Pet peeve: In a number of research papers, I see that the bibliography is sorted by author name. The problem with this sorting is that it supports a single function --- to check how many times a particular author is cited in a printed paper as the first author. Unfortunately, when bibliographies are sorted in this fashion,  it becomes very difficult to look up where in the paper that particular entry was cited. If you order the bibliography by the order in which it is referred to in the paper, it becomes much more easier for the poor reader to look up where and why a particular entry was cited in your paper.

IMO, the second function is much more important than the first. So, my plea to the authors: Please, order the bibliography by the order of reference.

I am trying to introduce my students in software engineering to LLMs. I want them to have a good idea of what it is like to work with them, or to build tools on top of them.  What is the best option currently?

It seems that I have almost entirely replaced my use of Grammarly and LanguageTool with ChatGPT (GPT4). The ability to instruct the AI on what to do in different parts, --ignore latex comments, keep the structure, make abstract concise, make introduction simple etc.--are a real game changer for me. However, I find its ability to write code I want *extremely* lacking!.

Valiant's general context free parser is one of the few very well known general context free parsers. Its claim to fame is that given any context-free grammar, it can parse any strings in that grammar in less than O(N^3) time, by leveraging advances matrix multiplication. Unfortunately, lucid explanations of what Valiant's algorithm does is somewhat hard to find. I have just written a live notebook post that explains the Valiant's parser, and lets you play with the algorithm directly.

https://rahul.gopinath.org/post/2023/03/16/valiant-parser/

#parsing #context-free

An unforeseen (or perhaps foreseeable) issue; Most foot guns I have learned to avoid in Python are present in GPT4 generated code, and it is not immediately obvious anymore. Chased a surprising bug and found 
             C = [[{}] * m for _ in range(m)]
followed by 
         C[i][j][k] = "V"
buried deep. Because I trusted GPT4 (it aught to be good at these things) I failed to recognize this pattern :/

It is very mesmerizing to get chatGPT+ (GPT4) to write code for you. It keeps making different mistakes every time, and inventing newer explanations!

To those who are struggling with Microsoft's outlook, please give #mutt http://www.mutt.org/ a try. It works very well with outlook (beyond some configuration), has sane searching capabilities, and does exactly what you want it to do. I have been using it to survive email in #usyd.

A few important tips for folks running #mastodon instances (also for people who run their own microbloging instances like #ktistec) https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html