It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
As far as I can see, awful UI never stops people from using software that is "mandated" or "default". I mean have you seen Windows? MS Office? Web sites? Mobile apps??
I get it, but LibreOffice is awful in a much worse way than Office. On MacOS, the fonts and images just look low res and blurry. There's no polish, even though that is probably quite an easy fix.
But if they know the alternative is better. Everyone knows about ms office so they will complain/demand that instead. People put up with shitty software when they dont know about an alternative
MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.
Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
Yep. With known software there's always this "learned helplessness" of dismissing problems with "ah yeah, this is how it is". Even when it's quirky, inconsistent or just broken.
With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.
I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.
One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
I'm convinced this happens in a lot of projects. If you're e.g. Microsoft, you can pay a few people to contribute maliciously to a GPL competitor's coding and governance full time.
It's trivial to throw a million or two dollars at making sure some project ultimately goes nowhere (but survives), and that particular bugs don't get fixed or particular features don't get added. I've got no story to tell, and I've never heard solid evidence of it happening, but it would just be unbelievably tempting to do.
Notice how they say “No PR” on every single repo ? So for sure no PR was open.
Putting a bit more energy, you are redirected to a whole other system which I have never seen anywhere else (and in this case; unique doesn’t mean good). After 5 minutes of trying to navigate what is probably the least intuitive software forge I ever had the displeasure to witness, you understand that clearly these guys live in a different UI/UX bubble than the rest of us.
Seems like they use gerrit. A lot of larger projects use gerrit for their code review. It is different, yes, but many prefer it over GitHub's "pull request" paradigm which really sucks for high velocity contributors.
This is bad faith. You are not obligated to contribute any sort of code to point out problems in an open source project.
When I go to a restaurant and order a steak, and it arrives and tastes awful, the waiter does not have the right to say to me "if you don't like it, cook it yourself". The chef does not have the right to say to me "tell me exactly what I did wrong, since you're claiming you're an expert on steaks".
No. Anyone can complain about a thing, and the fact that they haven't tried to fix the code themselves is utterly irrelevant.
The difference is that at a restaurant you’re paying for it. If you show up at a soup kitchen and complain that it wasn’t seasoned just right, that’s fully on you.
I love the idea of hourglass! Thanks for sharing I’ve ordered mine on Amazon today. It’s about a foot tall. This is also a great way to signal to other people in the office that I’m busy.
As a recent Clojure convert of 3 years or so, I love reading how amazing Clojure is. As a solo Dec there is simply no alternative. It’s so nice to return to a project 2 or 3 years ago and everything is still running and humming along smoothly as it did when I started the project.
I previously worked in PHP, Perl-cgi, Java, and Python- webtools mostly based on MySQL and other SQL database flavours.
I worked in a Clojure only shop for a while and they taught me the ways after that you don’t go back. Everything can quickly click into place, it’s daunting to start the learning curve is very unsteep, takes long to get anywhere, but as a curiosity it was fun, then I started to hate how everything else was done now I’m sold my soul to the Clojure devil.
That might be true but at the level of understanding that the Greeks had of things - making fire does give you a lot. Flint, dry grass, fuel source wet versus dry wood, wind and soil conditions- how to deal with them, once you have a fire how do you control, manipulate it, and keep it going. All those things are learned through making fire. Then you can also piece together which fuels work best, that leads to more understanding and experimentation followed by more learning. I think it’s what I take away from this article. I think those ancient people know more and understood more about keeping a fire going through the night than i ever will.
When you use an LLM and don’t have any understanding what you asking about it presents a huge problem. I see more and more people just using what it provides. And then when asked about it they can’t defend it because the didn’t read it or even tried to understand it. This is in proposals and business cases worth multiple millions.
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
Other ecosystems are smaller (probably nothing has more consumers than the two major app stores) but often much higher intent. The same person who you have to coax into paying $1 for an iOS app won’t bat an eye at a productivity tool that costs $20/mo.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
roblox :) Honestly though anything with a lot of users typically either has a way to make money selling addons, or by hosting your own content related to their product, like wikis and leaderboards and such.
There’s even a niche within Roblox, which is making plugins for the IDE used for making games for it, Roblox Studio. There’s a built-in marketplace where you can charge money for them.
