I am an academic at a big Australian university. I can't disagree more with this article. Students are not just machines that convert ideas to papers (and nor should faculty), they are one of the true joys of academia in the first place.
Unfortunately, as other comments here have pointed out, the incentive structure for academia right now is misaligned, leading some faculty to focus just on publish or perish. This is a huge shame on so many counts.
My hope and also slight expectation from the AI era is that academic writing becomes so commodified that we see a total devaluing of papers as a metric, even in prestige venues. Perhaps this would help the community find better things to focus on.
There's a drinking game which I guess is inspired by this game, which I believe is called "Pizza Box" (at least that's what everyone I ever met who knew it called it).
You start with an empty pizza box, and you need a large coin (the Australian 50 cents works well) and a sharpie.
Play progresses around the circle of players. Each player must flip the coin into the box. If they intersect no other circles, they draw a circle around the coin with the sharpie, and then write a rule into the circle (Whatever rule they come up with must fit legibly). They can change any aspect of the game. If you intersect with a circle, instead, that rule is activated. Just like 1000 cards, that could impact everyone, just you, whatever...
We usually got to a point where someone added a circle to "end the game", which then people might aim for - but usually only after a couple of hours of merriment!
I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming!
Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an in-house social media platform, set in a fictional country, with the goal of swinging a simulated election.
This was done to both raise awareness that such kinds of AI-powered campaigns are possible, as well as build a rich environment and dataset for red-team blue-team R&D in future.
So that we could tune every part of our system, we built everything from the ground up - including our own social network (based on early twitter), our own news websites (built with Jekyll), and our own multi-agent framework for simulating NPCs (built with too much spaghetti Python).
The whole game is multiplayer, so every player and team was competing against every other player and team interactively to try and sway the NPCs in their direction.
We had 277 students from 18 Universities across Australia sign up to play, and ended up with 42 teams on the scoreboard. Our final prizegiving event was yesterday, and the team from QUT - all freshmen/first years - took the win (of AU$5,000)!
Overall we had such a blast running the event, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Already we are helping Day of AI Australia produce their own open-source version of the game for high schools in Australia, and for future CTNs starting next year, possible collaborators from two overseas universities have reached out to discuss running a joint international event (really hoping we'd be able to do that).
Strange question - has the "submitted at" times been edited on this post and all the comments here? I swear I read everything on this submission, including the comments, several days ago, but nothing here is longer than a few hours.
Actually, google search agrees with me - if you search for the title here + hackernews, it says that it saw this post and several of the comments 6 days ago (apologies that I can't link to the cache as this is no longer a feature of Google).
Why are all the post and comment times here saying less than a few hours ago?
I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities.
I think a more reasonable interpretation might be "the government knows about expensive cars (i.e. that they are registered, have numberplates etc), and so charges some annual tax on the owners of those cars."
Not always one for pithy remarks, but the quote from George Orwell seems prescient here: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
I'm not American, but FTA it sounds like having a politically biased NARA director could have some interesting consequences for the formal parts of all y'all future electoral matters.
I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into other areas, security, operating systems, embedded, etc., and in those specialties may need assembly for more modern CPUs.
We have found that when needed, students pick up the newer/more advanced assembly languages (e.g. ARM, x86) fairly well, so we believe the early and universal introduction to MIPS does provide benefits.
In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure (https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems). I also do mean anyone, I have an undergraduate student using it right now (for free) to fine-tune several LLMs.
It also says commercial orgs can get access via negotiation, I expect a random member of the public would be able to go that route as well. I expect that there would be some hurdles to cross, it isn't really common for random members of the public to be doing the kinds of research Gadi was created to benefit. I expect it is the same way in this case in Canada. I suppose the argument is if there weren't any gatekeeping at all, you might end up with all kinds of unsuitable stuff on the cluster, e.g. crypto miners and such.
Possibly another way for a true random person to get access would be to get some kind of 0-hour academic affiliation via someone willing to back you up, or one could enrol in a random AI course or something and then talk to the lecturer in charge.
In reality, the (also taxpayer-subsidised) university pays some fee for access, but it doesn't come from any of our budgets.
In my experience in computer engineering in the academic systems of the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year. It is field dependent, but when I was a postdoc at a top US R1, 100% of the students I interacted with had their first paper in their first year. These even included students working on LLMs :-)
Also, top non-US universities often graduate their engineering students within 3-4 years of commencing, with 3-4 papers being a very common international expectation as well.
If you want to finish a PhD in 3 years and are interested in academia, in addition to following the path the OP has laid out you may also look to good international universities and then get your next 3-4 papers as a postdoc.
I've recently been designing a custom implementation of a DCC controller for a new model railroad I'm setting up - what don't you like about the protocol?
I find the protocol fascinating in that the data signal is combined with the power, so you just run everything over the two tracks.
Further, a transmitter is just a simple H-bridge that costs pennies...
That's interesting and I appreciate your response. I didn't subscribe until 2020 so perhaps I missed the downward swing and have only seen it on the up?
I'm a print subscriber to Wired and read it cover to cover most months. I find most issues pretty good and usually learn all kinds of interesting details about things happening in the tech world. They even have a hacker column, in a recent issue the writer talked about his journey setting up and using a raspberry pi based radio telescope. What would you say Wired is missing now compared to its first iterations?
In March of this year a post made it to the front page of Hacker News regarding Tiny Tapeout(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35376645). Here, they had made a process where you could submit custom, miniature silicon designs to a subset of a silicon shuttle for just $100.
I was already using LLMs to write Verilog for my research, so I was inspired to start another thread exploring if they were yet reliable enough to design whole chips. They were, and I right now have christmas tree LEDs blinking and controlled from a micro designed by ChatGPT and taped out by Efabless!
My blog post explores the whole journey as it happened, and links to the various repositories, paper, and webinars along the way.
Wow, this is cool! It has never made sense to me that a platform with thousands of times more compute and capabilities than Gameboys from two decades ago is worse in every regard for gaming. Hopefully resources like these can be used to both find and promote good works!
Unfortunately, as other comments here have pointed out, the incentive structure for academia right now is misaligned, leading some faculty to focus just on publish or perish. This is a huge shame on so many counts.
My hope and also slight expectation from the AI era is that academic writing becomes so commodified that we see a total devaluing of papers as a metric, even in prestige venues. Perhaps this would help the community find better things to focus on.