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I've never had any trouble publishing in a more conversational style and have read plenty of papers that do the same. Of course, this varies by field and venue and format (journal vs. conference) and even reviewer and it's difficult to understand what the true constraints are and what the state of the publishing system is in this regard.

But I suspect that a lot of academic's feelings about it are informed by what others have told them and how they've been trained, rather than by what's actually permissible in the publishing system.

If you write each paragraph and have an LLM make that paragraph more scientific, it is entirely your paper

"More scientific" is not some merely stylistic thing that faithfully preserves the original meaning of what you wrote. The precise details of each paragraph matters a lot in terms of what and how it communicates. The fact that these details do matter means that, according to my accounting, it is not entirely your paper.

Also, I find striving for "scientific" to be a pretty undesirable thing. Why should papers read like that? What is the benefit? The best papers (in terms of their writing and communication) are unpretentious and conversational. I'm pretty sure I'd prefer your "basic sentences", especially if they were wholly yours. (I understand that there are also external forces at play here as you mentioned.)

A Pixel 8 Pro (running GrapheneOS)

Tracker What if someone steals my bag? Hopefully the PebbleBee "Find My" device will help me recover it.

In your review (from last year) of the tracker, you wrote it doesn't work with Graphene. [1] From the linked issue, looks like there's partial support now. [2] What's the experience like now on Graphene? Is it good enough for tracking a checked bag or similar?

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/review-pebblebee-clip-unive...

[2] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/4079

Internet vibes---basically making conclusions based on feelings you get from participating in online communities. (E.g., Europeans concluding that America is a medical wasteland where most people do not have reasonable access to care because they read some horror stories on Reddit.)

From my experience in both systems, I think some of the students of course would (the best students in Scandinavia are just as good as the best students anywhere else), but certainly not all of them. And the degree of grade inflation as well as the level of courses and course difficulty is not only highly variable by school but also by individual instances of courses, so it's pretty hard to make broad claims regardless.

I should also note I've taken courses in Europe where the failure rate was like 60%, but I've also taken courses where just about every student got (the equivalent of) an A. Easy grading occurs in Euroland as well. Or other phenomenona, like niche courses that tend to only attract talented, interested students.

P.S. The "common" in "common knowledge" is not some claim of accuracy/correctness and does not lend credence to your point---a lot of things that are common knowledge are false! (I bet most things that fall under that description are false to a degree, or at least in terms of each individuals' average understanding.)

P.P.S. Failure in the US system and the European systems are very different things. In most US schools, failing is permanently recorded on your transcript and cannot be erased. You also cannot retake an exam you've failed. You just get the one shot. So the cost of failure in the US is much higher than in Europe, where it's absolutely routine. The US system also samples students more often, with course grades consisting of many homeworks, multiple exams, etc---this gives an early signal to students doing poorly they need to get their shit together and also prevents students from falling behind. In Europe it's often just a single final exam, which may be a whole of 10-15 minutes if it's an oral exam, and you may be permitted to take the exam even if you haven't really been doing the work (often you need some perfunctory thing like 50% of the points from the homework to qualify). All these factors are also responsible for high European failure rates---it's definitely not just the Americans going easy.

This is not a good comparison.

All the students at Harvard are all selected from the tail end of the distribution and are very capable.

The students at Scandinavian universities are selected to a degree, but represent a far broader range of the distribution and correspondingly there's a broader range of exam results.

Of course, other things are at play here (there is grade inflation at Harvard, the schools obviously operate differently, student disposition is (very) different (e.g., Scandinavian students are far less likely to care a lot about their grades), etc) but students from Harvard would do well at your university in Sweden. Also, the level of the material at Harvard is likely higher.

This is my experience from attending an Ivy undergrad and then doing graduate school in Scandinavia. I actually left my MSc program in Scandinavia because I thought the level of the courses was too low. (I ultimately returned for the PhD---I found the profs and researchers in Scandinavia to be first class/excellent. Much better than I ever will be.)

I have like 20 brands of foam earplugs in my drawer, 5 different pairs of custom silicone airplugs, unusual earplugs from Kickstarter like [1], and so on. What I'm saying is I know my way around the earplug block. Here's what I'd write for your categories:

Foam: The most effective, by far. I suspect many people wear them incorrectly and do not insert them far enough. You can use lube (they make special ear lube for stuff like hearing aids, although I think anything medical grade will do) if you have difficulty doing so. I have unusually small ear canals; the most comfortable and best I've found by a mile are Mack's Ultra Soft Foam Earplugs. These are much more comfortable than slim fit alternatives and also have very high attenuation.

