A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university.
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
Many years ago (early 2000s) I worked for a firm that would help identify people who were doing "pump and dump" stock scams on Yahoo Finance message boards.
Step 1 was to scrape all of their posts into a database.
Step 2 was to have a human analyst review all of the posts for clues about who that person was
It was amazing that you could easily figure out:
- if they were at work or home from when they posted (9am to 5pm vs 6pm to 1am)
- what city they were in (based on sports teams, mentioning local landmarks etc0
- roughly what career they had
- their age based on cultural references
and mostly b/c they would drop a crumb of information here and there over months. They probably forgot about all of these individual events but when reading all of the posts in a few hours, the details became pretty evident. You get enough of these details and you can start to venn diagram people down to a few 100 likely candidates and then use LexisNexus style tools to narrow it down even further.
Given the above, it doesn't surprise me that LLMs can do the same but at high speed and across multiple sites etc.
Not OP but I have experience in private sector here - Deanonymization in private sectors is used by anti-fraud or brand protection systems. For example, in brand protection we identify same IP/scam infringer across multiple store fronts and then we can shut them down directly or get more certainty on their other posts. i.e. if it's a known infringer their scam likelyhood score goes up on all of their listings. So deanonymization doesn't have to point to exact real identity - just enough certainty to tie multiple entries together and then other systems can take it further like OP's manual review tho LLMs can obviously do a lot these days.
> Going to play devil's advocate and say that they make minimal to no revenue off of their website so it being down is not a huge deal.
How much revenue they make doesn't matter if it impacts users. Prospective users need to be able to see what they are getting and download and verify ISOs from the team.
I despise ZorinOS for what they are doing in many ways that violate software licenses, but one thing they got right is charging users and being somewhat accountable to their userbase.
I'd discourage claiming any biological process is "solved."
But to your point: No--AlphaFold is an amazing machine learning approach to predicting protein structure but Folding@Home is still immensely useful for simulating how proteins fold up over a timescale. They are/will be complimentary methods.
no, alphafold is basically just a static structure predictor. folding@home explicitly models the folding process (the journey, not just the destination).
I ran an account on Instagram that "curated" posts from other people (basically reposted images but before the current reposting functionality).
The AI generated images are so prevalent that I resorted to reposting images only if there were from 2022 or earlier (sure, filters existed then too).
The whole experience reminds me of the story about "pre-radiation steel" [0] and how future generations won't be able to trust any image after 2024. Then again, we have large amounts of literature and stories from ancient history or medieval times that are impossible to verify as true so maybe this isn't a new problem.
Back in college, while majoring in CS, I had a rough time dealing with semicolons, typos, missed characters while coding.
I thought to myself "I wonder if playing Mahjong in the Windows games would help me get better at scanning code and finding these types of errors". So I tried it and, lo and behold, it did.
Also, in this day and age of LLMs writing a lot of the code, scanning for missing semicolons in code sounds like "I was great at fixing telegraphs!"
Which Aeroflot flights were hijacked and flown to West Berlin? I've never heard of this. Funny though that Windows Copilot believes this happened and says that:
"On December 12, 1978, two Soviet citizens hijacked an Aeroflot Yak‑40 on a domestic route and forced it to fly to West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was under U.S. control."
But then, when asked about any reference to this event, gives this:
"1. LOT Polish Airlines Flight 165 (30 August 1978)
A LOT Tupolev Tu‑134 was hijacked by East German citizens seeking asylum and forced to land at Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin."
I once called my Dad out about Chinese nationalists setting bombs on ships in the 60s. He reckoned his ship had come to the rescue of one where they'd found a bomb and the command crew had posed with it for a photo and it had gone off, killing or wounding all the crew capable of actually navigating the ship.
No mention on Wikipedia of these terrorist activities, nothing in the history I could find online. He was a bit of a tall tale teller so I called him out on it.
He was quite upset and ended up showing me his ship log book. With the ship name and the rough date, I actually found two news articles that had been scanned by Google scholar conforming that it had really happened.
I bet there's a lot we don't know that happened behind the iron curtain, I wouldn't doubt this just because you can't easily find any references with a quick Google.
If you want the rest of how they saved the ship, they tried to get a junior officer over in a sort of swing. If they'd have succeeded they'd have actually all been entitled to a salvage payment. But it was too rough so in the end they just got the other ship to follow them back to port.
When the pilot came out to dock the ship, he found another bomb.
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?
The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.
For all of the "saturated market" talk, I always think of the following examples:
- Restaurant Row in NYC is full of packed restaurants b/c people like variety and the demand is high enough to have multiple market participants
- Clorox is a chemical with a fancy bottle and a lot of marketing. They make $150 million+ profit a QUARTER on this [0]
- As someone once said: if it's visible and people see it as part of their identity, there are many brands e.g. clothes, cars etc. If it's not visible, there are fewer brands e.g. underwear
- The ability to personalize applications has been around for over 20 years but people still want predictable user interfaces so they can share with friends, spouses etc
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
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