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Wes Cowley

@wes.wordsbywes.ink

929 followers 688 following 380 posts

Academic, technical, and nonfiction editor, specializing in computer science, ML, AI (policy, legal, and technical), economics, finance, math, statistics, and related fields. Member EFA, ACES Home: www.wordsbywes.ink Email: wes@wordsbywes.ink

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 10/05/2026

Perhaps I'm missing something (since I didn't look at the data either), but shouldn't the rows in this graph from CoPilot add to something <= ~100%? The numbers aren't just made up, there's no cohesion to them.

Graph from Adam's post that shows CoPilot's fabricated breakdown of job fields by country. An example row shows for the US 48% in Tech, 31% in Public Sector, 44% in Healthcare, 42% in Business, and 12% in Arts.

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 31/03/2025

This @npr.org article is good, but makes one key mistake: it doesn't just take 2/3 of Congress to change the Constitution. That's what it takes to propose an amendment. That then has to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.

Quote from NPR article saying, incorrectly, "Changing the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in Congress or a constitutional convention — which 34 states need to request. Given the congressional deadlock — not to mention how the country is divided politically — the prospect of this appears slim." The issue is it's also takes 3/4 of states to ratify an amendment that 2/3 of Congress vote to propose.

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 27/01/2025

Overleaf's suport replied this morning that they'd just pushed an update that includes the new Error Assist in the same toggle that controls the Writefull integration. The toggle is on the account settings page under the password settings. #TexLaTeX #Overleaf

A screenshot of Overleaf's AI feature toggle on the account settings page. The "Error Assist" and "Writefull" features are controlled by a single "Enable AI features" button.

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 25/01/2025

Has anyone figured out how to turn off this stupid AI error assist that Overleaf added? On top of it breaking my client agreements if I accidently click it, it's a horrible waste of screen real estate. Half of the error log is now taken up by this. #TexLaTeX #Overleaf

A screenshot from Overleaf showing a typical LaTeX warning with an equal amount of screen space taken up by their new AI error assist button and the text "You have 1 free suggestion left."

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 23/01/2025

Did you know you can limit search and replace in a Word document to specific parts of the document, like the footnotes or comments? I just found this out, and it was a huge timesaver for cleaning up a bunch of footnotes. www.wordsbywes.ink/a... #AmEditing

A screenshot of Microsoft Word's advanced find dialog box. The Find In option is selected, showing the four portions that search can be limited to: the main document, the headers and footers, the footnotes, and the comments. On the screenshot, red arrows point to the Find In menu and the Footnotes option.

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 21/01/2025

Bucking the trend of companies breaking our editing tools, the OED has (finally) increased their session timeout. I stayed logged in all day yesterday, but it didn't last overnight. Oddly, they made the longer sessions opt-in. #AmEditing

A screenshot of the login dialog for Oxford English Dictionary, showing a new checkbox with the prompt "Stay signed in for longer (personal devices only)"

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 10/11/2024

Here they are, and there is indeed at least one and I think two names on all of them (though that's not clear from the abbreviated author lists here).

Citations 35-47 from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhydene.2024.10.197 where the authors say were added at the strong request of the reviewers despite not being relevant to the paper.

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Wes Cowley @wes.wordsbywes.ink · 19/02/2024

Economics and finance authors tend to use long variable names, which often look odd when set in LaTeX. This post looks at how to write those terms correctly in LaTeX so they look good. www.wordsbywes.ink/a... #TexLaTeX

When a long variable like ScaledIncome is written directly in math, poor kerning results. The first line of the image shows extra space between the capital I and the lowercase n. This space is removed when the variable is placed in a mathit command, as is shown in the second line of the image.

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