Silicone: expensive (but they're reusable and last years), but the least fussy once you get them. They are moulded to your goddamn ear---it's a perfect, pressure-free fit every time and they go right in. Drawbacks include lesser attenuation and attenuation that isn't immediately at 100%---it takes a while for it to "seal". I abadoned these once moisture started to accumulate between my ear canal and the plug and I'd hear it as I moved and it became very annoying.

Wax: joke attenuations compared to foam, and bad compared to silicone. The most expensive long-term unless you're serious about reuse. Somewhat fussy and may fall out. Very comfortable (little insertion).

Foam + wax: this is what you really want if you care about maximum attenuation. My ear canals are slightly too short to comfortably insert an entire Mack's earplug, so I snip the ends off mine, lube them up, and insert them completely flush into my ear canal. Then, I take a wax plug and mould it on top. It's perfectly comfortable and it performs better than any other option I'm aware of. I tend to also wear a Bluetooth sleep mask and play rain sounds on 100% volume and it just comes through the double earplug situation to mask any very loud/spurious noise. To remove the flush-inserted earplugs, I use a pair of blunt tweezers.

When I used slim fit foam earplugs I'd routinely get ear infections. Switching to silicone fixed that, but suffered from the aforementioned issues. With the ultra soft earplugs + wax method I never get ear infections. I make sure to always insert a fresh pair (but I reuse the wax ones for a few days) and to always do so with clean hands. I think the infections are due to friction between the plug and the canal during insertion as well as plugs that are too large/exert too much pressure once expanded---the lube and very soft plug addresses those issues.

[1] https://paxauris.com/

They aren't that rare. And AI is expanding the niche because making parallel linear algebra go zoom zoom is compiler work. There's also a lot of quantum compiler work.

I also did exactly this and do not receive any spam calls anymore.

Professionalism is not a virtue; measured irreverence is---an uncensored "Fuck" in this scenario falls into that category.

Silliness has an important and necessary place in research.

Good; censoring profanity (especially self-censoring) is for cowards. Be brave and dish out your fucks liberally in your papers!

Location: US & Europe

Remote: No preference

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Functional programming, type systems, language design, compilers, parallel programming languages, verification, Haskell.

Résumé/CV: https://rschenck.com/docs/cv.pdf

Email: See CV above.

I recently finished my PhD at the University of Copenhagen, where I worked on the functional array programming language Futhark (https://futhark-lang.org/). My research focused on Futhark’s type system---including sum types and rank polymorphism---and on adding support for parallel automatic differentiation. Right now, I’m a postdoc at VU Amsterdam, working on hardware verification. Specifically, proving leakage properties of functional hardware descriptions (functional in the Haskell sense) in a composable way.

See my CV or https://rschenck.com for a list of publications.

I'm open to both academic and industry positions. I'm broadly interested in all things type systems/functional programming/compilers/language design. I can work in both the US and the EU without a visa.

But most everything he writes will be right.

I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.

I took a course on massively parallel programming taught by one of the authors of this paper that extensively used Futhark and CUDA.

PMPH? :)

Notice that all the all the languages mentioned depends on the external BLAS library for example OpenBLAS for performance.

That's incorrect. Futhark doesn't even have linear algebra primitives---everything has to be done in terms of map/reduce/etc: https://github.com/diku-dk/linalg/blob/master/lib/github.com...

Futhark, SaC, and Accelerate have purely functional semantics. Futhark has something called "in-place updates" that operationally mutate the given array, but semantically they work as if a new array is created (and are statically guaranteed to work this way by the type system).

if the baseline chance of delay is 10%, engineering works add 25%, strikes add 35%, and bad weather adds 20%, then when all these problems happen, there's a 90% chance your train will be delayed.

What if signal failures "add" 15%? Then all factors combined would mean that there's a 105% chance your train will be delayed!

Adding up probabilities like this doesn't make sense. If you simplify these things as independent events, the probability of delay is just the 1 minus the product of all the probabilities of each event not happening (i.e., 1 - P(event)).

As for the article---I think you really undervalue your time and the price of inconvenience. I can see how you can romanticize it as a nice way to get things done, but (dealing with) train delays is hardly distraction free and is full of forced setting changes and (very) shit working environments (like waiting on a platform). This is a bad deal, even if it's free. Money is there to to be spent; this is a instance in which to spend it, moral/ethical/fraud concerns aside.

But hey maybe you're a Von Neuman type and thrive in cacophony and chaos.

PhD is at least a yellow flag.

Why?

Aren't all the SIGPLAN conferences recorded now? At any rate, her talks were recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrUh5AgIYKE

https://youtu.be/-Br66SUjsdQ?t=12103

(I was also at SPLASH24 and thought she gave great talks. :) )

I don't know about that, 30 seconds is for the whole set and was just a rough estimate. Time-holding-the-bar isn't particularly relevant here (other than to emphasize the point it doesn't take much).

