The old trust signals are on life support
Signals we used: Well-written prose, thorough documentation, tidy repositories, passing CI, lots of tests, good overall presentation.
Producing them implied: time, attention, familiarity with the work, dedication to a quality product.
What has changed: Generative tools can produce the outward signals cheaply, which means the information content drops for everyone.
- Arfon Smith
Where does the rigor go? Research software and the future of trustworthy science.
Using nanopublications in research software development
Interesting talk by Imperial's Saranjeet Kaur. I think we've dismissed the semantic web in favor of full-text search and ingest, but I wonder if a good LLM tool might bring it back with less token cost?