It was a crisis the moment that the Journal system was allowed to be built without any oversight from academia or the government itself.

A whole class of intelligent professionals performing a public good on public funds were tricked into doing most of the work for profitable companies who then charged these same people to read their peers’ work. They were tricked by appealing to their ego and longing for prestige.

And so now we have incessant publication/citation metrics and a tsunami of untrustworthy papers while shitty corporations rob the public funds of money that could much better spent.

Once that system was built, it was a crisis. Not just because it exists (and naturally leads to the current situation and worse). But because it was allowed to come into existence, which speaks to an intrinsic inability to self-govern on the part of the academic community.

Every browser released since 2020 supports this

It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.

Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?

But nah. These goobers got high off npm modules and did shots of JSX in the bathroom at lunch time.

Fucking LoL!

Anyone here have thoughts about doing basic interactive stuff with at most vanilla JS?

The problems are wider than that. Besides, relying “individuals just doing the right thing and going a little further to do so” is, IMO, a trap. Fix the system instead. The little thing everyone can do is think about the system and realise it needs fixing.

I’m sympathetic, but to a limit.

There are a lot of academics out there with a good amount of clout and who are relatively safe. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything remotely worthy on these topics from any researcher with clout, publicly at least. Even privately (I used to be in academia), my feeling was most don’t even know how to think and talk about it, in large part because I don’t think they do think and talk about it all.

And that’s because most academics are frankly shit at thinking and engaging on collective and systematic issues. Many just do not want to, and instead want to embrace the whole “I live and work in an ideal white tower disconnected from society because what I do is bigger than society”. Many get their dopamine kicks from the publication system and don’t think about how that’s not a good thing. Seriously, they don’t deserve as much sympathy as you might think … academia can be a surprisingly childish place. That the publication system came to be at all is proof of that frankly, where they were all duped by someone feeding them ego-dopamine hits. It’s honestly kinda sad.

Yep. But that is all a part of the problem. If academics can’t organise themselves enough to have some influence over something which is basically owned and run them already (they write the papers and then review the papers and then are the ones reading and citing the papers and caring the most about the quality and popularity of the papers) … then they can’t be trusted to ensure the quality of their practice and institutions going forward, especially under the ever increasing encroachment of capitalistic forces.

Modern day academics are damn well lucky that they inherited a system and culture that developed some old aristocratic ideals into a set of conventions and practices!

Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.

Yea, I’d heard about this planet, but I didn’t know how much modelling was involved and of course what alternatives can explain the data. Still, the new data that hasn’t been analysed seems like it could be interesting.

I really don’t think this video is click bait. It’s reason for existing might be the media hype and clickbait crap that has been produced … but all the video does is dig into the published science and generally dispel what all the media hype is probably saying. It’s the opposite.

At some point, if anti-clickbait behaviour is going to be sufficiently superficial, it’s likely as bad as clickbait itself (not unlike an auto-immune disease).

Right, so you didn’t watch the video … it’s about the paper that’s getting so much media attention and why most in the scientific community don’t think much of it and what challenges to the initial paper have been made in subsequent publications.

The video is solely about published work, by a publishing and working scientist, and not at all some mainstream media stuff.

Gotta say, at some point, if downvoters are operating at such a superficial level, their reason for existing basically disappears. Like an AI would have done a better job here. The quality of the video is precisely because it nicely dispels whatever media hype might be out there.

You need to see it to believe it I think. I was generally on the side of “too complex” but then came across instances perfect for it and used it right away and found it pleasant.

I’m still generally on the side of “too complex” though, and think there are probably better things for PSF to work on (cough packaging cough).

You don’t need one in each University, that wouldn’t scale. There’s be natural specialisations. And journals could even move from University to university as academic personnel change over time.

The main point is that they’re non-profit and run by researchers for researchers.

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

I’ve been saying it to everyone who’ll listen …

the journals should be run by universities as non-profits with close ties to the local research community (ie, editors from local faculty and as much of the staff from the student/PhD/Postdoc body as possible). It’s really an obvious idea. In legal research, there’s a long tradition of having students run journals (Barrack Obama, if you recall, was editor of the Harvard Law Journal … that was as a student). I personally did it too … it’s a great experience for a student to see how the sausage is made.

I am very envious of thumb clusters

I hear you … most people are still there (I’ve claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).

But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I’m not saying there’s nothing useful on Twitter (I don’t actually know). But we’re talking about microblogging and social media here.

I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.

Hmmm yea. Put together, cosmopolitan and “ape” do point in a single direction. I still wouldn’t be surprised if it were trolling. But yea, interesting. Being hyped on SV as a Googler in 2014 seems to me to have been a thing (you might disagree!), so so that doesn’t surprise me either.

Thanks!

yea, from what I’ve seen of her, you could say she’s part of or used to be part of a sort edge-lord techno anarchism that involves a good amount of “fuck you” trolling and embrace of the chronically online/urban life style. The “fascism” part here seems to come out of nowhere. The twitter post from Justine that that whole blog post hangs off of doesn’t exist anymore (and she’s active on twitter). In the end though, if she’s a bit nutty on how much better tech governance would be than ordinary government, I don’t resent her for that. And the sorts of things she’s building technologically certainly align with my interests.

What would “cosmopolitan” and “ape” be dog whistles for? Racism?