The main issue is that students don't have original ideas, at least not way into their master's project.
This means that every single thing they write throughout their studies is some regurgitation of stuff they find elsewhere.
To avoid having a reference after every single sentence, we need to allow them to pretend that some of the stuff they read is common knowledge, and can thus be passed on as such, without reference.
But if someone else actually wrote the sentence, that would be plagiarism, hence writing it in your own words.
Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example:
- Boxes & named figures
- Footnotes
- Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files)
- Comments
- Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents)
- Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.)
I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs like a savage.)
Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
[^0]: it doesn't matter where this is placed, just that this one has a colon.
The table of contents thing is annoying but it's not hard to write a little bash script. Sed and regex are all you need.
> Markdown doesn't have enough features
Markdown has too many features
The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Markdown is not intended for making fancy documents or blogs, it's meant to be a deadass simple format that can be read in anything. Hell, its goal is to be readable in a text editor so its more about styling. If you really want to use it and have occasional fanciness, you can use html.
But don't turn a tool that is explicitly meant to be simple into something complicated just because it doesn't have enough features. The lack of features is the point.
Yes, I think we're in violent agreement that markdown is the wrong tool for the job. That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using markdown, with its anaemic feature set (eg mdbook).
Even markdown + inline HTML is wildly inadequate. For example, you can't make automatically numbered sections. Or figures with links in the text. Or a ToC. And so on. Try and attach a caption to an image and you're basically hand authoring your document in crappy HTML.
So I agree with you. I don't think the answer is "markdown++" with comments, templating and scripting support. I think the answer is something else. Something which has considered the needs of authoring documents from the start. Something like typst.
> That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using
I feel this about so many things and it boggles my mind why people often choose to do things the hardest way possible.
Honestly, I think a good portion of it of the unwillingness to toss something aside and write something new. If it's just a hack on a hack on a hack on a hack then no wonder it's shit. It's funny that often it's quicker to rewrite than force your way through.
I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more. Because people will be asking "how do I make X do Y" when in reality you shouldn't ever make X do Y, you need to find a different tool.
> I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more.
I'm hoping the opposite, at least eventually. I think before long it'll be easy to get chatgpt to build your own version of whatever you want, from scratch.
Eg, "Hey, I want something kinda like markdown but with these other features. Write me the spec. Implement a renderer for documents in Go - and write a vs code extension + language server for it."
But if that happens, we'll get way more fragmentation of the computing ecosystem. Maybe to the point that you really need the memory of a LLM to even know what's out there - let alone understand how to glue everything together.
You missed my concern. Even if LLMs get much but it doesn't mean the users will ask the right questions. Even now many don't ask the right questions, why would it be any better when we just scale the issue?
MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX.
I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the project. Meh.
Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu.
When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
> For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format
Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented.
There also used to be the problem of different renderings on different machines (even if you had all the relevant fonts installed): You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. I don't know if that's the case today.
Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on opening a document are rare today.
> You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc.
When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).
> Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature or a bug
A bug, because even if this was merited somehow, they could have just made it a nice prominent checkbox for the user to decide what behavior they wanted.
Currently you will find that LaTeX is the de facto standard at CERN. Maybe only management would not use it. But CERN gives overleaf professional licence to each member. And all templates I have seen for everything I interacted with that is going into publications are LaTeX.
Well, naturally 20 something years make a difference, although for some others, it looks pretty much the same, as I have visited a few times since then as Alumni.
I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM.
Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt.
Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more.
How so? Only their web app seems to be closed source. And the company was created by the two project founders. They also don't seem to be doing a lot more than a community project.
Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?
I meant if there is no company financially benefiting from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC that is a completely different story.
There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't get.
When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter.
I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.
> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case.
I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.
One reason is that many journals supply LaTeX templates. And I find them easier to apply compared to their Word templates. I wonder how much support Typst has from these publishers, considering its relatively young age.
Look for the comment in the article, after passing to a subsequence if necessary. The ultrafilter produces the necessary subsequence for any question that you ask, and will do so in such a way as to produce logically consistent answers for any combination of questions that you choose.
That is why the ultrafilter axiom is a weak version of choice. Take the set of possible yes/no questions that we can ask as predicates, such that each answer shows up infinitely often. The ultrafilter results in an arbitrary yet consistent set of choices of yes/no for each predicate.
The axioms demand that either one function is eventually dominated by the other, or both functions are of the same order. But which of these is the case will strongly depend on which subsequence you look at.
You may have missed the same subtlety that I did. Because pi is irrational, the functions are different at all integers. Therefore, in the total order, these two functions cannot have the same order.
That still doesn't resolve which one is larger though.
Well, as presented in Tao's post, the set Ω can be either the natural numbers or the real numbers. So I'm assuming the "subsequence" is a (perhaps uncountable?) set of real parameters, in the latter case.
There's no need for the "/s" on the end, there. Deceleration, and especially in this case with a natural frame of reference, deceleration is negative acceleration.
The magnitude of the velocity vector is dependent on the frame of reference.
If you measure the same object's velocity from a spaceship traveling through the solar system, you'll get a different answer from what we measure from Earth.
That's why physics doesn't distinguish between acceleration and deceleration. What looks like acceleration in one frame looks like deceleration in a different frame.
Just like having employees with experience, I guess.
But tenured researchers are supposed to have some more protection specifically because they do research (and reach conclusions) on topics that people in leadership positions in society might not like.
> Just because you divide a number by a lot to get a small number doesn't make the original number smaller.
A bus emits more CO2 than a car. Yet it is more friendly to the environment because it transports more people.
> Those are 200M/d prompts that wouldn't happen without the training.
Sure, but at least a few millions are deriving value from it. We know this because they pay. So this value wouldn't have been generated without the investment. That's how economics work.
Those 200M/d prompts would be replaced with some other activities to solve the same problems. So if training did not happen, maybe instead of 200M/d prompts, you'd have 200M/d trips to the local library, using 200M cars to each drive three miles.
This means that every single thing they write throughout their studies is some regurgitation of stuff they find elsewhere.
To avoid having a reference after every single sentence, we need to allow them to pretend that some of the stuff they read is common knowledge, and can thus be passed on as such, without reference.
But if someone else actually wrote the sentence, that would be plagiarism, hence writing it in your own words.
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