“Noether, who was Jewish, fled from Germany to the U.S., where she died two years later from cancer”
It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt.
I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, but received no reply.
I have an opinion about the editorial style of Quanta that I don't think it's popular here (judging by how often they get upvoted), but I think it's a symptom of that.
They cover science, but the template they consistently follow is a vague title that oversells the premise and then an article filled with human-interest details and appeals to implications. This makes it easy for everyone to follow along and have an opinion, but I feel like science is a distant backdrop and never the actual subject.
In this article, what's the one tidbit of scientific knowledge that we gain? Dedekind's and Cantor's work is described only in poetic abstractions ("a wedge he could use to pry open the forbidden gates of infinity"). When the focus is writing a gossip column for eloquent people, precision doesn't matter all that much.
I find they are good at identifying interesting topics and writing articles that don't deliver. They remind me of Omni magazine (which I subscribed to at one point). The articles aren't even wrong.
I think your opinion is popular here. Quanta is, while better than nothing, universally disappointing. It seems like it would be much easier for them to do a better job -- write less vaguely, fact-check more, assume the reader is a bit more intelligent.
Thank you! After Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland's Ars Technica article they published using AI (while saying they didn't), and all the while their article was about an AI agent publishing a hit piece on Scott Shambaugh (matplotlib maintainer), I feel like I now assume journalists are using AI and things need to be fact-checked just as we do for our AI interactions.
I appreciate hearing about details like this and getting the source directly. I hope Kristina Armitage and Michael Kanyongolo from Quanta Magazine respond and you can update us!
Is the wikipedia page more or less correct or in need of editing in your view?
(Given that you are probably the current world expert on Noether having written the book)
It's best practice to say something like "Noether's real story is recounted in my book [link]". This both establishes you as a subject matter expert, and stops your comments looking like disingenuous grift.
Yes. And I did port my GUI layer to CimGui.jl. The rest of it is pretty intertwined with Makie, didn't do that yet. The Makie version does look better than ImGui though.
I don’t think that any Julia program I’ve ever written would need to change if Julia adopted 0-based tomorrow. You don’t typically write C-style loops in Julia; you use array functions and operators, and if you need to iterate you write `for i in array ...`.
“ergonomics matter”
Definitely. Ergonomics is the main reason I enjoy Julia. Performance is a bonus.
It’s a problem. But maybe it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t let this prevent you from sharing your project. There will always be stupid commenters. Just put it out there, tell the truth about it, and ignore them.
Almost nobody uses it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)
I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.
this is plainly inaccurate. most people only use very few packages, which exists only for legacy reasons, they should be really integrated. TeXmacs provide all things 90% of people need.
There is nothing wrong with the site as it is. The text reflows, so you can size your window to any width that you find comfortable. With a decent window manager this is just a few keystrokes at most.
Do you mean in the courtroom or anywhere? Because filming and photographing people in public is legal everywhere in the U.S., and no consent is required.
> Do you mean in the courtroom or anywhere? Because filming and photographing people in public is legal everywhere in the U.S., and no consent is required.
First, note that "filming" in public is not necessarily legal in every state if you include recording audio of conversations you're not party to.
Second, the GP said should be illegal without consent, so clearly was talking about what's they consider right, not necessarily what is.
But most importantly, "filming and photographing people in public" is also obviously not what the GP was talking about. They said:
> Filming/video and lookups of people filtered through a corporate data mining operation without their consent should also be illegal.
And, actually, extracting biometrics from video of people and tracking them/data mining them without consent is in fact not legal in several states already, and potentially federal law, depending on what they do.
I’ll take your word for that. I don’t know how to tell. But I did notice that the writing was conspicuously terrible throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such as “I'd slip in suspiciously while they contemplated the email that clearly said not to let anyone in with your own card.”
The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've spent hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that. It's hard because you can't just say things like "don't write lists of three items" because sometimes you want a list of three items. The rest of the text could be written by a person as it's kind of disjointed, but that could also be the result of trying to prompt out the AI-isms.
That’s not what “prejudice” means. It would be prejudice if the commenter objected to LLMs despite the quality of their output. However, the objection is based on the results. Also, the comment is correct.
It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt.
I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, but received no reply.
Noether’s real story is recounted in https://amzn.to/3YZZB4W.
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