And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.

The less memory the weights take to meet a level of competency, the more random, and therefore patternless and inscrutable they will be.

I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".

But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.

To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.

But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.

The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.

Sure, there's lots of good stuff on there. But there's lots which is not good. Publishing there is not doing science. Science requires peer review.

Its a wonderful resource, but when overworked journalists (or worse, AI) just picks up a paper from there and writes a breathless article on how cool this new idea is, it is misleading to the general public.

Worse, it can get the general public (and from the comments here, even people working in the field) to forget what science is and why arXiv is not a scientific journal.

Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.

I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.

And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.

And if the LLM has been trained up to the limit of what data it can hold, it is going to be random. Proof below if it isn't obvious.

The entire effort of all people who are trying to understand how LLMs work, how they represent their data, its all bound to fail.

Proof: a LLM is a very good approximation of the Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov universal probability function on tokens. As such, it will be random--pure white noise--because if you found any patterns in there, you could exploit the regularity and come up with a smaller set of weights for the same LLM.

There are no patterns there to be found. They have all been factored out by training the neural net until it couldn't learn any more.

Or whether your CPA did your taxes using Excell or just a big piece of graph paper and counting on his fingers.

What we should be doing is making tools which can tell when an AI is hallucinating, or the output doesn't really solve the problem the user wants to solve.

So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.

He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.

This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."

This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.

(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)

Honestly, I don't know why they bother charging. Surely they are gathering more information about what people want to do and want to buy than search engines ever possibly could.

Do you want to open a "hello kitty" theme park in wyoming? People are voluntarily telling AIs every day whether that would be a valid business for not. Selling that kind of aggregated information -- heck, giving venture capital to startups they know will succeed--is surely far more profitable than nickel and diming us.

What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.

You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.

If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."

I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.

Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.

But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.

We have no one to blame but ourselves.

All these old gold bugs just can't wrap their heads around what exponential growth really looks like. But we can grow our productive capacity far, far faster than we can grow the supply of gold.

I remember when the U.S. Treasury stopped issuing 30 year bonds---no deficit, no need to borrow!! Boy did that scare the bejezuz out of the financial industry though. I read an op-ed in the Wall Street journal about how are we ever going to offer 30 year mortgages if the banks can't buy 30 year treasury bonds?

Then the supreme court handed the 2000 election to George Bush, and the financial industry was happy again, because record surpluses turned into record deficits again. The banks still lent money to homebuyers--in fact, so many people took out mortgages that.....

The answer is so simple, everybody know it: spend less than you earn, borrow only for things which will pay you back. We can start doing that this afternoon, if we wanted to.

When people talk about government waste, what they really are talking about is things the government does which they don't approve of. E.g. ICE--is that wasteful spending? Depends upon whether you like ICE or not. Aide to Israel? Same stuff.

That's why DOGE got nowhere. There is no mythical mammoth waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.

But that's not what we get from Trump. He can't even maintain a reflecting pool--we're not going to get a ballroom.

No, he's going to leave the White house much worse than he found it. Which is his style.