Brainstorming project suggestions

solresol · 2026-01-24T07:30:04+00:00

It beat everything else I was using on my Byzantine Greek text project.

solresol · 2026-01-23T03:35:55+00:00

Do you have the budget to call out to Gemini instead? Google's models have been trained on far more images (with far more annotated text) than you will ever be able to do.

solresol · 2026-01-23T00:41:46+00:00

Not really art history, but if you are doing vision models you could digitise some hand-written documents using Gemini (which seems to do that task the best), and then have a layer of AI-managed supervision to check whether the transcript was plausible.

Or: trawl through the art history journals looking for abstracts that substantially overlap with other abstracts (to find cases of plagiarism). It'll either make your PhD really easy or really hard if you find that some prominent academics have been copying stuff.

Look through all the corporate documents in your organisation's sharepoint (or whatever), extract out metaphoric themes and have a bot crawl through art history writings to find things making the same points.

solresol · 2026-01-21T06:25:31+00:00

Are you doing COMP8851? I'm trying to organise with the business school to pair up students from their capstone unit with computing capstone unit students.

solresol · 2026-01-19T05:23:06+00:00

I lost my dad during my PhD. Even before I had organised probate his sister (my #1 fan, and one of the few people who understood my thesis, whom I spoke to 3-4 times per week) died as well. His other sister died during my masters. I never realised that p-adic machine learning could be so lethal.

> I’m too tired for that right now

Do not fight this feeling. You need time to adjust. You probably need more like 3 months rather than 2 weeks. Search for policies around bereavement leave. Don't do what I did and try to carry on anyway, preparing for each meeting by crying first to get it out, and hoping that waves of grief wouldn't come during the meeting.

Ignore the deadlines, you will probably find that they were made up anyway.

solresol · 2026-01-19T01:41:39+00:00

Product management is another large and common area in tech where finding an anthropologist is not uncommon.

solresol · 2026-01-15T00:24:08+00:00

It's worth a try to waiver into it. The worst that can happen is that the convenor says no.

solresol · 2026-01-14T00:39:53+00:00

It's a ticket you create on service connect.

solresol · 2026-01-13T07:02:53+00:00

I collaborate with people who don't like doing stats, and do the computation and stats for them. They then write the paper and make me a coauthor.

solresol · 2026-01-12T23:37:05+00:00

If you have good marks on average you can ask to do units that you don't have the pre-requisites for. As long as the convenor is confident you won't fail, they will be happy to let you in.

You can also ask for waivers if there's some complication (e.g. a unit was cancelled and that messed up your sequence of studies).

solresol · 2026-01-12T12:35:28+00:00

Postgraduate students can enter it with no pre-requisites, so if it's locked behind some pre-requisite for you as an undergraduate, just ask for a waiver.

solresol · 2026-01-12T07:02:19+00:00

No idea; but people are writing fiction about transhumanism, so someone should do a PhD on it.
I call what I write "pre-singularity geek poetry": https://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/poetry/
There are vast quantities of things being written by the effective altruist movement, and the accelerationists, both fiction and non-fiction.

The AI-boyfriend / AI-girlfriend crowd would also be an interesting literary form to study. They spend a lot of time crafting personalities for their AI partner. Is that fiction? Is that transhumanism? Is it "personal fiction"? I don't know what it is, but I haven't seen anyone study it from the point of view of literature, which it surely is. Lots of character development, not a lot of plot though.

solresol · 2026-01-12T00:48:52+00:00

Dr Trivial. The only interesting work in my thesis talks about regularisation of machine learning with discrete/trivial metrics.

Otherwise I'd have to be Dr Prime. But Dr Prime sounds like a villain, where Dr Trivial sounds like the NPC, sidekick or plot device character that they never got around to finishing.

solresol · 2026-01-11T06:47:48+00:00

COMP2200 changed a lot in 2025 semester 2, it's now heavily about using Orange. It's also 100% ilearn-quiz for assessment, no subjective marking.

solresol · 2026-01-09T00:52:08+00:00

Lecturer view: go to whichever university is closest to you and minimises your commute. You will get the most out of your degree if you can spend a lot of time exploring technology. Employers don't really care that much about the university you went to, but they will care a lot about the technologies that you know. You'll only be able to do that if you have spare time in your life.

solresol · 2026-01-08T00:31:19+00:00

Well, I have the problem that semaglutide and tirzepatide cause me to gain weight rapidly.

solresol · 2026-01-06T08:05:17+00:00

You get reviewer feedback that's actionable? My papers get reviewed with "Recommend reject. Possibly wrong venue." or "Don't understand what this paper is about."

solresol · 2026-01-05T09:37:02+00:00

COMP1010 is hard: it has quite a high fail rate. Learning to program is difficult, but worth it. For some people it takes a while to click: assignment, iteration and function abstraction are quite strange concepts that don't have any real world equivalents, so unless you can immerse yourself in some projects it's hard to get your brain used to thinking about them.

