I’ve finally reached peak academic narcissism: according to this email, my primary research specialty is "Furong Huang." 🫠 Not only am I the subject of my own research, but I’ve also apparently mastered "distributed systems", because, as the logic goes, we "distributed" images to participants in our watermarking competition? 🤣 I love a good reach, but this is a yoga pose. Jokes aside, to the students who are actually interested: I am truly sorry. Your thoughtful, genuine emails are being buried under a mountain of this agent-generated noise. If you want to stand out, please: • Ditch the templates. If a bot could have written it, a human probably won't read it. • Be specific. Mention a specific finding or a question you had about a paper, not just the title. • Show the "Why." How does your specific background actually bridge to our work? (And no, "distributing images" doesn't count as systems experience!) Final thought on the AI Agent Era: Attention is our most precious currency, perhaps the only truly finite resource we have left. While agents make it "free" to generate content, they make it incredibly expensive to consume it. We have to start protecting our own attention and, more importantly, respecting the attention of others. If you don't respect someone's time enough to proofread an email, don't expect them to invest their time in your career. #AcademicTwitter #ML #GenAI #AttentionEconomy