It's not a wild exaggeration and it's possible for most (healthy) middle-aged men within a year (usually a lot less), except for the truly unendowed. (We don't control our genetics and/or other ailments, but I think it's better as a policy to not try to rank yourself in this regard and just be Pollyannaish about it and assume you can achieve it.)

5x5 deadlifts is generally too much volume and probably constitutes overtraining for you if they're sufficiently heavy. Admittedly, when you're not particularly strong it's less stress and more recoverable (because they can't be that heavy).

Not being able to deadlift 405 after three years is generally indicative of poor programming (if you're trying to get stronger, at least) and/or poor recovery. You have to eat, you have to sleep, and you have to increase the weight each time.

Modern life enables the most effective exercise (really "training" is the correct word) in the history of humanity.

There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective.

We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before.

I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.)

Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland

The English translation of a second book in the same universe (well, one of the two universes) was just released---The City and Its Uncertain Walls. I've only just started reading it, though, so I can't offer any commentary beyond that.

If you like Murakami, you might like Convenience Store Woman or Earthlings, both by Sayaka Murata. Mieko Kawakami is also great. Killing Commendatore (by Murakami, again) is my favorite of his. I have no idea why it's my favorite, though. To be honest I can barely remember the plot of any of his books; it's just a feeling.

It's not, but it's a straight-forward use of Constant mode, documented here: https://docs.qmk.fm/features/mouse_keys. You change speeds by pressing MS_ACL0, MS_ACL1, and MS_ACL2 (or none, i.e., the default speed).

It's also unclear to me how you handle movements at a scale smaller than an individual cell, or if it's possible at all.

The characterization of mouse keys as taking "five...more like ten seconds to get to where you want to go" is incorrect with a decent implementation/practice.

I exclusively use mouse keys with my QMK keyboard [1] and I'm just as fast with it as with a mouse. I have four different cursor speeds that I toggle between as I move the mouse: I use the SUPA FAST LIGHTNING SPEED mode to move across the sceen and then reduce the speed as I zero in on my target. It's totally seamless and easy.

I also happen to use Tridactyl which uses a very similar mechanism as mouseless, but sometimes when I'm lazy I just use mouse keys. I don't think navigating by key anchors is always better: there's a greater cognitive load to reading off characters and typing them vs. using WASD to move your mouse around.

Alternatively, we could all simply relent and accept the fact that this problem was solved long ago in hardware and ship TrackPoints on all keyboards.

[1] https://docs.qmk.fm/features/mouse_keys

I understand your position (and it's one I'm absolutely swayed by to a degree and sympathize with), but I can't help but think that you are assigning unreasonable weights to privacy vs. safety/convenience. (Or, perhaps more honestly, I have to remind myself to be reasonable about these weights in my life.)

Do you think preserving your privacy in this one aspect of your life will have a greater net benefit to your life than driving a safer car (under the assumption that newer cars are safer)? Especially given that presumably there's still data being collected on you even in an old car (cameras on the road, other people's cars, your phone, etc).

By analogy, what's the marginal benefit of not eating any food in packaged in plastic if your water supply is full of (unavoidable, for the sake of argument) microplastics? Is doing so worth the cost (no food for you, buddy!)?

I guess this is just another round of being principled duking it out with pragmatism.

In many ways I agree with your opening sentence---maybe I shouldn't have written "fun". I think I was trying to get at something more like that the experience of learning itself is itself a good thing (even if it's not fun, even if it's suffering, even if it's hard) and I think mechanical and stoic recipes to optimize the process fail to adequately appreciate that fact.

The best part of learning piano isn't getting good at piano---it's learning piano. And sure there are some things we have to learn that we aren't that interested in learning, but I think even those things have the capacity to be worthwhile experiences if properly framed.

I think applying the word "efficient" to this area is suggestive of urgency and greater purpose---I don't buy into either.

Posts like this that talk about learning "efficiency" always come off as soulless and dystopian to me. I think learning should be fun and that fun learning is the most effective---that's the only thing I optimize for and I certainly don't think about efficiency percentages. What a drag that would be.

Location: US & Europe

Remote: No preference

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Functional programming, type systems, language design, compilers, parallel programming languages, GPU programming, Haskell.

Résumé/CV: See https://rschenck.com

Email: See https://rschenck.com

I'm a soon-to-be-graduating PhD student at the University of Copenhagen looking for either an industry job or a postdoc. My PhD work has been on the functional array programming language Futhark (https://futhark-lang.org/), including work on the type system (sum types, rank polymorphism) and automatic differentiation. I'm broadly interested in all things type systems/functional programming/compilers/language design. I can work in both the US and the EU without a visa.