noooooooph

To that point I think it's lovely how LLMs democratize science. At ICLR a few years ago I spoke with a few Korean researchers that were delighted that their relative inability to write in English was no being held against them during the review process. I think until then I underestimated how pivotal this technology was in lowering the barrier to entry for the non-English speaking scientific community.

I recall Dell had laptops in the past at some point that had blue trackpoint-like nubs

This assumes there are compelling alternatives in the market that I can choose from. In reality, there are only a few entrenched players in any established market that work hard to limit competition. So yes, even if I'd like to choose not to hand over my hard-earned money to Evil Corp #93, I can only do the "stupid" thing and watch myself and my environment get exploited.

What an abysmal take. Academia is arguably the one place in modern society where the human drive for curiosity does not need to be tied to some notion of utility. It would be terrible to corrupt this with the introduction of a market. Saying that the problem with academia is a matter of assessing “market impact” is missing the point entirely. First and foremost, academia should be about advancing our understanding of the world around us. Figuring out potential applications of this knowledge is a secondary goal, best left to engineers and researchers at companies whose role it is to extract profit from scientific knowledge.