It is computer science in the southern united states (though I am open to finishing my PhD in Europe, especially because cryptography is an area of interest). Sorry for not mentioning this in the original post.

a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.

Thank you, I think this is something I needed to hear (read).

Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisor’s lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn’t touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.

I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.

I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.

I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I won’t be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability is killing me. (In my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair — absolutely farcical.)

Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).

(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)

this is why i only self-host low risk crap and it’s all behind my tailnet

half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself

one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i’ll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought “that’s cool” and now my reaction is “great, gotta see if an llm was used”

everything feels gloomy.

cleaning the egg off my face (but egg prices are pretty high rn so i may just keep it)

thanks @swlabr@awful.systems for the link and @blakestacey@awful.systems for the skeptical post, my dumbass dropped the ball there

old gell-mann amnesia problem

I didn’t know this had a name. Thank you!

I think, if you can wait long enough, there is a chance employers will be champing at the bit to hire people who actually know what the fuck they are talking about and whose ability to think hasn’t been short-circuited by a tool that pretends to think for them.

That’s what I am counting on. Could just be (definitely is) copium.

Very out of my depth here but thank you for this post and the links. This was delightful to read. 💖

in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

i have to assume it’s only gotten worse

no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the “lemma, theorem, proof” kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling — if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, it’s more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.

I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular

would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)

The least-worst of the Chrome reskins is Vivaldi, which has no AI. It has its own adblocker, but it’s not as good a blocker as FIrefox with uBlock Origin. And Vivaldi’s not open source. But they’re relatively non-evil.

this made me cackle

very nice

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as “Google needs a competitor”), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad’s DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to “complete”) has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren’t on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/my-goal-is-to-eliminate-every-line-of-c-and-c-from-microsoft-by-2030-microsoft-bets-on-ai-to-finally-modernize-windows

My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code”. To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we’ve built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

wow, *and* algorithms? i didn’t think anyone had gotten that far

Alice: what is 2 + 2?

LLM: random.random() + random.random()

Alice: 1.2199404515268157 is better than nothing, i guess

yeah it was pretty wild

like we get it, you think your farts smell good, but this is an elevator sir

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.

Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

1. wrong tool for the job
2. bad tool
3. are you fucking serious?
4. environmental impact
5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate^[1] the model
6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
7. seriously what is wrong with you

they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-user’s brain.

anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences — “oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.”

additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?