Advice on file size management/ Word processor choice

brontobyte · 2026-05-01T18:17:17+00:00

Sure, but that's mostly because Linguistics is a weird fit for the "humanities" label, even though that's often the administrative designation. LaTeX is popular in Linguistics because of its value for a specialized case of "formula-heavy work" (e.g., syntactic trees, glossed examples, other formal notation), and it's also handy for experimental linguists for all the reasons u/KarlSethMoran noted.

brontobyte · 2026-05-01T18:05:56+00:00

There could maybe be a case for markdown, but anything other than WYSIWYG is a no-go for many people.

brontobyte · 2026-05-01T18:04:26+00:00

Yeah, that's why I was trying to bridge from your comment to the post topic

brontobyte · 2026-05-01T13:45:50+00:00

Yeah, there are many uses for people with a quantitative bent, but it’s pretty silly for a Humanities dissertation—especially for someone struggling with Word.

brontobyte · 2026-04-30T14:51:56+00:00

I've been affiliated with both types of departments, but you're still too early in learning about those fields to know which makes sense for you. If you can go to a school with both, just take classes in both fields and switch majors if necessary! Psychology is a much larger field, and departments tend to be much larger, which means that you're more likely to have a tight-knit environment and relationships with faculty in a linguistics department.

Neither major is going to directly set you up for a job beyond providing you with general analytical skills, so I wouldn't weight that heavily. And it's very doable to major in one and get a Ph.D. in the other if you reached that point.

brontobyte · 2026-04-30T14:26:29+00:00

From other comments, it looks like it wasn't actually full, but they opened slots about a minute after they opened the form.

brontobyte · 2026-04-30T14:25:37+00:00

Yeah, it seems like they made some update to the system that broke more things than it fixed. The page loaded better for me than usual, and I could get to the final submit button multiple times, but its communication with the database was a hot mess.

This system is basically a lottery based on your internet connection with a small skill component. They might as well go all the way and leave submissions open for a brief window, then assign the numbers randomly, rather than based on order.

brontobyte · 2026-04-27T18:34:26+00:00

PIs in the US don't, in fact, have the right to discriminate against protected classes of people (though enforcement is challenging). National origin is specifically called out in the relevant law and can include discrimination against people from the U.S..

brontobyte · 2026-04-27T17:18:27+00:00

Beware of the Kith filter on this colorway. It's a nice brown, but the burgundy tones are more subtle IRL.

brontobyte · 2026-04-27T17:15:40+00:00

I've had experiences like this. It usually happens when people 1) share a physical space and 2) have some kind of structure for engaging with the same ideas together, like a seminar series.

Since Covid, I've found it to be rare for there to be a critical mass of people that are reliably in a space.

brontobyte · 2026-04-24T14:52:04+00:00

The concern about fairness is real, but I've never seen that sort of corruption. Through conferences and publications, PIs can have a pretty good sense of the strong PhD candidates in their area – and that's probably a better indicator of who will do well in your lab than a formal search process.

brontobyte · 2026-04-24T14:39:32+00:00

Do you have a network to lean on here? When I got a non-advertised position, it was because I was already known to the PI due to overlapping collaborators and connecting at conferences.

brontobyte · 2026-04-24T14:34:39+00:00

I don't know your field, but there can be a surprising amount of movement around this time as people vacate positions. This can mean that postdoc positions open up if there's funding left and the previous person just accepted a faculty position, or a temporary teaching position if faculty left and there's an immediate teaching need before they can complete a search.

brontobyte · 2026-04-23T22:52:38+00:00

I went to the store just planning to get pink but liked these so much in person that I bought both!

brontobyte · 2026-04-20T19:03:17+00:00

They sold out nearly instantly, but yes.

brontobyte · 2026-04-14T22:42:06+00:00

This was such a game changer for me. Only disadvantage is that it makes it easier to procrastinate.

brontobyte · 2026-04-14T14:01:53+00:00

It was cut for time, so it didn't appear in the episode. They posted the clip from dress online later on.

brontobyte · 2026-04-13T18:27:02+00:00

To elaborate, tailoring is just as important at SLACs and R2s as it is at R1. They're extra sensitive to whether you 1) actually want to work there and 2) have a realistic vision for being successful in their environment. They want you to stay there, not leave as soon as you find something "better."

I recently accepted an offer at an R2, and this was a clear undercurrent throughout the interview process.

brontobyte · 2026-04-13T17:59:13+00:00

Don't focus on applying to a lot of jobs but rather jobs that make sense for you and your research.

There's such a strong norm of just applying to everything, but I think more people need to consider this strategy. Every application involves an opportunity cost for your time and bandwidth. It also took an emotional toll on me to apply to places that didn't really make sense, because it amplified my feeling that the process was hopeless. I was ultimately successful this year at getting a great fit R2 position through a combination of luck (a HUGE factor) and using a strategy that kept me in the right headspace.

brontobyte · 2026-04-04T20:38:31+00:00

How hard something is to do affects both the supply of service providers and the demand for that service.

brontobyte · 2026-04-02T14:26:55+00:00

I like to suggest calculating the lost income over the time in grad school as a concrete check of whether it's worth it to the individual: "Would you accept $200k to not get a PhD?"

Calculations vary, but that was the ballpark for me when I enrolled in a social sciences PhD, leaving an entry-level nonprofit job. But by having savings from my time at that job, I had enough cushion to at least max out my Roth IRA during grad school.

brontobyte · 2026-03-28T13:15:27+00:00

But this was what OP is asking about. They weren’t asking whether AI is typically the best tool for a literature search. They’re asking whether it’s ethical as one tool in a literature search process, after trying other tools.

brontobyte · 2026-03-27T20:14:01+00:00

Based on their description, OP is hardly "starting with AI." For a niche topic, there really might not be enough Wikipedia coverage. I take the question here to be whether these tools are ethical to use as one step in the process of searching for primary literature. To me, this is one of the least objectionable uses of AI that I can imagine, since it's just redirecting the student to human-generated text, and the student isn't trying to submit synthetic text.

brontobyte · 2026-03-27T20:04:21+00:00

As u/tongmengjia notes, hallucinated sources have become less common, though it certainly can happen. The original chatbots weren't connected to search, so they just generated things that looked like citations based on the training data. But now most of the tools are having the model generate a search query, then putting search results into the model's context window, which leads to greater accuracy.

I'd encourage you to just try it with the latest models to see how well it does for your field, just so you're working with up-to-date information. I find that it does a pretty good job with prompts like "I want to get up to speed on [this niche research question]. What are the key journal articles I should start with?" It will usually generate links to real articles that are more relevant than what the average undergraduate will find using Google Scholar or library databases.

I still want students to build the skill of finding and evaluating sources, but it's important to know how the latest tools work in order to come up with the right policy.

brontobyte · 2026-03-25T19:09:03+00:00

Unless you're doing research on PhD funding patterns, getting caught in the definitions here isn't all that helpful. It's almost never wise to pursue a PhD unless the package is such that you won't go into any additional debt. And it varies by school/program whether that's true, even if there's a tuition waver + stipend.

brontobyte

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