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I just typed my entire PhD thesis in latex earlier this year


Why did you not have an LLM typeset it for you in 1% of the time that it took for you to type all of it out by hand? Did you ride a horse to university instead of taking your car as well?

Are you suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses? Or just writing LaTeX commands while the students write the core text? Because if it's the latter, LaTeX usually isn't the bottleneck.

No, I am not suggesting PhD candidates have AI write their theses. The original poster implied that they typed latex code for their thesis out by hand, to which I responded that it seemed silly to do so, silly in a similar way that taking a horse drawn carriage would be vs using a car.

So, do they write their formulas like S a b f(x)dx in their hand-written source text, but then get the LLM to convert that to \int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx? Invent their own "markup" to indicate S a b is the integral from a to b? They might as well learn \int and just use that.

I write LaTeX by hand all the time whenever I need to put any math in my notes, and depending on your use-case or field, you learn the LaTeX for that which you use often and it's faster than trying to use most tools.


Most of the value of the Bloomberg terminal is the data, not the number of panels


as someone who worked at TR (now Refinitiv) and then Bloomberg, it's not even the data. it's IB. After IB it's the data. :)


As someone that worked for the spin out from GS, then got acquired by TR, then sold off to Blackstone, I wonder how much of our tech debt is still there for you to deal with 10 years later. :)


I haven't been at TR in 10+ years as well. AT TR, I mostly dealt with Eikon's pipeline for estimates, actuals and the like (IBES data) ingestion, querying and analytics. So can't say much, though some of my old colleagues still seem to be there.


I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but today my github account was removed from the organisation... after 10 years.


As someone who never worked anywhere: what’s IB?



Nonsense, when he'll have one panel per screen pixel, he'll be able to see over 8 million Fibonacci retracements, 40 heatmaps and real-time market sentiment headlines at once on a 4k monitor, then you'll see.


... and speed. They publish billions of ticker items in near real time simultaneously to all their users... the tech is pretty crazy!


it's all about the bas


this.


I don’t care that much about everything having a default (although it’s nice), but if a language insists on a default value for every type for safety, can’t you just use std::optional?


I can't tell if you imagine std::optional is a value (it is not) or if you know it's a templated type but you imagine that somehow it would be OK to redefine all programs so that every type is std::optional<T> of that type instead so as to simplify initialization.

Either way no, that can't work.


> Either way no, that can't work.

Kotlin has explicit nullable types. Rust has no null, but has option types. Both languages work fine.

I think your point was that neither approach could reasonably be retrofitted to C++, do I have that right?


Rust works fine because types are not required to have a default, if you want your type to have a default you implement Rust's Default trait. Stuff which only makes sense if there's a default just depends on that trait and so won't be available, for example you can't core::mem::take your custom Goose type which has no default because core::mem::take<T: Default>. In Rust if we say there's a variable of type Goose and don't initialize it, it's not initialized, and if the compiler can't see why it's initialized before it's used the program is rejected as nonsense because Rust is a safe language and that's an unsafe outcome.

I don't write Kotlin, so I can't speak to the details there.

C++ like Rust does not require that types have a default. In C++ the way you provide a "default" is usually via a zero argument constructor, since the compiler can just call that wherever you asked for an instance of that type and there's no requirement to write such a constructor, or indeed to provide any public constructor at all. So "just use the default" could not work in C++ as it exists today yes.

The other reason C++ can't do anything like this is that it makes a newer C++ with this behaviour behave differently despite no syntactical change. Rust is OK with that, because it has the Edition system to differentiate Rust 2015 code which means one thing from Rust 2024 code which means something else despite having the same text, but in C++ they do not have anything like that, it's not rare for somebody's C++ 17 code to get compiled in C++ 23 and people expect that to work (it doesn't always work but that's what they expect).


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