Hello Jacob,
I do not know the main reasons for the decrease in the conversations in
this list. About the use of LLM for searching information, it is getting
more and more impossible to avoid it (especially with Google feeding
these responses right at the top). However, I had too many cases of
wrong answers to convince me that we are not there yet with these tools.
I got code wrong, math wrong, and statistical concepts that were
imprecise when reading these results.
The interesting thing is that the best answers these LLMs can produce is
when they can source information from places like Stack overflow and
this list serve! So, it might happen in the future that we will simply
reverse back to "the old ways". Right now, these LLMs are not really
helping me that much.
Cheers,
Daniel Caetano
On 9/8/25 06:00, [email protected] wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: What kinds of posts is this list needed for in the age
of AI? (Jacob Berv)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2025 19:41:19 -0400
From: Jacob Berv <[email protected]>
To: Hilmar Lapp <[email protected]>
Cc: R Sig Phylo Listserv <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-phylo] What kinds of posts is this list needed
for in the age of AI?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
This is an interesting take. I wouldn’t be surprised if it accounts for a drop
off in most questions up to a pretty advanced level. I know that my personal
use of forums like stack overflow has gone to zero, but before November 2023
was a daily visit. Even google for search is eroding, at least for me
personally. The frontier models already know the best strategies for using
search engines to find the most relevant information. I have also had good luck
in using LLMs to assist in building relatively complex phylogenetic analysis
workflows. Maybe this itself is worth some discussion on here.
On Sep 2, 2025, at 5:57 PM, Hilmar Lapp <[email protected]> wrote:
(Re-titling, but it’s a follow-up to my previous post)
Incidentally, I notice that the most recent Answer post to Evoldir is from 2022
(https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/Answers.html).
There’s no reason to speculate that people who ask questions have somehow
become rude and do not post a summary of answers anymore, so the most likely
(and arguably Occam’s razor) explanation seems to be that it’s the asking of
questions that has faded away on Evoldir as well. Indeed, the “Other” category
archive (https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/Other.html) bears this out, at least
for the last 4 months that the archive extends to.
In that context, the asking of questions has persisted here for a little
longer, but in principle has taken the same trajectory.
This decline in posted questions obviously coincides with the advent of
increasingly powerful LLMs. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and I don’t
know whether this is what trainees are using now, but I know it’s what I would
try first. As a random experiment, I tried one of the more recent questions
that generated a number of responses here, on model-averaging corHMM models.
Original list post:
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg06023.html
My query to ChatGPT (free version):
https://chatgpt.com/share/68b76601-2a80-8001-98ad-7ef4417db345
You all judge the answer.
Anyone interested in examining this with a little more rigor?
-hilmar
On Aug 24, 2025, at 4:44 PM, Hilmar Lapp via R-sig-phylo
<[email protected]> wrote:
Apologies for chiming in a little late here. I have to say I am (and have been
for a while) in favor of moving the course announcements out of this mailing
list into a channel of its own. The main reasons in my mind include the
following:
- Having a separate channel for course announcements seems to be the common
mechanism for distribution lists with a wide reach (case in point for our field
is evoldir). This seems to work well – people interested in receiving these
announcements opt in, everybody else doesn’t need to take (and validate, check,
monitor etc) specific action.
- Science has become and will continue to become more interdisciplinary, more
so than ever in the age of data deluges and AI/ML. This can make it difficult
to draw a good line between courses that are and those that aren’t pertinent to
this community. And across this community, we’d probably choose different lines.
- It’s a little hard to say right now whether the diminishing frequency of on-topic
Q&A-style threads is a reaction to course announcements taking over more and
more and arguably most of the traffic, or an independent trend reflecting something
else. In the past, we have used frequency of posts as evidence supporting the
list’s value and usefulness. I still consider this very valuable information to
have – if this kind of forum is becoming or is much less useful than it was in the
past, we should be able to see this from the list traffic, ideally unencumbered by
confounding factors. Perhaps chatbots can now utilize the information from the list
archives (which are public) well enough that most questions get answered this way
rather than reaching the list as a post.
-hilmar
--
Hilmar Lapp -:- ORCID:0000-0001-9107-0714 <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9107-0714> -:-
GitHub:hlapp <https://github.com/hlapp>
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