a3_nm

A perspective as I live in France:

- There was already an easy statewide system to opt-out of telemarketing calls

- Having always been on that system, I still got many scam calls that sound like telemarketing

So it's great to have a ban rather than an opt-out, but this will not solve the issue of scam calls

I'm not sure whether I'm taking too seriously something intended as a joke, but this in fact can conceivably be useful! When studying mathematical problems, sometimes you have a number that has some special meaning in your problem (e.g., the first value for which some phenomenon does not occur), you may be able to compute this number by brute-force or by ad-hoc reasoning, and if the number is high enough then someone else finding this number may mean that they are looking at the same problem as you. Since there's a canonical way to write numbers, but not a canonical way to define problems, then this can be helpful for these people to find each other.

An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.

(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)

I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000.

Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.

Can you be more specific about what you are referring to?

About the 2% figure: many things are insignificant in terms of climate change if you narrow down on them. Also, this 2% figure of the share of air travel is projected to increase, because the number of revenue passenger kilometers flown is quickly increasing (doubled in the last 10 years), cf https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/airline-capacity-and-traf....

And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).

Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".

Interesting! It looks like this is called the "Gyárfás tree packing conjecture".

This came from a database theory study about queries on graphs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3524149 for the paywalled version, https://www.theoinf.uni-bayreuth.de/pool/documents/Paper2021... for the open-access paper. But honestly I find the problem intriguing for its own sake.

Yes, ChatGPT is really bad at those things...

The following open research problem. Given an undirected graph G with two vertices s and t, the task is to determine whether there is an undirected path connecting s and t which is simple (no repeated vertices) and has length divisible by 3.

It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.

(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)

As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?

Sorry, I don't understand this discussion about gender. If someone on the internet desires to be referred to as "he" and "him", or "she" and "her", then you do it, no? How is gender identity relevant?

> Bug reports or questions generally do not require mentioning your race, ethnicity, nationality or identity preferences

Sure, but pronouns? If someone refers to you using the wrong pronoun (e.g., assuming you're male, which this Vaxry person apparently admits to doing), don't you want to point it out somehow?

Unfortunately it seems that "be excellent to each other" is not specific enough to be understood by everyone.

E.g., "address people using the name and gender that they use to refer to themselves". You would expect this to be obvious, and yet... Or maybe making this explicit is promoting a "woke ideology"?

> can't imagine what a "victim of harrasment" for such a thing would look like

Well, Drew's article gives a concrete example of a victim. But beyond this specific article, it is not difficult to find examples of people who were harassed when trying to be involved in an open source community. This is pretty much the reason why so many open source projects are adopting codes of conduct.

This is not really correct -- it is not true, for example, in many of the national parks in which people typically hike.

Not all of them do: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_open_access which charge neither readers nor authors. In TCS, see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Sc...

It looks like there are research works trying to define precisely this notion of existential risk in the context of climate change, see e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-022-03430-y

This is an interesting article but it contributes a bit to terminological confusion about reviewing modes.

First, the article talks about "double-blind reviewing" as being "logistically hard" because reviewers can "find the paper in a Google search", and talks about a "price tag". By contrast, many conferences around me implement so-called "lightweight double-blind" reviewing, which takes zero effort and just means that the authors and affiliations are not mentioned on the copy of the paper that reviewers read. I think this form of double-blind is a no-brainer, eliminating some bias with essentially no downside; and that discussions about the cost and complexity of double-blind reviewing are a distraction from this immediate improvement.

Here is a typical paragraph from a call for papers (here, STACS 2023) describing the policy:

  As in the previous two years, STACS 2023 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process: submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. The purpose of the double-blind reviewing is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For example, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web, submit them to arXiv, and give talks on their research ideas.

Second, the article talks about "open review" as meaning "everyone’s identity is public". This is sometimes what the term means, but not always -- for instance the OpenReview.net platform <https://openreview.net/> supports forms of open reviewing where the reviewers are still anonymous. Here "open" means "the discussion happens in the open, and everyone can post comments about the paper and reviews and contribute to the discussion". Here again, I feel that the discussion about "open reviewing" with non-anonymous reviewers is drawing attention away from this model which looks like a net improvement over the status quo.

There is in fact already significant industrial use of hydrogen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Use_of_hyd... -- independently from the use case of replacing fossil fuels. So there is already significant demand for hydrogen that could be green, but the vast majority of hydrogen produced today is from fossil fuels.

No, there was indeed a problem in the CSS, I'm not sure what happened. It is now fixed. Sorry about that!

The nickname is related to my real name, but I'll let you guess how. ;)

Thanks for the pointer to https://qntm.org/tetris -- that's very relevant, I'll add it to the post.

Further, for metric TSP, an approximation algorithm with a slightly better ratio was found, and received a best paper award at STOC'21. See the second paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christofides_algorithm.

Nice, thanks!

I thought this could solve the following problem: when camping during a mountain hike, figure out where to set up the tent, by knowing at which time you will be woken up by sunlight. Unfortunately this app doesn't seem to take elevation into account -- I don't know if there is some other tool that can do it.

True, but academic journals usually try to maintain some sort of acceptance ratio, and avoid accepting every submitted article. (If they do, they will have the reputation of not being selective, which will harm their rankings and will make people try submitting their work to more selective venues first.)

Of course, for commercial publishers, there is an incentive to publish more -- so there is tension between taking more articles (more revenue in APCs, more volume, easier to attract subscriptions, more perceived impact for extensive properties like h-index) and being more selective (more prestige).

So worse reviews probably doesn't mean more papers accepted but a more random selection of accepted articles.

Assuming that articles have some intrinsic "quality" that most researchers would agree on, and that good reviews are better correlated to this quality than bad reviews, one would expect that getting worse reviews would make the journal selection process (even) more noisy. This can harm the prestige of commercial journals (if they start rejecting articles perceived as "good" and publish articles perceived as "bad").

Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper.

However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to skim through many different articles, so introducing a latency of a few hours/days each time you want to open an article makes the process unreasonable.

See also: Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Yes, there is a career incentive to review, but it's much weaker than the one to publish, and comes later in career, so hopefully more people can afford it.

And yes, there will probably always be people willing to do reviews for free. But if the quality/delay/expertise of reviews from commercial publishers starts to degrade, it encourages authors to look for alternatives.