I owe my thesis to scihub lol. I can’t stand publishing companies, especially elsevier.
Elsevier is so bad
Is this the most boring episode of the twilight zone? I just made this 10 mins ago (was relevant in a convo):
It will be read by thousands of LLMs 😀 The knowledge will be just fingertips away. It won’t be human knowledge tho but AI knowledge.
Missing the frames where they shell out their own $$ to get it into that book that’s locked away.
i did enjoy looking at old thesis on my university. seing typewriter written thesis with hand drawn plots in graph papers, original gel images, glued in pictures…
those theses are adorable scrapbooks of stress, sweat and tears.
that are so precious
Not really relevant, but: word processors were just starting to be used when I went to college, but I still mostly preferred using my portable electric typewriter. During my junior year the G key broke off and disappeared, so all my papers from that point on have the Gs written in by hand. If they ever invent time travel, I’m going to assume that enough other people are going back to kill baby Hitler and I’ll slap the shit out of 20-year-old me.
that’s a gargantuan grind. go and get your garish young self.
I dunno. I just read multiple papers from years to decades ago on the mechanical factors for popcorn because I kept burning kettle corn.
Who knows who will crack open the book someday and why. You either want to contribute or not. Don’t focus on the perceived impact. It feels like modern culture has made any effort to try new things not seem worth it unless you get recognition but that’s not why we did it originally.
“Thesis it?”
Not really accurate - publishers might put papers behind paywalls, but researchers themselves are usually glad to send them to anyone who requests them as long as they have time. And it’s totally legal, not like they’re pirating their own papers.
That’s a great point, I’ve reached out to researchers a few times to ask about their research and they have all freely just shared the work with me.
I feel like a more common reaction is “Finally I am rid of this terrible burden that I took on in my naivete. It is riddled with errors that the cruel arrow of time prevents me from rectifying. May I be lucky enough to get a publication or two out of it and then finally be rid of it forever” but maybe I’m speaking too closely to my own experience.
No, this is the way. PhD theses are probably like having an aggressive cancer and then submitting it is like a successful surgery.
It will be used as a midly useful paperweight eventually, dont worry
piracy enters the chat
This is my shelf, there are many like it but this one is mine…