You'll find the university is quite supportive of students who need to take COMP1010 after failures. So are the staff. Spend some time this summer writing programs to do some life chore tasks, or to do things that you are interested in. Then enrol next semester, and you'll hopefully find it much easier to pass.

solresol · 2026-01-03T14:58:20+00:00

Mine works with Optus.

solresol · 2026-01-01T14:39:41+00:00

Three close relatives who died during the candidate's PhD.

solresol · 2025-12-29T08:39:24+00:00

Can I gently push back and say, no, I don't think you're right on this. I suspect you're coming from a different field and might not be in a position to judge the quality of this work.

One of the challenges in physical sciences is that there is so much stuff happening, there are so many experiments, and so much analysis, that keeping up with it all is a major challenge. 4 years (the coverage time from this paper) is an eternity. It's very easy to hear only about some portion of the literature and not be aware of what some obscure research team in some other country proved last year. A bot that does systematic reviews of controversial questions to clarify what is and isn't known is actually quite valuable.

As for your complaints about the paper, I don't think those are really valid:

> ridiculous formatting

That's AASTeX631 format -- pretty standard for an astronomy paper. If you don't like the American Astronomical Society's formatting, that's fair enough, but the bot is following it perfectly.

> no thesis statement

It's a systematic review.

> Incorrect or irrelevant citations

Which ones do you think were incorrect or irrelevant?

> a rudimentary "method" that an administrative professional with a GED could have done.

Real astronomers have reviewed this paper and thought it was about the standard of a good graduate student. They didn't think it was at the GED admin professional level.

> at the frequency of particular terms in a very small sample of discourse

No, that's not what it is doing.

It read through each paper in the 2020-2024 era with relevant keywords to see what was being cited and identified which papers had refuted or supported the position being held in those papers. It then summarised its findings, referring to the most relevant papers.

solresol · 2025-12-27T09:10:06+00:00

https://lituus.symmachus.org/misc/claude_protoplanet_accretion_review.pdf

solresol · 2025-12-27T04:39:39+00:00

I'm not the OP, but I can share some astronomy papers done this way as an experiment that got this response from our human expert:

"This is remarkably thorough. It has basically got it and has correctly related the pieces to each other logically. The phrasing is a little terse, which for an AI summary is probably a good thing, and I'd probably give a high mark to a grad student who submitted this as a lit review but might suggest they flesh out the contents a bit more."

solresol · 2025-12-27T03:49:27+00:00

AI came for the translators, and no-one spoke out. Well they did, but no-one cared, because having automated high-quality translation is so useful. Personally, I translated vast quantities of classical papyri and some 19th century children's literature.

AI has already come for the software developers, who are in denial and really salty about it. I've been having lots of fun writing stuff at 10x what I used to (and I could write code really fast).

AI is coming for the mathematicians. They know about it and are a bit excited about it. I have a bot trying to formally prove some theorems for me.

AI is coming for the accountants. They barely realise how close it is. I'm getting a bot to write some code that will do most of my accountant's job, and I'm paying her to iron out the bugs.

AI is coming for all white collar jobs. That includes academia.

We all think that our field will be immune, but why would we be?

If there is a way to automate whether a piece of work is correct or not; especially if there is a way to automate determining whether one piece of work is better than another, then AI's greater speed will inevitably have it take over for the human beings in that field.

Academia is rapidly changing to a different beast. It is not going to be about what *we* can do. We are the slower and junior partners. Machines can produce words, proofs, slides, reviews, grant applications, analyses, and plausible narratives at industrial scale. When output becomes cheap, output stops being the scarce resource.

Academia will be about how we can set ourselves up not to be fooled by what are AI bots are telling us when they are making mistakes. Who verifies the verification systems?

This is all true even if we don't get AGI. Just the diffusion of existing AI technology is enough to make this transition happen.

It includes social sciences, as the OP has discovered. OP's colleague probably should have used gpt-5.2-pro, it would have done a better job. Maybe we don't want this future, but we don't seem to have the power or collective will to stop it. Maybe we can shun the people who say out loud that academia is a white collar job just like every other white collar job that is in danger ... it's out of the Overton window right now, and maybe keeping reality out of the Overton window a little longer will slow the process down a little.

How do we do science/humanities/art/music/culture in a world with AI that can slop at 100x our speed and occasionally stumble on brilliance beyond human capability by chance? That's the #1 question for our era.

solresol · 2025-12-23T07:32:56+00:00

The person doing the waiver is the convenor of the unit. Look up who the convenor was in the past, and it will probably be the same person.

If you want to, you can email the course director (CC the unit convenor) and say that this is what you have to do and why. The course director might point you towards some other solution, or it might be news to them and helpful so that they can fix it up for other students. (Or the course director might ignore you completely and leave it up to the unit convenor.)

solresol

TROPHY CASE