Notices by Albert Cardona (albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz), page 3

@mike

Sounds good, but what's the plan for handling the fallout of Meta slurping in the whole social graph of Mastodon and using it for their own nefarious purposes?

@chrisnelder

Reassuring: “We have reached the point where decarbonisation will happen with the fossil fuel industry or without them. […] renewables are simply a superior technology.”—Christiana Figueres https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/7/6/i-thought-fossil-fuel-firms-could-change-i-was-wrong

#EnergyTransition #FossilFuels #Electrification #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.

Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.

Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.

And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.

#ScientificPublishing #science #ChatGPT

"Actually, we will read your thesis" by Neel Krishnaswami https://semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2023/09/actually-we-will-read-your-thesis.html

"whenever I find a paper I don't understand, I start looking for the PhD thesis based on it. Nine times out of ten, the thesis is vastly more understandable: "obvious" lemmas will have explicit proofs, algorithms will have detailed pseudocode, and the right intuitions and perspectives to take about the topic will be spelled out."

Can relate. A colleague of mine, Stefan Pulver, once mentioned to me the "strategic reserve of Michael Bate's lab PhD student theses" as something of wonder – he was a postdoc in that lab. Huge amounts of data not deemed splashy enough for publication but full of details and caveats and protocols for studies of #Drosophila larvae #neuroscience.