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1. Embed this notice
   aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:08:03 JST aeva

   I know this is both controversial and brave of me to say, but I really hate the "two-column paper" format. {lastname}%y.pdf why are you like this.

   • Embed this notice
     tech? no! man, see... (technomancy@icosahedron.website)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:08:01 JST tech? no! man, see...

     in reply to

     @aeva far as I can tell it's a prestige thing

     "I'm going to make this more inconvenient for you to read so that you can understand how professional and academic I am! take me seriously please."

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:40:18 JST aeva

     in reply to

     If we lived in the parallel universe where Zefram Cochrane doesn't shoot the Vulcan, this would all just be hypertext! Just HTML with a tasteful stylesheet. Oh, that reference to another paper looks interesting? Just click on it and have a lookaroo

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     TheZouave (thezouave@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:40:26 JST TheZouave

     in reply to

     • Oblomov

     @oblomov @aeva Why wouldn't the authors give a link to the arxiv repository or personal hosting of the pdf? Do the publishers disallow those links on the principle that they aren't scholarly?

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     Oblomov (oblomov@sociale.network)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:40:27 JST Oblomov

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @TheZouave @aeva
     interestingly, more modern documents are also available in HTML form, and both PDFs and HTML have hyperlinks for citations that you can follow —as long as you have the luck of belonging to an institution that subscribes to that particular journal and/or the authors shelled thousands of dollars to make it open access.

   • Embed this notice
     TheZouave (thezouave@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 03:40:28 JST TheZouave

     in reply to

     @aeva You know, it's kind of crazy how much everyone has been convinced to give useless citations and/or references. Compare and contrast how many times you've gone through looking up a citation versus clicking a hyperlink.

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     Janne Moren (jannem@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:19:56 JST Janne Moren

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @aeva @TheZouave
     I agree; it *is* a crappy bandaid.

     But it's a crappy bandaid that even researchers have done for decades, because all incentives point toward keeping this crappy system and no incentives point away.

     Again, the first thing needed would be a modern replacement for pdf *files*, one that does things so much better it's worth the pain of switching. The main audience for papers is other researchers and web pages don't work.

   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:19:56 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • Janne Moren
     • TheZouave

     @jannem @TheZouave dude chill

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   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:19:58 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • Janne Moren
     • TheZouave

     @jannem @TheZouave ok so maybe I'm not understanding your point here but I've heard this advice before and *it's not a solution it's a crappy bandaid*

   • Embed this notice
     Janne Moren (jannem@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:19:59 JST Janne Moren

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @aeva @TheZouave
     Most research is paywalled, often even to other researchers. I have published papers that I myself don't have access to. It's absolutely ridiculous. That's why Sci-hub is thriving for instance.

     So it's absolutely normal and expected to ask people for papers. I absolutely understand that it feels awkward if you're not used to it though.

   • Embed this notice
     Janne Moren (jannem@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:00 JST Janne Moren

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @aeva @TheZouave
     As a tip: paper authors are usually happy (delighted!) to send you a copy of the paper if you ask. If the citation is somewhat recent you'll at least get a good, crisp pdf, not a third generation photocopy.

     But yes, papers are all created for print, not the web. Online repos (biomedcentral, arxiv, journal web sites) often do have a separate list of citations, and sometimes (as for biomedcentral ) links directly to the paper.

   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:00 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • Janne Moren
     • TheZouave

     @jannem @TheZouave I will give up before I have to cold call email a stranger. "hey sorry I cyber detective stalked you to get your email I swear I'm not a creep I just want your research."

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   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:01 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @TheZouave if I'm lucky, what falls out at the end is pdf with OCR text from a scan of a bad photocopy of paper from the late 20th century, and it is inexplicably partially written in greek.

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   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:02 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • TheZouave

     @TheZouave it's a friction thing. With a hyperlink, I click on it and the information is there. For a paper citation, I have to google the name of the author(s), year, and title, wade through a bunch of paywall seo and then find a dead link to a ~ directory on a university website that now redirects to the a generic page full of pictures of smiling twenty somethings doing group work, try archive.org instead, but it's not archived, and then go back to the seo to fish for a doi identifier and

   • Embed this notice
     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:08 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • tech? no! man, see...

     @technomancy I mean it's telling that they identify these by the names of the authors and publications, and not like, the concept they're meant to illustrate

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:14 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • Oblomov

     @oblomov this is every graphics paper I've ever read, new or old. The one that provoked this was from 2008.

     clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Oblomov (oblomov@sociale.network)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:15 JST Oblomov

     in reply to

     @aeva jesus crhist are you reading articles from the 1960s or what

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     aeva (aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:16 JST aeva

     in reply to

     • Oblomov

     @oblomov it's better than two columns of 4pt font. my eyes are fucked up I can't read this shit without putting the paper into "landscape mode"

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     Oblomov (oblomov@sociale.network)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:17 JST Oblomov

     in reply to

     @aeva OTOH HTML still sucks at certain kinds of layout, so in landscape it has a catastrophically suboptimal usage of space. Would be nice if there was a way to have it auto-layout columns in HTML, scrolling horizontally instead of vertically. But such is life.

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     Dek (dek@scalie.zone)'s status on Saturday, 17-Feb-2024 20:20:28 JST Dek

     in reply to

     @aeva
     It's not like the web was created for this lol.

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