Attention Is Off By One
I don&#x27;t really understand the subject matter enough, so I apologize in advance for the meta-comment...<p>The author mentions that he would maybe have written this as a scientific paper:<p>&gt; I tried writing a serious-looking research paper about the bug and my proposed fix, but I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex, so I figured I’d just write a blog post instead. (History is written by the winners; blogs are written by…)<p>Honestly, thank god he didn&#x27;t. This paper is so much more readable and approachable than what gets published in &quot;serious&quot; journals. The tone is self-effacing, it does not have an &quot;ego&quot; the way scientific papers tend to have. If all science read like this, and if we were &quot;allowed&quot; to cite research that reads like this, I think we would be much better off. This reads like a conversational, approachable textbook, not like an impenetrable wall.<p>Is it because I don&#x27;t understand attention at a PhD level that I hold this opinion? Maybe. Could he be writing like this because he&#x27;s a layman and utterly wrong about the topic, unlike those Serious Science Authors? Maybe, I don&#x27;t know.<p>But my god, wouldn&#x27;t it be nice to be allowed to write like this?