A couple days ago, when I wasn’t looking, our comments total for our twenty years of blogging surpassed 200,000. This is for about 12,000 posts.
We’ve had some trolls, but mostly the comments have been very helpful, so keep them coming! Also I’m working to reduce the troll presence to open up more space for good discussion. With some effort, we can do the anti-Gresham.
Here’s to another 20 years and another 200,000 comments.
Damn, did I miss the confetti falling down from above, and a banner with “congratulations, you just made comment no. 200,000” being lowered from the ceilling?!
As a side note: do you know which exact comment was number 200,000 and if so, is that a fun detail to mention?
Congrats on 200,000 comments!!
Maybe a duck with the label 200,000
$50 says the 200,000th comment was one of:
* A grammar gripe
* A poem on the subject matter
* A hot take from a certain someone in the shape of an anon
* The z-curve method
;)
Entomophagist,
I actually wrote the above post a few months ago and I don’t remember what was the 200,000th comment. I should’ve saved it for posterity! Your comment just above is #207,230.
Congratulations, though you really shouldn’t count comments from the original poster at full value. Subtract those out and you can start a 200,000-watch.
I’ve learned a lot from the comment section on this blog ! It motivates me to keep posting, because people write such helpful questions and thoughts.
Same here!
Unrelated, but thought you might find this amusing:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/21/irony-alert-hallucinated-citations-found-in-papers-from-neurips-the-prestigious-ai-conference/
“AI detection startup GPTZero scanned all 4,841 papers accepted by the prestigious Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), which took place last month in San Diego. The company found 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers that it confirmed as fake, the company tells TechCrunch.
Having a paper accepted by NeurIPS is a resume-worthy achievement in the world of AI. Given that these are the leading minds of AI research, one might assume they would use LLMs for the catastrophically boring task of writing citations.
So caveats abound with this finding: 100 confirmed hallucinated citations across 51 papers is not statistically significant. Each paper has dozens of citations. So out of tens of thousands of citations, this is, statistically, zero. ”
Statistically zero! Hooray!
Wonderful comment!
It’s probably just coincidence, or synchronicity, that an AI paper at an AI conference used AI to make up references though. So your comment would also fit well under the very next post:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/21/what-a-coincidence-what-a-coincidence/
Cheers,
Dogen