periheli0n

6 ms·

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by periheli0n 4y ago
I think it is easy to produce vague allegations of a lack of integrity, but I would really expect more substance to such a critique. > ... desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached. Is th
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by periheli0n 4y ago
The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar re
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by periheli0n 4y ago
First thing we did after moving to the UK was to buy a bread baking machine. Not quite bakery-level bread, but good enough for daily consumption, and it leaves a nice smell in the house.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> but is still just a web page > doesn’t support pagination Isn’t that exactly the point? Please, no pagination on a screen. A web page will do just fine. In fact, that was what the www was conceived for: publishing science. > open
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Computer science, and academia in general, has always adapted to technical progress, although slowly. In the case of ChatGPT and similar LLMs, these should become part of the toolbox that students are being taught. I.e., how does it work, w
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by periheli0n 4y ago
The bottom line being, you don't need to hire engineers anymore, just ChatGPT operators?
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a too that offers more control like indesign. Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publis
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Sure, one can write a thesis in MS Word. It has come a long way with support for large documents. But I still find its referencing clumsy, opaque and unstable. For example, automatic updates of figure numbers in captions and references: Cou
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by periheli0n 4y ago
To be fair, there is no better free tool than LaTeX to typeset PDFs. But it fails at non-paginated, free-flowing content.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
It is possible to find Open Access articles with math on ieeexplore with little effort. Have a look here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6767058 Does this live up to your maths standards?
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Thanks for the pointer, that looks interesting. Especially because it is open source! I see it supports Jupyter notebook. Math support in those isn’t too bad at all, so it might just work for many cases.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens. Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be ab
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by periheli0n 4y ago
O‘Reilly‘s online offer has not only O‘Reilly books, but ones from other publishers as well. Some of them have equations. However, they are often rendered as images. IEEE explore does a good job rendering equations on phone screens. Therefo
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up
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by periheli0n 4y ago
The real shocker is that it’s 2022 and LaTeX is still the best writing environment for a PhD thesis. It has so many downsides: the markup syntax is ugly, it really works best only if one used paginated output such as PDF, a zoo of partly in
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Parsing ASCII simply takes time. What you describe sounds like a use case for SQLite. Parse once when building the database. When indexed properly, searching should be much faster.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
“Keep it simple”—something I keep repeating to everyone I work with. I myself have been bitten too often by the temptation to use the latest tech, even when a trusted but less “sexy” alternative was available that could do the job perfectly
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by periheli0n 4y ago
And upgrade to Duke Nukem.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Don't be so hard on him (and your fellow compatriotes). His english is perfectly fine. Wouldn't it be weirder if he had no perceptible accent whatsoever? I find it quite refreshing to be able to tell where someone is from, judging
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by periheli0n 4y ago
This is likely the result of an overworked and underpaid academic being asked to quickly draft a few questions for the online exam tomorrow. It is definitely a sign of insufficient quality control.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Questions like this, where you must have attended the class to know the answer, are often introduced to penalise no-shows. It can also expose suspected contract cheating in online exams. However, it is quite risky, since it probably wouldn’
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> The difficulty being, of course, that the world and its knowledge isn't as simple to represent as a go board. Humans suffer from the exact same limitation. The limit to correct inference and prediction is often the amount and qual
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by periheli0n 4y ago
So one should use chatGPT as a frontend to Google v1!
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by periheli0n 4y ago
My point is, there are frameworks and languages for reasoning which are mature. But they require formalised input (e.g. code) and deliver formalised output. As a language model, chatGPT can translate back and forth between natural language
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by periheli0n 4y ago
The only reliable path to a permanent contract at a German university is to join the administration. Everything else is fixed-term, with the exception of the professorships, which are a lottery with an incredibly high ticket price.
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by periheli0n 4y ago
Where are these universities where an academic senate holds admin accountable? I want to apply!
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by periheli0n 4y ago
> We are a very long way from AGI. In fact it has just gotten closer. Logic reasoning is a pretty solid branch of AI since it’s inception. Robust solutions exist for most problems; even a programming language based on its principles (Pro
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by periheli0n 4y ago
That would then be „Zwieback“ in German, which refers to a kind of crispy mildly sweet bread that children get fed when they are ill :)
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by periheli0n 4y ago
University of Hertfordshire, greater London area, UK, Research Fellow, data science/machine learning, tinkering with electronics and robots encouraged, part-remote possible if working from within the UK. International applicants welcom

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