it has been known to happen.

For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors feel obligated towards their students, who need to get jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring decisions may not update for a few years which hurts students in the job market.

On the whole you should rarely read papers, you want to read a whole literature in an area. Academics embedded in the field can do this easily. Academics outside of an area know to do this, and to bounce things off an expert to make sure you have the context and aren't over-indexing on a flashy result. Everybody learns the painful lesson in grad school to not just read a paper and believe everything will work as it says.

Somehow the general public and policymakers got the idea that if a paper gets published in any non-fake journal, this is an official endorsement that it's 100% correct, everything in it can be read in isolation, and it's safe to use all claims in the paper to direct policy immediately.

I think academia is partially to blame for encouraging people to believe this rather than insisting on explaining the nuances of how to interpret published research. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear a message that things are nuanced, and they will have to do costly hard work to get at the truth.

I think a world where "you can take any published paper at face value...without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space" would be great, but it never existed, and it's just fundamentally impossible.

I wouldn't be surprised if the parent's complaint about his academic buddy who didn't read the paper's methods yet declared their findings as true, had misunderstood why his friend did so... which could have well been due to their additional knowledge about similar past findings/studies.

it varies enormously by field.

in CS you will have intense grind weeks around conference deadlines and a more manageable but challenging pace of life otherwise.

in wet lab science you live by the schedule set by your experiments, which often involves intense hours.

if you think of it like a bond it’s pretty fantastic. coupon rate 3.5% and you got it at a giant discount to par even though it’s actually (according to this guy’s beliefs which proved correct) nearly certain to be repaid.

sympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge.

however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.

I like to think of Claude as enjoying himself more when working with good tools rather than bad ones. But metaphysics aside, tools that have the functions you would expect, by the names you would expect, with the behavior you would expect, do seem to be just as important when the users are LLMs.

For numeric stuff, I've been playing recently with chebpy (a python implementation of matlab's chebfun), and am really impressed with it so far - https://github.com/chebpy/chebpy

I've always sort of assumed the models were just making sympy scripts behind the scenes.

Wheres Godel when you need him. A lot of this stuff is symbol shunting, which LLMs should be really good at.

sometimes you can see them do this and sometimes you can see they just work through the problem in the reasoning tokens without invoking python.

I don't think we should pick a winner. When it comes to mathematical answers the best would to pose the same query to all of them and if they all give the same result then our space-rocket is probably going in the right direction.

there is some inevitable "insider trading" in commodities markets. for example if you're a giant agricultural company, and you want to hedge the price of soybeans, you have some extremely relevant insider information about the soybean market. but you're still allowed to trade soybean futures. very different than securities.

if prediction market contracts really are regulated as commodities, then presumably a lot of insider trading must be legal, although there must be limits of one kind or another and probably if you do something really egregious you might be prosecuted under some legal theory.

An agricultural company hedging the price of soybeans is precisely hedging, not speculation. The insider information they have is their supply/demand/pricing picture. That's different than the colloquial definition of insider information which I've always taken to tie to event occurrence (or not).

Why not both? They also have insider information and aren't required to limit their trades to those which would hedge the crops.

Switzerland is like this and is also a real democracy. Although the food is not as good.

In Switzerland you're not going to rent or buy any housing. If a miracle somehow happens you'll live in hotel room sized studio and your full time job will be rental laws and regulations. With no housing it's irrelevant how real the democracy is there.

I have rented an apartment in Zürich (a hotel-room sized studio as you say, though with high quality construction and amenities). it was indeed pretty frustrating to go through the apartment search, but it is possible to rent housing, as evidenced by the fact that millions of Swiss citizens and residents live indoors.

> but it is possible to rent housing, as evidenced by the fact that millions of Swiss citizens and residents live indoors.

Otherwise you are on a fast track from "unable to find housing" to "have to leave the country".

The rail system is good enough that you can live 30min from most cities and be in the country side where prices are not crazy.

No sorry, the real democracy has spoken and said no housing for you.

Anthropic already was using "Clawd" branding as the name for the little pixelated orange Claude Code mascot. So they probably have a trademark even on that spelling.

Runescape boss "Clawdia" [1] predates Anthropic use by several years.

https://runescape.wiki/w/Clawdia

this is probably a net negative as there are many very good scientists with not very strong English skills.

the early years of LLMs (when they were good enough to correct grammar but not enough to generate entire slop papers) were an equalizer. we may end up here but it would be unfortunate.

But then, assuming we are fine with this state of things with LLMs :

why would it be upon them to submit in English, when instead reviewers and readers can themselves use a LLM translator to read the paper ?

this would be a good development. seems very far off.

How is it far off if it's already used like this, just on the side of submitters ?

the earlier list of ICLR papers had way more egregious examples. Those were taken from the list of submissions not accepted papers however.