>What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
The company behind the minimalist writer is writer had a presenter app called iA Presenter. https://ia.net/presenter
I’ve had it for a while and it’s awesome to write all the notes and stuff in markdown. They also provided a good amount of content on how to write good presentations.
Looking at these two offerings the iA presenter tries to look great out of the box straight away versus this one where you have to mess with the layout. It helps you focus on the content. I’ve done a few presentations with iA presenter and it’s been well received — note I’m a good speaker but not a great slide maker.
I love Presenter. When I used it recently, it was the first time someone described one of my talks as “beautiful”.
Its docs also work hard to sway you away from walls of text. It’s probably a good idea to download Presenter even if you don't want to use it, just so you can read its presentation advice.
It also lets you export your presentation plus speaker notes to a PDF later to distribute to your audience.
Side Effects
Along with its needed effects, a medicine may cause some unwanted effects. Although not all of these side effects may occur, if they do occur they may need medical attention.
Check with your doctor immediately if any of the following side effects occur:
More common
Belching
Bloated, full feeling
Constipation
Diarrhea
Excess air or gas in the stomach or intestines
Gaseous stomach pain
Heartburn
Indigestion
Nausea
Passing gas
Stomach discomfort, fullness, or pain
Vomiting
Less common
Recurrent fever
Yellow eyes or skin
Rare
Burning feeling in the chest or stomach
Stomach upset
Tenderness in the stomach area
Incidence not known
Anxiety
Blurred vision
Chest tightness
Chills
Cold sweats
Confusion
Cool, pale skin
Cough
Darkened urine
Difficulty swallowing
Discouragement
Dizziness
Fast heartbeat
Feeling sad or empty
Headache
Hives, itching
Increased heart rate
Increased hunger
Irritability
Lack of appetite
Large, hive-like swelling on the face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat, hands, legs, feet, or sex organs
Loss of consciousness
Loss of interest or pleasure
Nightmares
Pains in stomach, side, or abdomen, possibly radiating to the back
Puffiness or swelling of the eyelids or around the eyes, face, lips, or tongue
Redness of the skin
Seizures
Shakiness
Skin rash
Slurred speech
Tiredness
Trouble breathing
Trouble concentrating
Trouble sleeping
Unusual tiredness or weakness
Some side effects may occur that usually do not need medical attention. These side effects may go away during treatment as your body adjusts to the medicine. Also, your health care professional may be able to tell you about ways to prevent or reduce some of these side effects. Check with your health care professional if any of the following side effects continue or are bothersome or if you have any questions about them:
Less common
Hair loss
Rare
Bleeding, blistering, burning, coldness, discoloration of the skin, feeling of pressure, hives, infection, inflammation, itching, lumps, numbness, pain, rash, redness, scarring, soreness, stinging, swelling, tenderness, tingling, ulceration, or warmth at the injection site
Change in taste
Loss of taste
Other side effects not listed may also occur in some patients. If you notice any other effects, check with your healthcare professional.
I’m a researcher and honestly not worried. 1. Developing the right question has always been the largest barrier to great research. Not sure OpenAI can develop the right question without the Human experience. The second biggest part of my role is influencing people that my questions are the right questions. Which is made easier when you have a thorough understanding of the first. That being said, I’m sure there will be many people here that will tell me that algorithms already influence people, and ai can think through much of any issues there are.
I do use these systems from time to time, but it just never renders any specific information that would make it great research.
These systems serve best at augmenting information discovery. When I'm tackling a new area or looking for the right terminology, these models provide a quick shortcut because they have good probabilistic "understanding" of my naive, jargon-free description. This allows me to pull in all of the jargon for the area of research I'm interested in, and move on to actually useful resources, whether that be journal articles, textbooks, or - rarely - online posts/blogs/videos.
the current "meta" is probably something like Elicit + notebookLM + Claude for accelerating understanding of complex topics and extracting useful parts. But, again, each step requires that I am closely involved, from selecting the "correct" papers, to carefully aggregating and grooming the information pulled in from notebookLM, to judging the the usefulness of Claude's attempts to extract what I have asked for
ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
I tend to not edit drafts as much anymore and just start over, more of a destructive iterative design approach. It makes it harder to plan projects and colleagues don't always like it but my output is high and I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work. Do you feel similarly?
