Science
Mostly just summaries of scientific papers for people without an academic background.
The Toilet Paper
Not all parallel careers lead to the same outcomes
People with parallel careers simultaneously hold two different jobs not because they have to but because they want to.
The Toilet Paper
How humans and AI should work together in critical care
Data scientists and clinicians provide their perspectives on how humans and AI can safely work together in intensive care units.
The Toilet Paper
Software engineering across domains
Software engineering practices differ between domains and companies. Who’d have thought?
Captain’s Blog
Where I get my papers from
I made a list of all the journals and conferences that have been featured in my paper summaries on this blog.
The Toilet Paper
People are apparently farming citations on ResearchGate
This week’s paper about citation farming is right at the intersection of two of my “favourite” subjects: AI slop and academic fraud.
The Toilet Paper
The complicated relationship between developers and security experts in Scrum
Good product security is possible only when developers and security experts work together, but this turns out to be hard in practice.
Douze Points of Contention
The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Union
The Eurovision Song Contest is technically not related to the European Union, but it does affect how the EU is perceived abroad.
The Toilet Paper
Tackling gender biases in AI-driven systems
This paper presents a handful of recommendations for designing effective guidelines to tackle gender biases in AI.
The Toilet Paper
Corporate bullshit considered harmful
The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale provides a way to measure how susceptible someone is to corporate bullshit.
The Toilet Paper
How explainable AI affects understandability, trust and usability
Researchers evaluated different explainable AI designs for disinformation detection and found some surprising results.
The Toilet Paper
Agile teams don’t use a lot of data in their retrospectives
A survey of 19 development teams suggests that objective data such as project metrics are not used systematically in retrospectives.
The Toilet Paper
Do AI coding agents improve velocity and quality?
I know you have Betteridge’s law of headlines in mind, but the answer to this question isn’t as simple as “yes” or “no”.
The Toilet Paper
The current(-ish) state of LLM-based multi-agent systems for software engineering
At this point, we may just be reinventing real-world software engineering practices using LLMs.
The Toilet Paper
How batch size affects LLMs’ classification of requirements
We all know that larger large language models (LLMs) tend to perform better than smaller ones – but what about the size of their inputs?
The Toilet Paper
Is that my legitimate interest or your legitimate interest?
Websites are allowed to collect user data without explicit consent, if they follow all the rules – but they often don’t.
The Toilet Paper
What’s wrong with technology readiness levels (TRLs) and how to fix them
The technology readiness level (TRL) scale, developed by NASA in the 1970s, is still going strong but can be challenging to use.
Douze Points of Contention
Israel’s attempts at songwashing in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest
The 2024 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest was an absolute shitshow, and Israel was a major part of that.
The Toilet Paper
Weaponised autism in online alt-right communities
The term “weaponised autism” is frequently used on extremist platforms such as Gab. What is it and what does it mean for autistic people?
The Toilet Paper
Potential threats to the validity of LLM-based software engineering research
Large language models have become a popular tool for software engineering research, but they can also influence the outcome of experiments.
The Toilet Paper
Efficient and green LLMs for software engineering
Training and using large language models to develop software is bad for the planet – but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Toilet Paper
Your app needs more than just a dark and high-contrast mode
Dark and high-contrast modes help make apps more accessible, but not all support them well enough.
The Toilet Paper
Svelte really is that fast
The five most popular JS frameworks – Angular, React, Vue, Svelte and Blazor – use different rendering strategies, and it shows.
The Toilet Paper
Do large language models respect copyright notices?
A group of researchers studied what happens when you explicitly remind large language models to respect copyright notices.
The Toilet Paper
A method for preventing browser extension fingerprinting
Who could have thought that DOM-based browser extension fingerprinting can be easily mitigated by splitting reality?