I like that there's three examples. Two named, who are both men and then one woman who is mentioned by an anonymous source and if she's real, doesn't sound that unlike (at least in moral terms) to the crypto evangelist archetype.
There's an animated version of the graphic novel of An Béal Bocht that I haven't had a chance to watch yet but have had highly recommended to me.
I did find the description kinda funny though "An animated adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s only novel written in Irish under the pseudonym of Myles Na gCopaleen. It is a biting satire of the life story of a young Gael reflecting on his life from Sligo Gaol." - as if Flann wasn't also a pseudonym, but I suppose he never wrote much under the name Brian.
(Entirely unrelated, I saw the German adaptation of ASTB as a teenager and it was fascinating. Not necessarily good, but out there)
FWiW he was a prolific writer all his life, as a pre computer civil servent he would have written at length all through many of his days at work .. the rules of the day demanded he be circumspect in regard to public opinion:
Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy.
The Irish civil service has been, since the Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical.
Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views.
As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis.
This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings.
I read Being and Time recently and it has a load of concepts that are defined iteratively. There's a lot wrong with how it's written but it's an unfinished book written a 100 years ago so, I cant complain too much.
Because it's quite long, if I asked Perplexity* to remind me what something meant, it would very rarely return something helpful, but, to be fair, I cant really fault it for being a bit useless with a very difficult to comprehend text, where there are several competing styles of reading, many of whom are convinced they are correct.
But I started to notice a pattern of where it would pull answers from some weird spots, especially when I asked it to do deep research. Like, a paper from a University's server that's using concepts in the book to ground qualitative research, which is fine and practical explications are often useful ways into a dense concept, but it's kinda a really weird place to be the first initial academic source. It'll draw on Reddit a weird amount too, or it'll somehow pull a page of definitions from a handout for some University tutorial. And it wont default to the peer reviewed free philosophy encyclopedias that are online and well known.
It's just weird. I was just using it to try and reinforce my actual reading of the text but I more came away thinking that in certain domains, this end of AI is allowing people to conflate having access to information, with learning about something.
If you're asking an LLM about a particular text, even if it's a well-known text, you might get significantly better results if you provide said text as part of your prompt (context) instead of asking a model to "recall it from memory".
So something like this: "Here's a PDF file containing Being and Time. Please explain the significance of anxiety (Angst) in the uncovering of Being."
It is wild to me that the bulk of responses here seem to take how this is being described by the poster at face value.
As well as the question of interfering with registration, he has also gone about this in a way that causes reputational damage (& UW have probably caused their own, but that's not necessarily relevant here), which I cant imagine they'll take that kindly either.
But I work in a public university in the EU, so my understanding of how these institutions probably operate is likely a little skewed.
Probably pent up rage w.r.t. beurocracy we've all experienced in college?
I agree with you that it seems that there might be something missing from the story.
The standard response and advice of talking to a lawyer I think is still good and stands regardless of how full or truthful the OPs account of the situation is.
I don't personally think that most university staff in the US are out to get people in this way either, so either there is something about the story we are missing, or this is a really big deal and this particular university is out of control.
My experience in university in the US was never this dramatic and I didn't see actions like this taken (but I also never constructed a project of this nature that is directly related to the university beurocracy).
In other words, this is kind of weird in a US context too and I feel the same weirdness about it that you are probably feeling viewing from the EU.
UW has had some pretty bad issues (e.g. systems lab abuse [1], early-entrance programs [2]). Another program I was in had serious issues such as overworking and threatening student eligibility, such that almost all the leadership involved left for other universities. That was never reported more loudly out of fear of retaliation and sheer exhaustion of the students. That being said, it is a large university with many different actors and most of my experiences here have been positive.
How is he interfering with registration? I assumed all he built was a place to pair students so that they could exchange classes using the university's own system. It seems in principle as much of an interference with the university as a coupon aggregating website is to grocery stores: efficiently spreading information so that people can make better use of the existing resources available to them. In his LinkedIn post, he mentions trying to get read access to courses, not write access.
I like how this is visualised (at least aesthetically) and I appreciate the utility of genre in that it creates expectations, but at the same, it sort of reeks of this feigned complete knowledge of music and this obsession with categorising things that cannot be neatly categorised. The techno section has this 'these are the types I've read about on reddit'-ness to it and the metal section... I remember crunkcore but I really dont understand how it could be in such large text.
I'm only familiar with metal genres, but it doesn't look bad. It's way better than Wikipedia, for example. There are no "gimmick" genres like aliencore, and every style mentioned is distinctive, historically important and accepted by me and the people I interact with. The only thing that surprised me is that first wave of black metal is called "extreme metal" here.
If anything, it's not detailed enough. For a long time I was listening almost exclusively to technical death metal, while for example I don't line brutal death metal at all. These subgenres of death metal (and band self-identification) are very different, and yet here they are all lumped into just "death metal", as far as I can see.
Yup, categories are useful, but when you obsess too much about them, it starts to look like "pigeonholing". Also, in my experience the most interesting musicians/bands are those that can't be easily categorized...
