cure-all. Medical problems? AI. Financial problems? AI. Scientific research? AI. : AI... It isn't that ML[0] can't help with these problems (it can!), it is that "AI" is being sold as a solution to these problems. As if humans will be obsolete in 6months[1].

LLMs are a fantastic example. We (lossy) compressed the entire internet and build a human language interface into it. That's some real Sci-Fi shit right there. That's an incredible achievement with a lot of utility! But how is it sold? If you call it what it is people will act like you're diminishing its status. We've exaggerated the accomplishments so far out of proportion that we can't even recognize big of an advancement that these machines actually were. LLMs were a huge step forward, but even a giant is small when you compare it to a titan.

So yeah, I do think it is being sold as Snake Oil. And that's been my fear for quite some time (you can dig up my history if you're that passionate). But that's also what we've done with every major tech recently. Hell, even cryptocurrency has real value. The thing that killed it was all the hype built around it when the tech was just in its infancy. Do we really want to do the same thing to AI? It certainly has more utility to it than cryptocurrencies. But it doesn't matter how good the actual product is if people are sold on something else. What matters is how the actual product matches to peoples' expectations. There is such a thing as "overselling", and we're certainly doing that as a community. I know it is an exciting field and there's lots of exciting technology, but we can't promise the moon if we can't deliver.

  [0] It wasn't long ago that "AI" was a red flag and "ML" was seen as less likely to be bullshit. 
  [1] I'm still waiting on my self-driving car...

  > The hard part now is liking the industry around it.

But now, the industry really kills that passion. I don't believe we're solving real problems, but mostly just solving made up problems that get us money. We've become incredibly dismissive of fixing things and using thought terminating cliques like "I only care that it works"[0] or "don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough"[1]. When finding bugs we end up arguing if it is "valuable"[2] rather than if it actually helps people. I can't tell you how many meetings I've been in discussing if we should fix the problem that were a magnitude more time, per person, than it takes to fix the problem. We've become allergic to deep understanding. We abhor expertise[4]! I thought this was supposed to be a community of nerds? I came to the STEM side because my family was all "business monkeys" and I didn't want any part of that constant BS. There was a real "revenge of the nerds", but the MBAs did strike back.

We're incredibly penny-wise and pound-foolish. We love our sayings, but hate understanding. All to keep that velocity up, but forgot that velocity has direction.

What happened to the time where we could make money AND make meaningful products that make peoples' lives better? (I know, rose colored glasses) That's the real dream, right? That's what we want *an economy* doing, right? Not this bullshit metric hacking. Not this maximizer with complete disregard for the things we're intending to maximize[5]. And for some reason we still look for "passion" in people when hiring, only to beat it out of them when they get hired. And how have we gotten to a point where someone's resume that has "VR + Crypto + AI" is read as impressive rather than the hype chasing giant red flag that it is?

I don't think this is just about computing. It's a bigger cultural phenomena. But without a doubt our field became perverted by whatever this infection is. There's a reason so many are burnt out. The disease creates a negative feedback loop too. We get burnt out, end up just going with the bullshit (tired of fighting), which only creates more bullshit. The feedback has been going on for quite some time now.

I don't know how we push back, but I know I'm not the only one frustrated, and I know if we don't figure out how to make changes soon then we shouldn't be surprised if change happens in an unpredictable and chaotic manner. That steam can only build for so long.

  [0] Everyone does you asshole! What we disagree on is if it actually "works"![0.5]
    [0.5] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2066657032938442833 
  [1] Perfection doesn't exist! Only an idiot thinks there's perfect code. What we disagree on is what is actually "good enough"!
  [2] $$$$ not "does this make the product[3] better"
  [3] God fuck... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM  ----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NeJ3Kg6OUo
  [4] https://x.com/yacinemtb/status/1836415592162554121
    [4.5] Yes, this is the same guy who said QM and Fluid Dynamics are all easy, "its all einops" (I can, with 100% confidence, tell you that it is not. There's entire subfields of mathematics being lost here that are critical to both these subjects. You can't even get through Griffith's with just Linear Algebra and that's barely scratching the surface of QM!) https://x.com/yacinemtb/status/1836428078999851515
  [5] A metric is never perfectly aligned with what we intend to measure https://9gag.com/gag/aQ9GEZ7