suuuuuuuu (u/suuuuuuuu)

suuuuuuuu commented on Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3 oneusefulthing.org/p/thre... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

zkmon · 25 days ago

I find Gemini 3 to be really good. I'm impressed. However, the responses still seem to be bounded by the existing literature and data. If asked to come up with new ideas to improve on existing results for some math problems, it tends to recite known results only. Maybe I didn't challenge it enough or present problems that have scope for new ideas?

suuuuuuuu · 25 days ago

I myself tried a similar exercise (w/Thinking with 3 Pro), seeing if it could come up with an idea that I'm currently writing up that pushes past/sharpens/revises conventional thinking on a topic. It regurgitated standard (and at times only tangentially related) lore, but it did get at the rough idea after I really spoon fed it. So I would suspect that someone being impressed with its "research" output might more reflect their own limitations rather than Gemini's capabilities. I'm sure a relevant factor is variability among fields in the quality and volume of relevant literature, though I was impressed with how it identified relevant ideas and older papers for my specific topic.

suuuuuuuu commented on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/science/201... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

oh_my_goodness · 3 months ago

It goes without saying that you're a better writer than Cormac McCarthy. Tell us something beyond that.

suuuuuuuu · 3 months ago

The implication was that likely not all of the advice in this article, which was written by biologists, is actually attributable to McCarthy.

suuuuuuuu commented on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/science/201... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

gmueckl · 3 months ago

Footnotes effectively have no place in CS, engineering or natural sciences. Other disciplines treat footnotes very differently, I think.

suuuuuuuu · 3 months ago

This is certainly too strongly worded to be correct. I use footnotes quite a bit in my papers (physics) as a strategy to handle the "two audiences" problem - that many or most readers just skim for main ideas, but some (and those whom I might argue are more important) try to follow the details closely. I presently use footnotes for the latter audience for certain supplementary details or technical qualifications that would break the reading flow or add unnecessary length for the former.

I do appreciate the arguments that footnotes can be distracting, or that one doesn't know whether to skip them, but at present I see them as the best option for keeping the main body streamlined/as short as possible without sacrificing points that I'd like to make that wouldn't make for or fit into an appendix.

suuuuuuuu commented on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/science/201... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

abdullahkhalids · 3 months ago

Most of the advice is good, though not particularly different from an advice you would give about writing any essays. This one though:

> Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is.

I don't know what to make of it. Equations are supposed to be part of sentences, and mathematical equations are compact expressions of relations. For example, the sentence,

    Newton taught us that force is equal to mass times acceleration, where both mass and accelerations are inertial quantities.

can be compacted as

    Newton taught us that $F=ma$, where both the mass $m$ and acceleration $a$ are inertial quantities.

This becomes more useful with more complex relations. Generally, hanging mathematical expressions (those independent of sentences) should be avoided to the utmost in any technical report.

suuuuuuuu · 3 months ago

I think it's just wrong. Related, linked recently here: https://dwest.web.illinois.edu/grammar.html

The authors are biologists, so I suspect they're not particularly versed in mathematical writing (and that McCarthy was not likely providing them much advice on it).

suuuuuuuu commented on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/science/201... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

suuuuuuuu · 3 months ago

I like a lot of the advice here, except

> Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

Repetitive sentence structure is not engaging and lulls a reader to sleep, no matter the context. Clauses and transition words and nontrivial sentence structure allow for qualification and clarification, juxtaposition and contrast, and emphasis, often with many fewer words than if written as a series of single independent clauses. A short sentence following longer ones punctuates its point and can effectively lead into subsequent sentences that express more complex ideas/explanations.

In my own scientific writing I also frequently use compound sentences to indicate that the ideas are related (causally or otherwise). It's also unclear to me how one could more efficiently communicate logical or causal flow between ideas than with transition words like "thus" or "therefore."

suuuuuuuu commented on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf] gwern.net/doc/science/201... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

mariusor · 3 months ago

I would assume that his suggestions for clarity in "scientific papers" and his literary style don't overlap all that much to infer the former from the later.

suuuuuuuu · 3 months ago

This is certainly the case, but it does make it all the more amusing that the myth

> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.

suuuuuuuu commented on Representing Python notebooks as dataflow graphs marimo.io/blog/dataflow... · Posted by u/akshayka

akshayka · 4 months ago

Thanks for the comments. I'm the original creator of marimo.

Habitually running restart and run all works okay for very lightweight notebooks, but it's a habit you need to develop, and I believe our tools should work by default. It doesn't work at all for entire categories of work, where computation is heavy and the cost of a bug is high.

From the blog, you will see that reactive execution not only minimizes hidden state, it also enables rapid data exploration (far more rapid than a traditional notebook), reuse as data apps, reuse as scripts, a far more intelligent module autoreloader, and much more.

marimo is not just another Jupyter extension, it's a new kind of notebook. While it may not be for you, marimo has been open source for over a year and has strong traction at many companies and universities, including by many who you may not view to be "real devs". The question of whether marimo will catch on has already been resolved :)

https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

suuuuuuuu · 4 months ago

I would consider replacing my jupyterlab usage with marimo were it less opinionated about workflow - it offers a lot of benefits that aren't tied to its execution model. I like the editor/interface and the representation as python files for portability, version control, and the ability to import from other notebooks, but I have no interest in changing my workflow (in particular insofar as marimo is restricted compared to python itself). E.g., I want to be able to redefine variables and use star imports in my personal, exploratory notebooks, and I'm happy to retain responsibility for top-to-bottom executability (as in regular python scripts). I would definitely consider marimo if these restrictions could be opted out of if one has reactive execution disabled.