• Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
    38·
    2 months ago

    Comprehensive…

    Real-world applications…

    Promising…

    Sometime I feel that research is just a bunch of guys trying to sell useless stuff (myself included).

    • Droggelbecher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      2 months ago

      A bit of a more serious comment on that: knowledge is never useless. Many, maybe most, researchers agree with that. It’s why we do what we do. Publishers and sources of funding (be they third party or governmental), however, disagree. So we have to sell them on the importance of our research this way.

      • Ekky@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        9·
        2 months ago

        “Knowledge is never useless”

        Going on a tangent here: While I fully agree with the above, there is an amount of knowledge after which fact checking becomes bothersome, and some people just skip fact checking overall. One could argue that, while knowledge is never useless, unchecked knowledge might become bothersome or dangerous.

        See flatearthers, scientology, etc. for extreme examples.

      • Engywuck@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Condensed matter - basic research. No actual real world applications, independently of what the abstracts/introductions may claim.

        • stoicmaverick@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Awesome! Two questions: 1. Could you pitch some of your material as having a possible future application of radically increasing packing efficiency for airline bound luggage? And, 2. What’s your favorite kind of nuclear pasta?

  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I have a visceral reaction to words like elucidate, and other fluff. My writing has to be very to the point, and technically accurate. Because of this, I carve up drafts from juniors like a Thanksgiving turkey.

    • leisesprecher@feddit.orgEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Most “professional” writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.

      I’m involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it’s 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.

      • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        It doesn’t have to be like that. Sure, context is important, but parroting phrases or other crap that the client has in the RFP is bullshit. They don’t want you blowing smoke up their ass, they want a technically sound product that addresses the exact issues they asked you to address. They also want you to show them how you’re going to get there, and achieve the objectives they set out.

        I realize you’re on the tech side; I’m just venting my frustrations with the corporate/PM spheres.

        • bitjunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          I thankfully don’t have to deal with RFPs anymore, but when I did, I’d either go line-by-line or ignore the prospect’s text entirely. There is an in-between, but it’s wishy-washy crowd-pleasing nonsense, and even the people entrenched in those bureaucracies see straight through it.

          • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            That, and parroting makes it sound like you don’t know what they want, or that you’re stupid, and the best that you could come up with is their own text with slight variation

        • leisesprecher@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Well, actually you’re kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.

          So I’m not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) “we will deploy that in our k8s cluster” but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that’s incredibly stupid.

          Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.

          I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.

  • stoicmaverick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I’d like to see someone hand an LLM as many abstract sections as they can possibly find, and then have it generate the most generic, meaningless, fluff piece abstract/grant proposal/possibly silicon valley startup loan application, the world has ever seen.