Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 1d

I do agree that formal peer review as we know it is a dead idea walking, but mostly because we have long swooped past a breaking point where the effort justified the systemic gains.

(if there ever were systemic gains to start with, which isn't super clear to me)

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 1d

Everything is cyclical. Some 25 years ago European institutions pushed for quantitative assessment because previous qualitative, subjective assessments meant that departments were riddled with nepotism.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 1d

What even was that? youtu.be/D5_xwX_jxB0?...

Kansas City Chiefs vs Jacksonville Jaguars Game Highlights | 2025 NFL Season Week 5

YouTube video by NFL

youtu.be

Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 1d

Fuck's sake, the @chiefs.bsky.social lost the game via the most ugly touchdown I have ever seen. Heartbreak.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 7d

"The American military will follow lawful orders and disobey unlawful ones."

Will it? So far the track record of long-standing institutions pushing back isn't great.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Pete Hegseth Is Living the Dream

A man who retired as a major lectures hundreds of generals about the need to meet his standards.

www.theatlantic.com

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 7d

As a sidenote, I don't truly think that teaching students how to use AI effectively is all that important. These tools aren't hard to use, and the "tricks of the trade" are ephemeral. Teaching students how to prompt feels a lot like teaching SEO or googling.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 7d

That said, you still need to know some form of programming / algorithmic thinking / problem decomposition when programming with AI. How to teach that when students have access to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Cursor day 1 I honestly have no idea.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 7d

Every day that I use Gemini and similar, and every conversation I have with others, leads me closer to seeing insistence on "coding yourself" more similar to the "real programmers use assembly" mindset I abhorred myself when I was a student.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 7d

It's an interesting question what "the fundamentals of programming" are going to be in an AI age. Two months ago I would have agreed that being able to program yourself, without AI, line-by-line, will remain crucial for the foreseeable future. Today, I'm much less sure.

Stefan Marr @stefan-marr.de · 7d

First Day: A New Chapter at the JKU

It's Wednesday. Is this important? It's my first day in a new position. So, perhaps the real question is: what's going to be important to me from now on?

stefan-marr.de/2025/10/firs...

First Day: A New Chapter at the JKU

New job and responsibilities: what's now important to me?

stefan-marr.de

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 10d

New paper accepted by Huaifeng Zhang, Mohannad Alhanahnah, YT, and Ahmed Ali El Din:

BLAFS: A Bloat-Aware Container File System

(accepted at the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing)

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2305.04641
Tool: github.com/negativa-ai/...

Congratulations to Huaifeng and the team!

The Cure is in the Cause: A Filesystem for Container Debloating

Containers have become a standard for deploying applications due to their convenience, but they often suffer from significant software bloat-unused files that inflate image sizes, increase provisionin...

arxiv.org

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 19d

I am emphatically in favor of this new type of "open source ish" license:

If you’re a little guy, do whatever you want with my work.
If you’re a big guy, fuck you pay me.

tante @tante.cc · 19d

"The Free Software Foundation has been sliding into irrelevance more and more by entirely failing to address its big Creepy Uncle problem. Open-Source has turned into a form of unpaid internship to be hired to make shitty apps that bring more surveillance and ads to our world."

Introducing the Forklift Certified License—Aria’s Barks

It's not following the OSI definition of open-source because i don't give a damn how capital defines its needs.

aria.dog

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 26d

Slides for yesterday's talk at the 2025 WASP Software Engineering cluster meeting:

www.icet-lab.eu/news/2025090...

WASP Software Engineering and Technology Cluster Workshop Talk | Internet Computing and Emerging Technologies lab (ICET-lab)

Welcome to the Internet home of the the Internet Computing and Emerging Technologies lab at Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg

www.icet-lab.eu

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 27d

Eh.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 27d

Ich fürchte die traurige Wirklichkeit ist dass die USA seit Trump I ein entgleister Zug in Slow-Motion ist, dem man nur schockiert zusehen kann wie eine erwartbare Eskalation auf die Andere folgt.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · 29d

I find this equal parts fascinating and weird.

Maximilian Werner @maximilianwerner.at · 29d

Today I learned: Die einzige Tageszeitung Liechtensteins, das "Vaterland", "übersetzt" ihre Artikel mit ChatGPT in "Jugendsprache" und veröffentlicht das auf brudiland.li.
Das Ziel: "Die Sprache darf salopp sein und viele Anglizismen enthalten. News in Nice eben!" (www.vaterland.li/portale/brud...)

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Sep 8

I will serve as Awards Co-Chair (together with Catalina M. Lladó) for ICPE'26:

icpe2026.spec.org/organizing-c...

Organizing Committee: ICPE 2026

icpe2026.spec.org

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Sep 3

Ist halt ein leicht verkapptes Anti-Emanzipations Argument.

Konservative Idealwelt: der Mann macht viel Erwerbsarbeit ("Karriere"), seine Frau macht alle Care Arbeit, Geld einbringen tut nur der Mann. Wenn man da gerne wieder hin will macht die Forderung schon Sinn.

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Reposted by Philipp Leitner

Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · Jan 15

arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/h...

This is funny: one way to tell that openAI scraped YouTube, is that its Whisper transcription is biased toward transcribing inaudible or garbled text to "drop a comment in the section below" or "please like subscribe and share" and such

Hospitals adopt error-prone AI transcription tools despite warnings

OpenAI’s Whisper tool may add fake text to medical transcripts, investigation finds.

arstechnica.com

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Aug 27

If you are a healthcare professional currently wrinkling your nose and going "if only that boy had seeked professional help", ask yourself very seriously the question if they would have likely received something that's better than a human-like tool that always listens and is always sympathetic.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Aug 27

The reporting on the tragic ChatGPT suicide assistance story triggers me a little bit, but not in the way you might expect.

Teenagers turning to ChatGPT in times of crisis was bound to happen, given that mental healthcare everywhere is expensive, unavailable, and of embarrassingly shitty quality.

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Aug 27

I share this worry. To be honest it's a surprise that Scholar survived as long as it did.

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @hannahshelley.bsky.social · Aug 13

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Google Scholar Is Doomed

Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

hannahshelley.neocities.org

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Reposted by Philipp Leitner

Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @hannahshelley.bsky.social · Aug 13

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Google Scholar Is Doomed

Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

hannahshelley.neocities.org

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Reposted by Philipp Leitner

tante @tante.cc · Aug 25

Btw. about 6 months ago the Anthropic CEO said that by now 50% of all code would be written by LLMs.

How does that prediction relate to the reality we all live in and what does that say about his ability to make predictions about the future?

Anthropic CEO: AI Will Be Writing 90% of Code in 3 to 6 Months - Business Insider

"And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said.

www.businessinsider.com

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Philipp Leitner @philippleitner.net · Aug 22

Many decision processes end up unfair because for the deciding body false positives are disastrous but false negatives are almost irrelevant.

That's how you end up with coding interviews, overreaching visa requirements, and similar.

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Reposted by Philipp Leitner

CerberusXt @cerberusxt.bsky.social · Aug 21

Good morning Bluesky !

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