stannenb

Musk seems to be proving similarly inspirational to CEOs who believe their employees have grown too lazy, too coddled, too opinionatedabout their workplaces. On November 16th, the same day Musk asked Twitter’s remaining employees to sign an oath pledging to work long hours or resign, former PayPal CEO and Facebook crypto guy David Marcus tweeted:

I guess the times of complaining to the CEO of a large tech company at an all hands in front of thousands of people about the quality of toilet paper have come to an end. (True story. This really happened.)

Marcus has plenty of company in being annoyed at the entitlement of some tech employees; countless rank-and-file tech workers have told us stories about one outrageous request or another that one of of their peers made at an all-company meeting.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/29/23483812/elon-musk-tech-ceo-dei-inclusivity-twitter-ban-big-bang

Putting aside everything else, we're witnessing the most significant labor action in tech in years.

ETA: Remember the good old days when Elon took over Twitter, in part because the workers had too much control?

tldr: Sama stepped down,

No, he was fired.

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

That's as close to "he lied to us so we fired his ass" as you're ever going to hear from a corporate board.

Scientific publishing is done the way it is for a number of reasons, important ones already have been noted by other commentators.

But one aspect not covered is peer review. A peer reviewed journal article has been the gold standard of scientific research for quite some time. This involves submitting the article to the journal, and letting the journal anonymously recruit other experts to critique the paper. The goal here is to strengthen the research and screen for mistakes (and fraud, though peer review assumes honesty on the part of the researchers.)

This process has been challenged recently because, in the end, it doesn't really work to create a uniform gold standard of research. Large fields of research can't actually replicate the results of peer reviewed studies. Large, systematic frauds go undetected. The process is agonizingly slow in case of emergencies like COVID. And "idiosyncratic" reviewers can make the process worse. (See: Reviewer 2).

On top of that mess is money. You often pay to have your article published, your institution's library has to pay for a subscription, and your work is locked behind a paywall. This is particularly galling when the government has paid for the research in the first place. But the big publishers retain (too much) control.

The last problem is the discovery of your work. Publish a blog post and who notices? Publish in a leading, reputable journal, you're guaranteed eyes on your work.

None of this is particularly good for either researchers or scientists and it's interesting to watch academics experiment with alternate ways of codifying their discoveries. The insistence on "open access" - no paywalls - is one way. PrePrint servers like Arvix allow researchers to meaningfully distribute papers intended to be peer reviewed before the review happens. And fields like LLMs are moving so fast no disciplined publishing process could keep up are helping to further disrupt this.