Gabriel54

What software can be used on Ubuntu but cannot be used on Debian?

I think you are right about the branding / reputation. Personally I heard negative things about Canonical and I heard that they just basically follow Debian, so why not use the original? It's been a great experience so far. Perhaps because Debian moved to include proprietary drivers out of the box now it is extremely easy to set up.

What is keeping people on Ubuntu instead of just using Debian? I'm genuinely curious. What is Ubuntu offering that Debian doesn't provide?

> It's the bedrock of all other science. The goal is to find solutions and to advance the field…

That may be true but that may not be the feature that attracts people to the field.

> As we solve lower level problems, we can unlock real world math solutions.

That is an argument often made for funding mathematics research. But again it may not be the thing that attracted people to the field.

Note I don’t share all the doom and gloom of some folks in the math community but it is a valid point that people who might otherwise have gone into the field may choose not to anymore.

Also, math research has typically focused a large amount of energy abstracting and generalizing results. Your suggestion about solving real problems usually moves in the other direction. If the powers that be with all the money decide AI can solve all the real problems that exist (rightly or wrongly) then mathematics research community will have a problem.

Your example is not something that can be formally verified.

This question strikes me as strange, because it has always been in the nature of the mathematical community to share results as openly and widely as possible. Hong Wang’s work was in the public domain and was meant to be built upon. This is what human mathematicians have been doing for centuries.

Sometimes the particular case is the hard case (as opposed to the general or high-dimensional case), so it is not so clear without looking at the respective proofs. Nevertheless of course it is a remarkable achievement!

As other people are pointing out, we are going to great rhetorical lengths to avoid the empirical fact that in almost every major event based on physical strength or endurance, men outperform women. Are suggesting that every data point from every cultural, ethnic, national background in the world is contaminated by sexist bias?

Is a marathon a power event?

That thought certainly crossed my mind, but having worked with people using LLMs for this purpose successfully, this instead comes across as taking a simple idea and asking {model} to expand this two or three sentence idea into a web page.

Using AI to go through an old manuscript has nothing to do with writing up those same results with AI. These are completely separate concerns.

I don't like to frame it in terms of, "this person is using AI, so I am no longer interested in communicating", because it is not really the AI that is the problem. It is the lack of effort put into communication with another human. AI can be extremely helpful for some people (e.g., proofreading text if one's native language isn't English). But this use case is almost never a problem if done carefully because the original ideas were all there in the beginning.

I focus my frustration on writing that is circular, vague, unnecessarily explanatory, etc. In my experience this is a symptom of the fact that there were no original ideas to begin with.

I am very happy to see people make use of AI to do previously impractical work, but the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.

> Not a diary, not a family chronicle - a tool book.

> As reliable as it says on each page - no more and no less.

> Pages without a special note have been editorially reviewed: carefully checked and corrected.

This sounds like an extremely interesting topic but the lack of care in the presentation is disappointing.

Regex can also be horribly slow - it depends on the particular regex you are using.

Where are you getting this from? I've never heard this and I am a native speaker. Also none of the dictionaries I have access to mention this. E.g., one says:

> likely to have a strong or far-reaching effect; radical and extreme: a drastic reduction of staffing levels.

I was only a lowly TA so I saw these issues from afar, but I would add that, on a more optimistic note, I don't think I've ever met an instructor who wouldn't do whatever he or she had to do to support someone with special needs. As you suggested, metrics do not tell the whole story and certainly metrics for the sake of metrics are not helpful and may in fact be dangerous.

That said there is certainly a lot more work that needs to be done in this area. Hopefully these regulations over time bring out practical positive change. Time will tell.

I'm reading the comments here and confused by one thing... Do people here not purchase fresh fruit and vegetables on a regular basis (i.e. multiple times a week)? I am not an expert on Costco but it seems insane to visit a store the size of Costco every couple of days just to buy some tomatoes and parsley.

