Samantha Cole, writing for 404 Media:

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.” [...]

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule — meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned — but that decisions will be open to appeal.

I see no cognitive dissonance in being pro-AI, in general, but vehemently anti-slop.

Link: 404media.co/new-arxiv-rules-ai-generated-papers-ban/

Windows Notepad is, more or less, the Windows peer to MacOS’s TextEdit — the built-in system text editor. For years, it was really basic — more basic than TextEdit. Recently Microsoft has started beefing it up, though, culminating last year when they added fucking Markdown support. Which still blows my mind.

Notepad++ is a longstanding open source (GPL) Windows text editor by Don Ho, which debuted back in 2003. Just adding “++” to the name feels misleading. The name implies that it’s like Microsoft’s Notepad but a little more. Notepad++ is in fact a wholly independent programming text editor, with a rich plugin library, and remains quite popular. To some extent Notepad++ sorta kinda the Windows peer to BBEdit.

Nextpad++ is something new, from Andrey Letov. It’s a Mac port of the Notepad++ GPL code, apparently in Objective-C. It launched a few weeks ago under the name “Notepad++ for Mac”, but Letov had no right or permission to the name. That dispute has been settled, and Letov has renamed this project Nextpad++. The website’s About page has entire sections for “How Nextpad++ for Mac Was Built” and “Technology Stack”, and neither of those mentions AI, but this thing almost has to have been built using AI vibe-coding agents. That same about page also says the project only started on March 10, and the 1.0 version (under the defunct “Notepad++ for Mac” name) shipped just a few weeks after that. Something of the scope of this port couldn’t happen at that pace without AI.

Nextpad++ feels like a fever dream. Like what Mac apps would be if the Nazis had won WWII. Look, there are all sorts of foreign apps on the Mac. Electron apps. Apps ported with Wine. The curious new generation of lean-and-mean apps that are, in a technical sense, “native”, but are decidedly not Mac-assed apps, like Zed and Tolaria. Those apps just feel like aliens on MacOS. Like new species. But the Mac is welcoming to them, like the Mos Eisley cantina. We do serve their kind here. Nextpad++ doesn’t feel like an alien. It feels like Vincent D’Onofrio’s alien-bug-in-human-skin character from Men in Black.

Letov’s website describes it as “A real Mac app, not a Wine wrapper: Objective-C++ on top of Scintilla and Cocoa, shipped as a Universal Binary for Apple Silicon (M1–M5) and Intel Macs.” Ostensibly that’s a good thing. But Nextpad++ looks and feels like something that should not exist. The promotional screenshots on the app’s own website show it with 50 inscrutable toolbar buttons. It closes tabs on mousedown, not mouseup. Its default font is 10-point Courier New. No human being would port a complex Windows app like Notepad++ to the Mac like this.

I’m not anti-AI. I’m very much intrigued by the whole incipient vibe-coding phenomenon. But this app feels unholy. It’s spooky.

Link: notepad-plus-plus.org/news/npp-trademark-infringement/