I also like the idea of soft requirements. I think that we ought not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, in my mind I would much rather have an offtopic section to have interesting open ended discussion. I would just prefer if there were some requirements about not posting topics that simply have a link with no commentary, or things obviously intended to inflame without much possibility of productive discussion.
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I like that. There’s some overlap here with how some folks have been using the Community category — I’ve always thought of that category as being about the Julia Community, but a number of posts are there because the OP thought it’d be interesting to the community here.
I think detangling that would be a great improvement!
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Well, we had a few discussions related to AI. AI is a field of application of Julia, and (might) have a strong impact on the society. So there should be room to discuss how to cope with that. It is relevant for scientists, but also for programmers in general. Do you want to jump on the AI train or not, or only under curtain conditions… I think this are topics loosely related to Julia and worth to be discussed here.
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I tend to agree with @ufechner7. I think for the offtopic category in a Julia forum its sufficient to have the soft requirement that your post in at least some loose way relates to Julia. That cuts out most of the politics/religious debates anyways. I don’t think we need to forbid politics more explicitly. Also it would be rather difficult to draw a line where something starts to be too political.
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Some good suggestions here. First I would say that sometimes wording things in the negative is of great benefit. If you look at item 7 of the 10 principles in the Policy Governance model it is phrased in the negative. Being part of a not for profit policy governance board, it is explained that the executive director has perfect freedom to implement the vision of the board in any way he desires, except he cannot do those things that the board is limiting him to. One limitation may be that the executive director cannot put the organization in debt.
For something like the Off Topic category in this forum I like the soft approach both positive and negative with a lot of good ideas already presented. Excluding the negative will be detrimental in term of guidance.
So, what is the deal with the minimum amount of original content in a post? I would have thought that providing a link to interesting content would be enough.
After all, my goal is to inform, not to impose my opinion on others.
Or, are we all used to the web browser providing a predigested bit with a link? (Courtesy of LLM. Presumably.) So now we expect to see a brief summary a la
.
Or, is the issue with the uncertainty whether or not this is a conversation starter? Should I have said: No posts, comments, or other feedback expected?
Dropping links without context has been considered bad form in many forums since the 1990s. I don’t particularly care but also wouldn’t consider following the link unless the subject was of extreme interest to me.
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Well we don’t currently have very strong guidance around this, but we do ask that everyone strive to improve the discussion here. This is a discussion board — it’s explicitly a place for conversation. Amongst humans.
This is also why the topic titles matter to us as a community. Clear topic titles help everyone prioritize their own time — it’s a matter of respectfulness of the place and people.
Anyhow, that’s why I opened this Meta Discussion topic on the matter.
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Well it was interesting to you for a reason. It might interesting to others for the same reason. So why not state why you found it interesting? That might encourage others to read a random link and spark discussion even.
But then again this is a Julia forum, so I think even Offtopic should be related to Julia in some capacity. I mean I could post links to interesting papers about quantum thermalization galore but wouldn’t you agree that this would be out-of-place here?
Addendum: original content does not hit the mark. It’s not about how much you add per se. I would accept a random link to something where Julia played an interesting role with just a title like “oh look Julia had an interesting application to ”
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Exactly!
And while “original content” is not necessarily the point, adding a title like
might even be considered “original content” in some way.
But - IHMO - more importantly, it provides a modicum of context that might not be obvious from the original title without also knowing where the shared material is from.
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I would tend to agree. I find it nice to come to this place and have it be only about stuff related to Julia.
Well, almost all here use LLMs in some form to do their programming (presumably in Julia). In addition, many here try to use Julia to address ML. So, obviously, I thought the topic of the editorial would be of interest in this forum. And, my assumption was that everyone would understand that as well. I doubt that that was unwarranted.
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I’d agree that I’d rather Offtopic be removed rather than overly-restricted. It seems to me that if the requirement is “be directly related to Julia” that it should go into General Usage or Specific Domains. I don’t consider a post like JIT Compiler for CPython to be inappropriate in the Offtopic category, even though it’s not directly related to Julia – it’s directly related to Python, indirectly related to Julia. But I do like seeing the Julia community’s thoughts and discourse on topics like that.
But I do agree that I’m not a fan of posts consisting only of a link – that’s not discourse. So for me, as long as what’s posted is:
- Legal / meets Code of Conduct requirements
- At least tangentially related to Julia (no posts about who we think the starting QB at My University State is going to be)
- Has a reasonable amount of effort exerted to try to start a discourse on the topic
Then don’t filter the post – the fact it’s in the Offtopic category in the first place is enough of a signal to my own internal filter for whether I want to spend time in it.
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Taking that example: The way the original post is done seems not a good fit here - and also got no interaction. However then the same poster came back later and related it to Julia and that sparked a bit of conversation. So I think that this is an excellent example that demonstrates the two sides of a line we could draw. Context is after all what makes information useful and interesting.
Well there might be a significant overlap between Julia users and LLM users/ML practioners (I for one fall in neither of the latter groups). But this is still primarily a Julia forum imo. I see it like this: Sure I can just ignore your post (since it is not apparent why it should interest my) and not be bothered (and I am not). The issue is rather that if more people where to post things of potential interest then Offtopic would become totally useless and unmanageable. That is why we should set up some rules - not because it currently is unmanageable or anything.
If you want to supply folks with random interesting links then I suggest you do that on twitter/mastodon/etc. I think I would follow you on one of these and from time to time even read links you drop because the context is a different one.
Petr has been a member of the community for 7 years and is a very valuable contributor. When he posts an off-topic link, I know it’s worth checking out, no nonsense.
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I don’t think links without context work well for our forum here, no matter if in offtopic or not. We know the pattern from other places like reddit or hacker news, people love jumping in the comment section, often not even really reading the article beforehand. This leads to unfocused discussion. How should I know if the poster has read the source and what point they want to make, I can’t read minds.
If however the link is just part of something the poster wants to communicate like “I think LLMs could be interesting for us for reasons A, B, C and here’s an article that supports that” then we at least know what to discuss.
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This is definitely not true here.
Furthermore, the articles linked are often informative and interesting.
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Yes we’re lucky to have pretty good discussion culture here in general and should be trying to keep it up. For me, giving the context in which you’re presenting a link is a form of courtesy to that effect.
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Whether it was warranted or not, this assumption about “everyone” apparently happened to be wrong. For a scientist, the most normal thing: To learn that his assumptions were wrong, and correct his views on that point correspondingly.
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OK, I think the consensus is that if a link, then with context. Will do. (I won’t ask ChatGPT to write it for me. 
)
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