Well, to be fair, it has made every course hosted on Canvas equally accessible to everyone. ;)

Canvas has an easy way of checking if a pdf or other course material is accessible, so many universities are forcing faculty to put all their materials on Canvas. That way if a pdf or powerpoint is not compliant it is immediately flagged. The goal is to reach a "100% accessible" metric.

Note that little of this really helps the students that it is supposed to help, because as you wisely point out, raw HTML is almost by definition extremely accessible. I work in a field that uses Latex and the source code of Latex should also be considered more accessible than the compiled pdf. But for university administrators the only important thing is that the accessibility metric that appears (or used to appear, before today!) on Canvas shows 100% accessible.

Accessibility regulations, implemented with feedback from faculty and with the support of university resources, are certainly a good thing. But that is not what is happening in my experience.

Definitely not a criticism of your (hard) work here. Thank you!

I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year.

Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, without exception, due to ADA compliance regulations. It is explicitly forbidden for professors to, e.g., refer to pdfs posted on a personal website.

Other commentators here seem not to understand that many faculty also do not enjoy being forced to use Canvas.

Where are you in the process currently? Once the I-130 is approved my understanding is that you can delay at the NVC stage indefinitely. You just have to contact them at least once every 12 months, or log in every year to submit one or another document (basically they should see some activity on your case).

I never said what I think about the law. I think we can agree that it does not address many of the fundamental issues that people experiencing homelessness face. The alternative, however, is not more sympathy but rather specific solutions like a sane health care system (which might include mandatory drug or alcohol rehabilitation) and social service support. Everyone has the right to live in dignity which includes a safe place to live.

> The chance of people being sympathetic and wanting to help those who suffer is much higher if the homeless people aren't removed from their view.

I disagree with this completely. I think seeing homeless people in the street every day makes people think the government is incompetent and unable to deal with a serious issue. This leads to people adopting more extreme measures like exactly the one we are discussing right now.

I'm not sure what sympathy has to do with anything we are discussing? People experiencing homelessness do not need sympathy, they need homes and community and support. It is a luxury to be sympathetic because the most sympathetic people are not the people dealing with issues associated with homelessness.

In my opinion the way the US deals with homelessness is a disaster because we have a disorganized, disconnected and dysfunctional social net. E.g., how is someone with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia able to treat their condition if they cannot get their medicine because they don't have health insurance? How can they get a home without a job or family support? The list of such issues goes on and on.

Telling people that they just need to have more sympathy and to accept seeing homeless people on the street is a losing strategy and not a solution. In my opinion the solutions include universal healthcare, robust social support systems and drug/alcohol treatment programs. These programs benefit everyone. At the same time it is not crazy to say, "I do not want to see drug addicted people on my doorstep every day."

Perhaps you also agree that these are part of an ideal solution but framing it as sympathy for the homeless is a losing strategy. Everyone would benefit from a social welfare system set up in a sane way, but somehow every discussion in the US turns into an "us-versus-them" mentality. It is like a reality distortion field and a victory of the media-propaganda complex.

Edit: to summarize, homelessness presents two problems, one for the individual experiencing it, and one for society. Solutions need to target both problems. But to deny the reality of one or the other is a critical error.

Your heart doesn't have to bleed for such a person but I think most people would agree it is tiresome to see homeless people in the street. It is also a public health issue. Doing heroin in the middle of the sidewalk and throwing the needle on the ground is obviously extremely un-hygienic and dangerous to everyone.

Or to be more generous, they are tired of seeing drug addicted people sleeping in the street.

I certainly do not agree with that. My point is that this article itself conflates homelessness and addiction, which I think is a serious error.

There is homelessness, and then there is drug and/or alcohol addiction.

> Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months.

What happens if someone is homeless and not addicted to drugs or alcohol? Why assume everyone who is homeless is also an addict? It seems entirely reasonable that someone homeless AND addicted to drugs/alcohol should be required to enter into a treatment program.

There is a big difference between professors being "free" to publish and express their views on a subject, and teaching that same subject in such a way that their views are presented as the only acceptable views on that subject.