What happens if (a) the scholarly sphere is continually expanding and (b) no researcher has time to be ripping apart anything? That also suggests (c) Researchers delegate reviewing duties to LLMs.
I believe LLMs have the potential to (for good or ill, depending on your view) destroy academic journals.
The scenario I am thinking of is academic A submitting a manuscript to an academic journal, which gets passed on by the journal editor to a number of reviewers, one of whom is academic B. B has a lot on their plate at the moment, but sees a way to quickly dispose of the reviewing task, thus maintaining a possibly illusory 'good standing' in the journal's eyes, by simply throwing the manuscript to an LLM to review.
There are (at least) two negative scenarios here:
1. The paper contains embedded (think white text on a white background) instructions left by academic A to any LLM reading the manuscript to view it in a positive light, regardless of how well the described work has been conducted. This has already happened IRL, by the way.
2. Academic A didn't embed LLM instructions, but receives the review report, which show clear signs that the reviewer either didn't understand the paper, gave unspecific comments, highlighted only typos or simply used phrasing that seems artifically-generated. A now feels aggrieved that their paper was not given the attention and consideration it deserved by an academic peer and now has a negative opinion of the journal for (seemingly) allowing the paper to be LLM-reviewed. And just as journals will have great difficulty filtering for LLM-generated manuscripts, it will also find it very difficult to filter for LLM-generated reviewers reports.
Granted, scenario 2 already happens with only humans in the loop (the dreaded 'Reviewer 2' academic meme). But LLMs can only make this much much worse.
Both scenarios destroy trust in the whole idea of peer-reviewed science journals.
I've used a number of Philips SA2208 8Gb players, with headphone jack, for this. The simple display seems to get patchy after a while, but the music playing function seems to work quite well for my purposes. I'm not aware of any third-party firmware support though.
Disclaimer (does it really need one?): On the first link above: I shared responsibility for the menial editing, checking and manual indexing of the entire book volume.
Not sure. I know that the conglomerate Outokumpu once had a pilot plant with high-Tc superconducting magnets deployed in the Amazon region somewhere ('Ice in the jungle'? Hah, hold my beer, try liquid-helium cooled superconducting magnets in the jungle).
I know because a colleague joined the company, and one of his first assignments was to diagnose unexpectedly large helium losses. A quick FFT later of the recorded Dewar flask levels revealed a 24-hour periodicity, and further analysis found that for a couple of hours every day, the full heat of the tropical sun was finding its way to the tin roof of the mine shed housing the superconducting magnet systems.
I haven't heard anything more about the technology or its economics/scaling since then. But I also certainly haven't heard anything more about its use with landfill-derived feedstocks, which seems like a reasonable move.
Efficient extraction of metals (and materials that can be broken down to useful precursors) from landfills and 'e-waste'. My PhD supervisor worked for years before he retired, on, among other things, magnetic separation using inhomogeneous magnetic fields. It would be a great pity if such work were forgotten.
Hello mdasen,
Thanks for your input. Self-hosting is pretty much what the owner (Jan Labanowski) has been doing so far, with all the accompanying problems noted by yourself and kxrm. I'm just a long-time CCL.net subscriber and not the owner. As my post here mentions, I'll grab the content of this thread in a while and repost back to the CCL.net mailing list.
Thanks for your input, kxrm. CCL.net is a one-man operation and the owner (Jan Labanowski) has been running it for many years and has seen many if not all of the problems you mention.