I don’t see what the benefit of most of that is, and why publication fees are a good way to pay for it. Take video recordings: why should we pay for them to develop a video hosting platform when perfectly good ones exist? In fact, conferences that I am familiar with put the recordings on YouTube, and this works great.
> ACM has to be careful to not get into financial trouble by giving away their crown jewels without generating sufficiently stable alternative income sources.
The attitude that the work of science belongs to these publishers is what grates me the most. Yes, ACM is not as bad as Elsevier, but this attitude is still fundamentally wrong. They are in the position they are mostly by historical accident, able to extract rents because it requires a lot of coordination to switch.
Why do I call it rent extraction despite the ACM doing stuff? Suppose the ACM charged separately for using their video platform. Would anyone pay for that?
> For example, authors no longer generate their own PDFs but submit the LaTeX/Word manuscripts to a central service (TAPS), developed and operated for ACM by an Indian company, Aptara
And what good is that? Why should we pay for a separate company to run pdflatex for us? The system exists primarily to check that we’ve put ACM branding in the paper.
Sometimes people also say that the real service is long term storage of pdfs, but let me preempt that right now: there are government sponsored long term storage facilities like Zenodo that are likely to outlast ACM. Second, commercial storage paid for indefinitely using an annuity would cost less than $1 in present value for hosting the pdfs of a conference, about 0.0001% of ACM publication fees.
That isn't the case. Conferences organize their own website to submit articles for review. Volunteers from the conference pre-filter submitted articles for spam, the rest is handled by the review committee.
There is no cost to submit. In fact, the eventual cost is often not even mentioned at that point. When the article is accepted for publication, the conference gives authors a link to an ACM website where the authors upload their PDFs. Only after that will the authors be asked to pay the fee (and if you wanted, you could refuse at that point, which presumably means that the conference will eat the loss, or maybe they'll un-publish your article).
I don't think spam is a huge issue. The conference websites and submission portals are niche and random people don't tend to find them or care enough to go through the trouble.
This is good, but they're now charging authors a publishing fee of over $1000 per article (and they say that that is the discounted price). It is unclear whether this is justified. In my experience publishing scientific articles with ACM, all the real work (such as peer review) is done by volunteers. From what I can tell, ACM just hosts the exact PDF + metadata that authors supply. I suspect that in the future, more journals and conferences will switch to an arXiv-overlay model.
3blue1brown actually shows the usefulness of formalism. The videos are great, but by avoiding formalism, they are at least for me harder to understand than traditional sources. It is true that you need to get over the hump of understanding the formalism first, but that formalism is a very useful tool of thought. Consider algebraic notation with plus and times and so on. That makes things way easier to understand than writing out equations in words (as mathematicians used to do!). It is the same for more advanced formalisms.
The type of reasoning by the OP and the linked paper obviously does not work. The observable reality is that LLMs can do mathematical reasoning. A cursory interaction with state of the art LLMs makes this evident, as does their IMO gold medal scored like humans are. You cannot counter observable reality with generic theoretical considerations about Markov chains or pretraining scaling laws or floating point precision. The irony is that LLMs can explain why that type of reasoning is faulty:
> Any discrete-time computation (including backtracking search) becomes Markov if you define the state as the full machine configuration. Thus “Markov ⇒ no reasoning/backtracking” is a non sequitur. Moreover, LLMs can simulate backtracking in their reasoning chains. -- GPT-5
Well, they apparently did donate to some woke-adjacent pseudoscience, which seems like a waste of money to me. Regardless, I agree with you that the question isn't where some $0.25 million went, but why they are spending $100 million and still asking for donations with that misleading message, while a few years ago they were spending a small fraction of that even though their hosting costs were actually higher back then. It increasingly looks like Wikimedia as an organisation has a parasitical relationship with Wikipedia, doing enough to keep its host alive with a small fraction of its budget, while benefiting from the work of volunteers and not even fixing longstanding issues with the software that the volunteers ask to be fixed. Even beyond fixing bugs, I'd be happy to add to their $100 million budget if they actually did useful things with it. I can easily think of 10 features that would improve Wikipedia. For instance, Wikipedia pages such as "list of countries by GDP per capita" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...) are useful, but the table UI is not that great and the map is a non-interactive PNG image. For $100 million, why can't we hover over the country and see its name and the exact GDP per capita number?
Here is the message wikipedia has on its donation page:
> We'll get straight to the point: Today we ask you to defend Wikipedia's independence.
> We're a non-profit that depends on donations to stay online and thriving, but 98% of our readers don't give; they simply look the other way. If everyone who reads Wikipedia gave just a little, we could keep Wikipedia thriving for years to come. The price of a cup of coffee is all we ask.
> When we made Wikipedia a non-profit, people told us we’d regret it. But if Wikipedia were to become commercial, it would be a great loss to the world.
> Wikipedia is a place to learn, not a place for advertising. The heart and soul of Wikipedia is a community of people working to bring you unlimited access to reliable, neutral information.
> We know that most people will ignore this message. But if Wikipedia is useful to you, please consider making a donation of €5, €20, €50 or whatever you can to protect and sustain Wikipedia.
Whether or not one likes the causes they give the money to, if they spend $100 million and they only use $2.4 million for hosting, and they also give money for political activism, then this is a misleading message, making it sound like they are on the cusp of not being able to cover the costs that keep the site online unless they start having ads on wikipedia.
There is a difference between a lone mass shooting and a terrorist attack coordinated by a government. It goes without saying that this is not the fault of Muslims in general. It's the fault of some Muslims, in this case IS.
> That's a caricature. A lot of the perpetrators, like in 9/11, are highly educated and even westernized people, not some backwater goat herders believing such BS.
I am fully aware of this, I said so in other comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10564189 The mistake you are making here is the idea that otherwise intelligent and educated people cannot believe crazy things. Just look at the Christian nutjobs.