It seems that, as soon as you transact with a sanctioned entity, you are globally in breach of the agreement and risking the revocation of all your certificates — also the ones for non-sanctioned countries.
Front matter:
- it is called a "Subscriber Agreement" and not anything that suggests that its scope is a single certificate
- it's a "contract [...] regarding Your [...] rights and duties relating to [...] Certificates" - plural
2.1 "Term":
- "[the agreement] will remain in force during the entire period during which *any* of Your Certificates are valid" - plural
3.1 "Warranties":
- "[by] requesting, accepting, or using *a* Let’s Encrypt Certificate" - plural
In case you are interested in hearing a reader's opinion: the AI writing was noticeable and detracting. The most significant cues for me were the sensational tone and the prolific "clever" one-liners. I think that while it is difficult to make the judgment with any degree of accuracy based on a single suspicious sentence, but given the length of the article, all the individual cues eventually add up to a near certainty.
I think that the sorry thing about the article is that, even though I've read through an article of yours, I have learned nothing about what kind of person you are. I think that there's more to blogging than just showing the work. It's also a stage for you. The displays of character in the article ("I had a feeling", "I sat with that for a minute") written in first person are not actually yours, and are instead, in a way, a performance of the LLM that you used. So in my opinion (and you're free to disagree) you've robbed yourself of the attention you deserved.
However, I assume that the contents of the investigation were true, and if so, they are quite damning (in fact, my SO has just surprised me with a cheap Chinese projector. Nice timing!). It was also great that you've shared the prompts and results at each stage.
serious_angel is not contending with you that the design is bad, or that it is bad because it is unoriginal. In fact, they are not even specifically calling out the design.
They have noticed the design, recognized it as the output of an LLM, then proceeded to discover that an LLM was involved in much of the creation of the project. This is an academic project. Whatever the pedigree of the researcher is, this implies to the grandparent that the final result of the work may be amateurish or worse, to an extent generated. Therefore, he's concerned that it puts the legitimacy of the research outcomes (e.g. completeness, contents of letters, classification, maybe even hallucinations in the thesis proper).
Preemptive arguments:
1. "The author's a researcher, not a programmer; therefore it's fine to use an LLM. It is preposterous to ask each researcher to learn web development to publish their research." You are right, but given the amount of vibe-coded websites we see, and them all having the default (Astro?) style, the grandparent all the same has the right to associate that style with untrustworthy crap. I'm not saying that this academic website is necessarily crap. However, I think it's useful for the grandparent to share their sentiment, because the researcher might not know.
2. "A lot of pages have links to sources; you could verify the legitimacy yourself". perhaps, but doubting the veracity of research is a bad first impression, isn't it?
It's a bit sad, because the website is non-trivial, and would have taken quite a bit of effort without an LLM. But it is difficult to separate webdev enablement with the rest of the LLM baggage.
I was checking the submission on the phone and only peeked at the comments section. While it's not always easy to judge if something is AI-generated or edited, here it was obvious at first glance from the quotes. Assuming that all of the comments were done in good faith, I think that the low AI literacy even here is really concerning.
Flagged for AI content: I hope this submission dies and the user is penalized (look at their submission and comment history!), because IMO the article does not belong on the front page. Quick polemic:
>The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
If you ask me, one could name different criteria for winning, and commercialization would not be the first thing to come to my mind:
> It also owns platforms that generate and organize the data of the AI age. YouTube is a video corpus. Google Drive and Microsoft 365 sit inside daily office work. GitHub sits inside software development.
Yeah, okay. China does not have any platforms nor data.
Not taking away the right to your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more; I found it an excellent sociological article. One, it takes the formal concept of "bullshit" and applies it to knitting in a very methodical and strict manner. I found it novel and convincing, and the examples were great; not contrived or forced at all. IMO it was much better than many academic books or articles; an immediate share.
Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …).
Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.
I could never see the need to rebind Ctrl to Caps Lock (and I do use Emacs). Whenever it's time to press Ctrl, I curl my pinky and press that key with my pinky's distal joint. I did, however, swap Fn and the Global key on my Mac.
I once won a power bank in an anonymous raffle at a marketing event of a company that could be imagined as our distant competitor. I voluntarily gave it away to another attendee, because God forbid there's a suspicion of a conflict of interest. But I am clearly a bear of very little brain.
Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.
Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.
Technologies: Strong with distributed systems, networking (SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA), authorization systems, web/network security and more. Backend: Rust, Typescript, Python, C#, Go and a variety of other interpreted and compiled languages. Frontend: React, Angular, Tailwind and so on. Relational and document databases. Data analytics. AWS and Azure. China specialist and interpreter, can speak German.
I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop zero-trust solutions at a Swiss networking company.
I've been engaged with China since 2015. In 2020, I've started a degree in Chinese Studies at the University of Zürich. In 2024, I have finished a scholarship at the BFSU, the best language university in China. I have interpreted between Polish, English and Mandarin Chinese for the Polish Trade & Investment Agency at the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum in Shanghai (see pics on LinkedIn). I also keep tabs on technology and Chinese cybersecurity laws through Chinese sources and keep in touch with open source enthusiasts based in Mainland China and in Taiwan.
Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.
Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.
Technologies: Strong with distributed systems, networking (SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA), authorization systems, web/network security and more. Backend: Rust, Typescript, Python, C#, Go and a variety of other interpreted and compiled languages. Frontend: React, Angular, Tailwind and so on. Relational and document databases. Data analytics. AWS and Azure. China specialist and interpreter, can speak German.
Hi, I'm Igor. I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop innovative at a Swiss networking company.
I've been engaged with China since 2015. In 2020, I've started a degree in Chinese Studies at the University of Zürich. In 2024, I have finished a scholarship at the BFSU, the best language university in China. I have interpreted between Polish, English and Mandarin Chinese for the Polish Trade & Investment Agency at the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum in Shanghai (see pics on LinkedIn). I also keep tabs on technology and Chinese cybersecurity laws through Chinese sources and keep in touch with open source enthusiasts based in Mainland China and in Taiwan.
Thank you very much for the article, it was super interesting. The mystery in the story draws people in, and people surely won't mind a couple of grammatical mistakes. But you have to watch out: the use of AI makes it easy for people to suspect that the story might've been embellished. For the second part, it might be better to try translating it manually; the same goes for writing replies.
Front matter:
2.1 "Term":
3.1 "Warranties":