> ... desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached.

Is this suggesting that the public funders influence the outcome of research? It is not something I have ever witnessed. They sometimes may seek to take influence on the direction of a research programme, especially when the performance is below expectations. but I have yet to see an example where a public funder has attempted to influence research results.

> I think we’d quickly learn that academia of today is not at all what it presupposes itself to be

What does it presuppose to be? Academia of today is 1) a place of teaching and knowledge dissemination, 2) a place of research and knowledge creation, 3) a multibillion dollar business that sells tickets to successful professional lives. The latter leads to overinflated self-marketing, and unfortunately this affects how research results are communicated.

Those who hold the "purse strings" have little interest in influencing research outcomes. Rather, they care about the reputation of their course (students), their own reputation (alumni), recruiting talent and/or outsourcing research (businesses), or actual research results (public funders).

This is at least the case in most institutions in the US and the UK, and most of western Europe.

However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.

Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.

> doesn’t support pagination

Isn’t that exactly the point? Please, no pagination on a screen. A web page will do just fine. In fact, that was what the www was conceived for: publishing science.

> open the accompanying PDF, […] of much higher quality.

The only thing that is higher quality in the PDF is the justified alignment and pagination. The figures have the same (poor) resolution.

The bottom line is: * it is perfectly possible to publish technical papers in a format that is accessible on a phone. * non-paginated, free flowing output also works better on larger screens (e.g) I can resize the window and have my note-taking app open next to the paper. * PDFs are still great for annotating and printing, if required.

In the case of ChatGPT and similar LLMs, these should become part of the toolbox that students are being taught. I.e., how does it work, what can it do, what are its limits, how can it be used to help solve a problem or complete a task.

An exam question could then be e.g. to ask ChatGPT for an essay on a topic, critically discuss its shortcomings, and improve the essay e.g. by adding references and deeper discussion, which will be graded.

Alternatively, use ChatGPT to iteratively discuss and improve the essay. The whole chat transcript should be included and will be graded.

Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publishers are paid extremely well for. When I self-publish content I want the process to be as simple as possible. If this means ragged margins, browser-default styles for headings etc., default colors and fonts — so be it.

(but to be fair, optimising the layout is an excellent way to procrastinate on doing hard research)

Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?

For example, automatic updates of figure numbers in captions and references: Countless times it failed on me and I had to manually recreate the fields, bookmarks, cross-references, and whatnot is needed.

Bibliographies are hardly doable without an external tool that comes with its own headaches.

Typography in MS word is quite decent these days, though. Anyway, the content of a PhD thesis shouldn't be judged by its typography (as long it maintains a readable standard).

Does this live up to your maths standards?

I see it supports Jupyter notebook. Math support in those isn’t too bad at all, so it might just work for many cases.

Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form.

Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it.

What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.

IEEE explore does a good job rendering equations on phone screens. Therefore, it is possible.

There is no technical reason why equations couldn’t be rendered on a screen just as well as on a PDF. Sure, canvas size constraints might interfere, but this problem exists in principle also on paginated output. Plus, horizontal scrolling is a thing.

I‘m not saying a phone is the ideal platform to read a paper containing free energy-like math, but it can go a long way. Much longer than with the artificial restriction to paginated output like PDF.

I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up their UI to be compatible with phones.

I have read thousands of pages of fiction on a phone and quite enjoyed it. Phones are great for reading if the content reflows properly.

Now publishers and content creators would need to embrace non-paginated, reflowing output. This would not only facilitate reading on phones, but also on tablets and laptop screens.

O‘Reilly‘s online platform does a good job with their app.

There is zero reason why paginated output should be the default in 2022.

It still beats the competition because of rock-solid referencing, both to in-text elements like equations, chapters, etc as well as citing literature with bibtex.

Plus, it’s extremely stable, so someone who learnt LaTeX 20 years ago, like yours truly, can download the newest TeX distribution and feel at home immediately.

Nevertheless, I would prefer a Markdown-based system that can use CSS and MathML, and has a 100% bibtex clone for references.

Yes, pandoc goes quite a long way along this route, but setting up such a pipeline is still too complicated for many.

But this post could have been made a lot simpler by using SQLite. Do away with all the docker stuff, a simple file- based database will do for starters. If you need concurrent access later, it will be easy to port the DB to Postgres or similar.

Wouldn't it be weirder if he had no perceptible accent whatsoever?

I find it quite refreshing to be able to tell where someone is from, judging from their accent alone. When I was a kid, growing up in a rather rural area, I could tell with an accuracy of about 20km which area around my hometown someone I just met was from, just from by the fine differences in their accent. But in fact very few people like being identified like that.

I get it, breach of privacy and all that... but on the other hand, is it so bad to know where someone is from, when having a conversation with them

The real problem is of course the biases in people's head... "dutch people are such and such", and so on. I say we should fight the biases, not the fact that one's geographical origin can be guessed.