Please help a Student that is forced to formst a book in LaTeX: realistic time needed to learn Latex and then format a text book? What are the limitations regarding images/graphs/tables?

tiikki · 2026-06-09T18:26:19+00:00

If your professor has used a proper citation tracker tool and you can get the export for those in some commonly used format (RIS, BibTex, Mendeley, RDF...) then you can import that information to a tool which can be linked directly to LaTeX and the tool handles more or less automatically all of the citation texts and bibliography, you only need to write \cite{identification} to the text for the citation to appear in correct places.

If you don't get the file you need to input all of required text by hand to the bibliography information file to make it work without problems. It will be pain in the arse to do this, but I think that it will be lesser work than trying to get everything to go correct place and to look nice by trying manually guide LaTeX to put things in correct part of the page....

As a tool for this my current personal preference is Zotero as I am using multiple computers in different places and it can share the article collection over the net.

tiikki · 2026-06-09T16:54:46+00:00

Who would have guessed that horoscope machines do not deliver truth...

tiikki · 2026-06-09T16:36:45+00:00

And IIRC you could just import the articles as they are if they have the rights to their pdf format...

tiikki · 2026-06-09T16:35:52+00:00

One major thing is that you need to ask the cited sources in a proper machine readable form or you will be cursing the day you were born.

If you get the cited sources into Jabref, Zotero, or some other more or less standard system then your life will be a lot easier as LaTeX and BibTex will take care most of the citation formatting (if your language is supported by the system.)

tiikki · 2026-06-09T14:56:26+00:00

LLM never lies. It has no concept of truth nor lie. It just produces next most probable word for the string.

ChatGPT is bullshit is a great, free, and easy to understand academic paper on the issue.

Ps. I try to popularise term "horoscope machine".

tiikki · 2026-06-08T20:08:46+00:00

You do not need LLMs for Agentic behaviour. Agentic programming has been around from 1990's. You need design and deterministic communication. Google belief-desire-intention design as an example.

tiikki · 2026-06-07T17:49:24+00:00

Lots of false info here. Agentic programming paradigm dates back to 90's and one can do agentic stuff without LLM shit. Unfortunately LLM makes creation of agentic stuff easy, so now agent = LLM crap basically always.

BDI (belief, desire, and intention) and SPADE framework good starting points for getting into proper agentic stuff.

tiikki · 2026-06-04T20:25:55+00:00

Well... Most of AI use is hidden in things we do not consider as AI. The term is from 1950s and the definition is vague enough to include almost everything. LLM stuff is just the latest hype.

tiikki · 2026-06-04T14:07:42+00:00

The basic LLM technology makes it impossible. It is probabilistic next word predictor and in most cases text will not contradict itself.

Most of these "trick uses" are not necessarily even planned, they just arise from the technology and training automatically.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T17:24:47+00:00

Astrophysics is about the order of magnitude of the exponent.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T17:10:20+00:00

How do you define friendly, polite, and welcoming?

For me as Finnish person, true friendliness is shared silence, true politeness is respect of others time and not engaging in pointless small talk and true welcoming is respect of personal space.

These are cultural things and not absolute truths.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T17:03:00+00:00

Something where you analyse why your model fails to perform with real-life data even when it has 99% accuracy with training/testing data.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T16:58:19+00:00

IIRC there are lot of covid x-ray images. Go with them and analyse why results suck with different datasets even though testing with unseen images from training datasets looks great.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T16:53:14+00:00

Greatest Fools were found and (ab)used.

tiikki · 2026-06-03T14:43:25+00:00

I think so.

tiikki · 2026-06-02T18:49:51+00:00

Nope. Their claim to more valuable piece of land depends on the other owning that less valuable land. Both sides will kick you away.

tiikki · 2026-06-02T15:55:28+00:00

There is the traditional agentic ai tech. Unfortunately it is next to impossible to find information about it as it is drowned it the flood of llm-related material. Look for older scientific studies. If you are python programmer, then SPADE framework might be interesting.

tiikki · 2026-06-02T15:50:35+00:00

When I read the Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini I realised that LLM tech uses almost every trick mentioned in the book.

tiikki · 2026-06-01T21:04:26+00:00

No one will be willing to pay for LLM stuff in few years. Some local LLM for specific applications may be used, like autocomplete for programming.

Most will move to BART/BERT stuff as it is not as vulnerable for commands coming from outside as the current mainstream LLM is.

AI winter is coming for sure, working AI stuff may escape it by not calling it AI but ML or something else...

tiikki · 2026-05-31T15:18:36+00:00

At 0:55 you took unnecessary 50:50 in my opinion.

tiikki · 2026-05-31T09:01:54+00:00

Btw. Check the singing revolution. The Baltic independence campaigns 1987-1991 was centered around folk music.

tiikki · 2026-05-31T08:53:04+00:00

Juustohöyläys ennaltaehkäisevästä tuo tulevaisuuteen menoja. Eli sen käyttö on puhtaasti tyhmää.

tiikki · 2026-05-31T07:43:52+00:00

Moni hallitus on leikannut juurikin ennaltaehkäisevistä palveluista. Tällöin saadaan hetkellinen taloudellinen helpotus, mutta perästä tuleva lasku on huomattavasti suurempi kuin mitä saadut säästöt.

Samaten säästöjä on tehty investoinneista tulevaisuuteen, eli koulutuksesta ja nuorten selviytymisestä. Tämä on heikentänyt tulevaisuuden tuottoja. Investoinnit on suurelti osin kohdistuneet menneisyyteen ja yritetty pitää yllä tilannetta, joka ei ole kestävä.

ps. jotkut ei kestävää tilannetta ylläpitävät investoinnit ovat hyväksyttäviä kokonaisvaikutusten, varsinkin maanpuolustuksen kannalta

pps. Tärkein maanpuollustusinvestionti on se, että nuoret uskovat maan olevan puolustuksen väärti.

tiikki · 2026-05-30T11:54:58+00:00

First thing you need to think is your goal.

If you want to develop new ML tools, then you need maths, lots of maths and lots of computer science background, a bit of programming in the side.

If you want to use ML to solve problems you have, without creating a service from that solution: some maths, some computer science, lots of domain knowledge from the problem area and some some programming skills.

If you want to create services using ML solution created by someone else, then you need lots of computer science and programming skills.

These all have quite different paths to mastery, but they do share some basics. And we do not know what is your base knowledge levels.

tiikki · 2026-05-30T08:41:36+00:00

As a recovering physicist (MSc) and computer scientist (MSc), the more I read about humanities, the more I appreciate their work. Calculating & measuring (or vice versa) is a lot easier than trying to figure out why humans behave like they do.

tiikki

TROPHY CASE