Hackaday Links: April 28, 2024

Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.

It doesn’t always take a statistical analysis of word distributions to detect the footprints of an LLM, though. The article includes examples of text copied and pasted directly from the chatbot, without any attempt at editing or even basic proofreading. How not only the authors of the papers but also the journal editors and reviewers managed not to pick up an obvious chatbot error message that had been copy-pasted is hard to imagine. And let’s not even get started on the Midjourney-generated diagram of a monstrously well-endowed rat that was used to illustrate an article (since retracted) on spermatogenesis, complete with nonsensical captions and callouts to non-existent body parts. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Speaking of nice things, did you know that the largest manufacturer of vintage lamps in history is a little company called “Underwriter’s Laboratory”? At least it seems that way looking at eBay, where sellers listing old lamps often claim the manufacturer is the storied safety standards organization. We suppose it makes sense if the only label on an old lamp is the UL listing label and you had no idea what UL is. But really, that’s the least of the problems with some of these listings. “Vintage” is a stretch for a green banker’s lamp with a polarized plug that was clearly made sometime in the last 30 years.

Switching gears a bit, it’s one thing to know that everything you do online is tracked, but it’s quite another thing to find out exactly how much information is shooting back and forth between your computer and the Hive Mind. That’s what Bert Hubert built Tracker Beeper to do, and it’s a little terrifying. The tool emits a short beep every time your computer sends off a bit of data to a tracker. It started just monitoring data going to Google, which was alarming enough. The tool was later modified to include most of the trackers we’re likely to come across in our daily travels, and wow! It sounds like a Geiger counter when the tube gets saturated by a highly active source. Probably just as dangerous, too.

Heads up — the HOPE conference is gearing up. Hackers on Planet Earth XV will be held July 12-14 on the campus of St. John’s University in Queens, New York. The “Call for Participation” is now open; it’s always nice to see a big Hackaday contingent at HOPE, so make sure you get your proposals for talks, workshops, or panels together soon.

And finally, what should you do if the FCC comes knocking at your door? It’s not just an academic question; the US Federal Communications Commission does a lot of field investigation, and if you do any kind of RF experimentation, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll make some kind of spurious emission that gets their attention. Josh from Ham Radio Crash Course dropped a video that addresses the dreaded knock. TL;DW — come back with a warrant. But it’s more complicated than that, as illustrated by a hilarious IRL account of one such encounter. We won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that if your house is under the approach to a major international airport, you probably want to be extra careful with anything radio-related.