> I tend to be really good at cutting off things early that won't work.
I tend to be bad at this because "this isn't working" becomes "oh interesting, this isn't working".
Fwiw, very rarely does that not lead to value. Its just that the value add can be later down the line or in a different project. But so often there's that "Ahha!" or "oh it's just like that" moments. But I think a lot of people have difficulties with long term rewards. I think it's good to have both though but I'm not sure any single person is good at both so you need both types of people. Different optimizers for different goals
Totally it’s all about the kind games, trying to frame every paragraph, sentence or even word as a first draft. Don’t need to wipe an entire document imho.
I'm not so sure the knowledge acquisition is slower. I'm actually starting to believe it's faster. What my other ADHD friend and I notice is the threshold for thinking you get it is lower. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand any single thing but I do have a lot of peers which will say yes far earlier and it leads to a lot of confusing experiences.
A common experience we have is that we'll be trying to figure something out then go talk to a larger group or find someone who should understand the thing (e.g. highly relevant publications) and then either "huh, I never thought about that" or they try to answer a different question (I understand they are trying to be helpful but I'd rather "I don't know". It's academia, the whole point is we don't know lol).
Though in other things I fully agree. I'm always slower in "speed to first result" but often that's because I'll write code from scratch, make sure I really understand, and make sure its flexible because I know I'm going to be hacking on it a lot. Others are often forking repos doing a lot of gluing and all that. (When I do that I feel very lost and like I understand nothing). But my experiments end up being more complete and I'm able to answer more questions where someone else would say that's too much work.
I think academia needs both types of people btw. I'm not trying to say I'm better it's just different. There's different advantages. My issue is that the system strongly optimizes for one and not the other. I think the biggest flaw in academia is thinking we know what's a successful line of research and what isn't (along with what's novel, especially post hoc lol). All the evidence seems against this and the high frequency of dark horses suggests it'd be idiotic to rely on predictions to be highly accurate.
I too think knowledge acquisition is faster - much faster - but that's only when I can actually get myself to sit down and focus. Depending on some magic combination of my mood, feeling of purpose, and phases of the moon, I can blow through a thick spec book in one long session and remember both tons of little trivia and grok the principles behind the design, all in one pass - or, I'll get sleepy after the third sentence, take an involuntary nap halfway through the first page, and overall maybe read a dozen pages before giving up, and not remembering much of if later.
I had this experience several times at work - I had to deal with some obscure legacy tech (think industrial protocols from the 90s), I enthusiastically figured I can learn this quickly, sat down to reference material, and... my eyes stopped being able to process text. And yet, over the following weeks or months, I'd have moments trying to work with that old thing, where I'd suddenly find a rabbit hole I had to chase, and through that chase I'd get rapidly up to speed with the spec that was impossible to even look at earlier.
Long term, this added to a much deeper understanding than people around me had, for fraction of the effort - so this was a win. Unfortunately, this also isn't compatible with how everyone works, as I can't plan or give other people promises or estimates around this. "I'll get there when I get there" doesn't fly in the modern workplace.
Like a few other related aspects of ADHD, it really is a superpower - just very hard to activate, and trying to activate it on demand actually makes it impossible.
What makes me sad though is that it seems this is not how it used to be. In fact from what I can tell it was more common in high innovation labs to select these types of people and kinda let them loose. The job wasn't so much to tell them what to work on so much as make sure there aren't things blocking them and to make sure they don't get stuck in the rabbit holes. Of course it was never all sunshine and roses, but it did seem that the environments were a lot more flexible. Even several recent Veritasium videos have talked about people who just essentially didn't do their actual job for like a year, "slacking off", and how this gave them the opportunities to explore certain ideas.
I really think we have to admit how many dark horses there are when it comes to innovation. If we don't provide space for them, then we slow progress down. If we don't create an environment, then it slows. Do we really want to go back to the time where most science was performed by the wealthy? Because only they were the ones who had the luxury of being able to explore?
I often think back to Asimov's "Profession"[0]. I can't help but think this in part was a critique on academia and the relationship to this issue.
