Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.

Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including

By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].

…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus

We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.

Great work.

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.

It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.

From the article:

While drug companies profit from the sales of unproven drugs, everyone else — patients, insurers, and the government — pays a heavy price. In just four years, from 2018 through 2021, the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid shelled out $18 billion for drugs approved on the condition that their manufacturers produce confirmatory trials that had yet to be delivered.

I’m guessing their citation only includes Medicare and Medicaid because those have publicly-available data for the study to review, but I have to assume that private insurers pay a ton as well. I can see your point that insurance denials result in angry sick people, but there’s not really a lot of nuance in “that medication has never been shown to be safe and effective for your (or any) condition.”

I dunno. Everyone sucks here.

American health insurance companies are famously miserly, and this seems like a great area to use penny pinching for good. Where the hell are the insurance CFOs who should be demanding efficacy proof instead of being swindled along with the masses?