If you'd built a "tool" that stupid, why would you advertise the fact?
22 comments
·October 14, 2025sigmoid10
tom1337
There are some 10minutemail / trashmail providers out there who provide .edu emails - great to get benefits which are only for students free, but sucks for everbody who is implementing these platforms to get those benefits because they can't just check if the domain ends on .edu but rather need to validate against a common list of valid universities...
jeroenhd
> rather need to validate against a common list of valid universities
Don't you need that already anyway? There's no standard for how universities format their academic email addresses.
Plus, .edu only applies to American universities. Services validating if you're a "real" student by checking for .edu emails were quite annoying during my time as a student. A lot of these platforms don't seem to even know .edu is an American thing.
hshdhdhehd
A spammers dream.
Jean-Papoulos
I believe there's a vicious circle of a few companies starting to use AI with an actual idea, then shareholders of other companies say "we need to use AI as well, it works for them !" and then more companies start using AI to "not fall behind", etc... All with very few actual use cases. 99% are doing it just because others are.
vishnugupta
I’m old enough to remember this phenomenon play out multiple times
1. SOA and later micro services 2. Big data & MongoDb 3. Kubernetis 4. Blockchain
delaminator
That's what happening at our company.
The owner lives in London and rarely visits but he has arranged for AI consultants to come in and workshop with us to see how "AI can help the business". Our operations mainly consist of data entry.
newswasboring
Isn't data entry a really good usecase for the LLM technologies? Of course depending on the exact usecase. But most "data entry" jobs are data transformation jobs and they get automated using ML techniques all the time. Current LLMs are really good at data transformation too.
sirwhinesalot
No because they aren't reliable. You don't want to be storing hallucinated data. They can help write the scripts that do the actual work though.
delaminator
We can't even use AI language translation because of compliance / liability - we translate food ingredients.
"It says 'no shellfish', go ahead - eat it"
Even with lots context the various services we tried would get something wrong.
e.g. huile is oil in French and sometimes it would get translated as "motor oil"
grey-area
No data replication or transformation is not a good use-case for text generators.
jeroenhd
If your core feature is data entry, you probably want to get as close to 100% accuracy as possible.
"AI" (LLM-based automation) is only useful if you don't really care about the accuracy of the output. It usually gets most of the data transformations mostly right, enough for people to blindly copy/paste its output, but sometimes it goes off the rails. But hey, when it does, at least it'll apologise for its own failings.
swiftcoder
Ah yes, because hallucinations will definitely improve our data entry!
mettamage
> All with very few actual use cases. 99% are doing it just because others are.
Same here, but I started a few months earlier than most (I work in a marketing department as the only one with SWE skills). There's a lot you can do with AI.
For one, you can finally introduce some more automation, they are more open to it. And whenever you need a more "human-like intelligence" in your automation, you basically make an LLM call.
It also helps in terms of creating small microsites, etc.
It helps me personally because whenever I want to make a small command-line tool to make my life easier, I can now also decide to create a whole website as it's about as quick to make nowadays with things such as Codex and Claude Code (aka 30 min.).
azernik
This is how buzzword bingo has always worked. The eternal curse of the computer industry (especially software).
ErroneousBosh
I'm old enough to remember when transputers were the thing that were going to absolutely revolutionise everything to do with computers and computing.
delaminator
Transmeta paid Linus to work on the Linux kernel for 6 years
https://www.theregister.com/2003/06/17/linus_torvalds_leaves...
gdulli
We're all trapped in history's worst prisoner's dilemma.
timpera
Academia.edu might be the most useless and spammiest service out there. They don't seem to offer anything of value, but you can't know that before you pay.
geon
It follows the spam economy. If you can use AI to generate thousands of "articles", some unlucky google user is bound to click on your link. When the price of articles is near zero, it is still profitable.
mrasong
I checked out Academia.edu, it’s packed with papers, but I’m not really sure about the quality tho.
internet_points
they scrape, wheedle, pilfer and mooch off other people's good work
>It was academia.edu, and who can possibly explain how they were able to get a domain name in the .edu TLD?
Relevant section From Wikipedia:
>Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the ".edu" top-level domain. However, since the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions in the US, it is allowed to remain active and operational. All .edu domain names registered before 2001 were grandfathered in, even if not an accredited USA post-secondary institution.