• dave@hal9000@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am a historian, who even in this scenario would be one of the least useful… But I work on history of aviation, so maybe that could work out somehow lol

      • dave@hal9000@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Well, I am a professor at a university, which involves teaching and research (at a research focused gig, so not excessive on the teaching load). I wouldn’t call myself a historian of aviation really, but a historian of technology - but my dissertation and hence first (and only) book is primarily about aviation so that would potentially cause lots of folks to think historian of aviation, but I already moved on to other topics, so aviation was not my focus really, but rather aviation’s role as a technology in a particular process that is the actual thing I was focusing on (territorial expansion and colonization through aviation). So, if historian colleagues ask what I do, it’s history of tech and history of the geographical region I focus on. If someone outside the profession asks, sure, history of aviation.

        All that said, my long and (pejoratively speaking) academic explanation is kind of a moot point, since I am unfortunately quitting academia because I am too underpaid to guarantee my kid a secure future. So the next project I had, on the history of hydroelectric dams and their environmental impacts, will not come to fruition

      • dave@hal9000@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        PS.: peeked your profile after responding, and ehrmmm I am actually going into IT work, which is what I have done on the side to sustain life while being a professor. I have been divided between tech and humanities for a long time, and have mixed both in my career. Also keep my side gig doing custom 3D printing for local artists, but that’s just because I enjoy it :)

        • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Very interesting. I also do 3d printing for fun hee hee. Yeah, I know a lot of people from humanities who’ve jumped over to tech. One of the people I know was Art but they have been in tech for over a decade now

          • dave@hal9000@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            If you don’t mind telling me, what kind of roles did they get into? I worked at a small company and was a jack of all trades, started coding then did their DevOps, managed other coders, did compliance consulting gigs, was de facto sys admin, etc. But I am trying to think of what I could do in the tech world that would also leverage my skills in the humanities, rather than something purely technical, since I have a somewhat unique combination of skills with the academic background. Also because I never specialized in any one technical role, so it would be hard to jump into a senior role for any of the technical positions I had

            • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              I believe they mentioned they worked help desk, QA, software programmer, and then I think possibly something in networking

      • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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        1 year ago

        ChatGPT does very well at summarizing existing information. I haven’t seen it change the meaning of some input text yet. But if generating new text, sure it’s an issue then.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          Summarizing a news article and a scientific article is a bit different, the later needs to give the essential information of the article with perfect accuracy and the language used in scientific literature is very precise.

          • macarthur_park@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I agree that anything generated by an LLM will need human verification for accuracy, but scientific abstracts are one of the few areas where LLMs can be immediately useful. I’ve played with having ChatGPT create abstracts in subjects that I’m familiar with and it’s been surprisingly good. It even respects word limits. If you have a block of text that needs to be condensed, ChatGPT can probably get you most of the way there.

            For example, I had chatGPT summarize your comment in 5 words:

            “Summarizing scientific articles demands precision.”

        • duckington@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It misses what details are important most of the time or just does a very inelegant job. Even when using gpt4 I still don’t really use it for direct rewrites when it’s something important