Well, it’s official – AI is ruining everything. This is not exactly news, but learn it LLMs are probably used to write scientific papers is a little disturbing, and Andrew Gray, librarian at University College London, has receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly articles from 2023, looking for the words “admirable,” “sophisticated,” or “meticulous” that appeared more frequently in LLM-generated text. Most of the words seem generally positive in tone and seem a little fancier than everyday speech; Finally, rarely use “obvious” or “noticeable” unless you’re trying to sound clever. It found an increase in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT was not widely used.
Statistical analysis of word distributions is not always performed to detect traces of LLM. The article includes examples of text copied and pasted directly from the chatbot without any attempt at editing or even basic editing. It is difficult to imagine how not only the authors of the articles, but also the editors and reviewers of the journal managed not to receive the obvious copy-pasted chatbot error message. Let’s start with the Midjourney-created diagram of the outrageously rich rat used to illustrate the article (since it was withdrawn) about spermatogenesis, complete with nonsensical titles and references to nonexistent body parts. This is why we cannot have nice things.
Speaking of cool things, did you know that the largest manufacturer of vintage lamps in history is a small company called “Underwriter’s Lab”? At least it seems so Looking at eBay, where sellers listing old bulbs often claim that the manufacturer meets the safety standards of the organization. We assume that the only label on an old bulb is a UL listing label, and it makes sense if you have no idea what UL is. But really, that’s the least of the problems with some of these lists. A stretch for “vintage”. green banker’s lamp with a polarized plug clearly developed in the last 30 years.
Shifting gears a bit, it’s one thing to know that everything you do online is being tracked, but it’s quite another to find out how much data is being sent back and forth between your computer and the Hive Mind. It was built by Bert Hubert Tracker signal to do and it’s a little scary. The tool emits a short beep every time your computer sends a bit of data to the tracker. It just started tracking data going to Google, which was quite exciting. The tool was then modified to include most of the trackers we might encounter in our daily travels, and wow! When the tube is saturated with a highly active source, it sounds like a Geiger counter. Probably just as dangerous.
Pay attention – The HOPE conference is in preparation. Hackers on Planet Earth XV will be held July 12-14 on the campus of St. John’s University in Queens, New York. The “Call for Participation” is now open; It’s always great to see a large Hackaday contingent at HOPE, so be sure to get your bids in for talks, workshops or panels in soon.
And finally, What to do if the FCC knocks on your door? This is not just an academic question; The US Federal Communications Commission does a lot of field research, and if you do any kind of RF experiment, your chances of making some sort of spurious emission that catches their attention are next to zero. Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course released a video of the scary beatdown. TL;DW — return with warrant. But it’s more complicated than that, as a hilarious IRL account of one such encounter shows. We won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that if your home is near a major international airport, you’ll want to be very careful with anything radio-related.