this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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elucidating 🀌🏼 (feddit.org)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Me: Polish my abstract:

"The development of ..."

ChatGPT: "Wypoleruj moje streszczenie...”

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

#shittyskynet

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Ergo

Concordantly

Vis-Γ -vis

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I get a full on boner whenever someone uses "thusly" in a sentence. Such a great word.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

what are your thoughts on β€œwhence”?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It's a big w for hence

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

If you suffix it with "forth" I'm in, you son of a bitch

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I misread that as prefix and, honestly, forthwhence doesn't sound half bad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

that’s an extremely rare sighting but it’s so satisfying to read

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Does it have to be used correctly? If not, i could thusly use it incorrectly, possibly?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

πŸ˜°πŸ˜°πŸ˜°πŸ˜°πŸ˜°πŸ˜–πŸ˜–πŸ’¦πŸ’¦πŸ’¦πŸ’¦πŸ’¦πŸ’¦

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I fucking love "thereto" and "therein", alwo "which" and "whence" and things like that, such simple words that make sentences less awkward

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Perchance?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

you can't just say perchance

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I have a visceral reaction to words like elucidate, and other fluff. My writing has to be very to the point, and technically accurate. Because of this, I carve up drafts from juniors like a Thanksgiving turkey.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Most "professional" writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.

I'm involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it's 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

It doesn't have to be like that. Sure, context is important, but parroting phrases or other crap that the client has in the RFP is bullshit. They don't want you blowing smoke up their ass, they want a technically sound product that addresses the exact issues they asked you to address. They also want you to show them how you're going to get there, and achieve the objectives they set out.

I realize you're on the tech side; I'm just venting my frustrations with the corporate/PM spheres.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I thankfully don't have to deal with RFPs anymore, but when I did, I'd either go line-by-line or ignore the prospect's text entirely. There is an in-between, but it's wishy-washy crowd-pleasing nonsense, and even the people entrenched in those bureaucracies see straight through it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

That, and parroting makes it sound like you don't know what they want, or that you're stupid, and the best that you could come up with is their own text with slight variation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Well, actually you're kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.

So I'm not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) "we will deploy that in our k8s cluster" but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that's incredibly stupid.

Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.

I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I work in IT, and by now, every single 3-letter-abbreviation makes my eyelid twitch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

My industry is three-letter-acronym (TLA) heavy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

They let the ad guys write grants and then wonder why they don't end up getting them

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Doing the Lord's work. The longer I work in academia, the more radical I become about keeping it simple.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's heartening to see comments like this. Busybody buzzwords and marketing maneuvering infiltrating real scientific study has been a hallmark of the de-intellectualisation of society for a long time, in my mind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Your writing could use a little polishing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You guys are allowed to say novel?!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

My group abuses this word and I fucking despise it. Every manuscript I see has "novel" in it, I call out unless it actually is displaying novelty in that context.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Hitherto!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I'd like to see someone hand an LLM as many abstract sections as they can possibly find, and then have it generate the most generic, meaningless, fluff piece abstract/grant proposal/possibly silicon valley startup loan application, the world has ever seen.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

a stunning %0.1 improvement in prediction accuracy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Well shit I didn't expect this to be relevant again so quickly