Worth noting that LLMs are very bad at writing cetz code, even if you try to feed them all the docs. I had to use TiKZ and import the resulting PDFs for some of the more complex illustrations in my thesis.
I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3[1][2]. Also, it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic[3][4] (which looks like a dead project itself) out of the box.
Seems like an admirable project but they’re building on creaky foundations. Even the way TexLive is released feels like something from academia than a real piece of software.
I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.
Sometimes bugs appear only if you load three specific packages in a specific order. The fact that there are no namespaces and every package can modify everything makes it a complete nightmare. LaTeX would do well to take a hint from the lessons we learned in the past 40 years. Or just retire it and push something sane forward, like Typst.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.
I’ve written book-length documents in Plain TeX (probably what you mean — nobody writes in “raw” tex) and in LaTeX. I would say that Typst, if it’s a replacement for anything, is a replacement for LuaLaTeX, because of its programmability. But in this article I framed it as a possible LaTeX replacement:
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
If these sectors offered competitive salaries - sure, talent would flock to them. As a former chemist, I struggled to find a job that didn't pay scraps, no matter the industry - from big pharma to advanced materials. Eventually, I just gave up and went into the IT, which is 3x-10x better paid (at the very least).
We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
I always wonder if people do not look for external reasons to avoid doing work or taking decisions themselves.
Most of the people I know do not spend their free time doing research into the satisfaction of society, and do not donate (even what they could!) to great causes. It is not the "market dictates" is "most of people dictate".
And still. I am writing this in an open-source browser, on an open-source operating system. The existence of this tools helps society no matter how you put it. So in fact, if you think of it, there are many people that do not "obey" the market. And this is only one way, there are others.
So maybe rather than "blame the market" be positive and tell us what way did you find to make a difference.
These people, who make purchasing decisons, also make them on behalf of someone's preferences, mixed with their own, to the extent they have a say. Like the market, government represents certain weighted subset of people. With the market, the people in the government are under influence just as much as anybody else. You can't really say that preferences flow a certain way, from government to business.
"Market" is a proxy for other things, and different people mean different things when they say it. So when we talk about the "market" wanting or doing something, we aren't always talking about the same thing. This is important to realize, so that we don't conflate separate concepts and talk past each other.
I wasn't really sure how to respond, it seemed obvious to me, so I put your question with the two comments into Claude. I genuinely think it gave a great response. I encourage you (or anybody) to try yourself next time, but here it is:
The second person was essentially unpacking the phrase "the market" to reveal who it actually represents. Here are the top 3 interpretations of their point:
1. The market isn't a neutral arbiter — it's a voting system where money is the vote. When we say "the market decides," we're really saying that people with more money have more say. A billionaire's preference for a luxury yacht counts for vastly more than a poor person's need for affordable housing. So "market outcomes" aren't some objective measure of what society wants — they reflect what wealthy people want.
2. The first person's critique is correct, but misdirected. By saying "the market" is indifferent to people's well-being, the first commenter was almost treating the market like an external, autonomous force. The second person is saying: it's not some mysterious system — it's just rich people's preferences given structural power. The problem isn't the abstraction called "the market"; the problem is inequality in who gets to participate meaningfully in it.
3. The language of "the market" obscures a political reality. Calling something a "market outcome" makes it sound natural, inevitable, and impersonal. But framing it as "rich people's preferences dominate resource allocation" makes it sound like what it actually is — a political and social choice about whose interests get prioritized. The second person is essentially calling out the ideological function of the word "market" as a way to launder what is really a power structure.
The three interpretations overlap, but they emphasize different things: the mechanics of how markets work, the validity of the first person's critique, and the rhetorical/political role of market language respectively.
Yes, it was clear that you wanted to refocus this as a moral problem of people. But that's irrelevant. The point of the guy above is that there is a system (the market) that creates certain incentives, and as a result, we have what we have. That's why I ask: what's your point? We still have all these problems.
So are you asking how to change it? I think that's pretty obvious once people understand it's a collective social choice - organize to change it. The point is "the market" is not some mysterious unreachable force.
For example, this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181837 is wrong; even if you had large amount of people acting like that person does, you would still likely have a system that doesn't work in the interest of society.
I'm no asking how to change it. And I don't think anyone has suggested that the market is some mysterious unreachable force. To be honest, at this point it's clear that you're being condescending and assuming people believe something foolish instead of trying to understand what they're actually saying.
There was a huge inflection point in basically everything around 1971. [1] That was US pulled out of Bretton Woods and the USD became completely unbacked by anything, enabling the government to 'print' infinite money. How can market forces be the one deciding anything when literally trillions of imaginary dollars keeps being dumped into it, in a highly prejudiced fashion, by the government and their preferred institutions?
At that point the historical correlations between money and basically everything, which had sustained for centuries - even though the industrial revolution, began completely breaking down, and infinitely began skyrocketing to levels never seen before, in the US at least.
>the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society; the vast majority of products are failures with few users. The reason tech companies make money is because they make things people actually want to use.
>The biochem industry is extremely bad at creating things that increase the satisfaction and well-being of society
I'd argue the "satisfaction" of society has been hijacked. We cannot even, as a society, understand the impact on medicine, nutrition, agriculture and the well-being we could harness from focusing on the long term, rather than seeking dopamine hits through screens.
Since the government chooses to ignore the science and risks, the primary expected natural mitigation could be via continental scale "cleansing" over a sustained period: 10-20 missed generations x 30 years per generation = up to 600 years. That's a proper reset. Some environmental toxins like PFAS will however last much longer in the environment.
Another big issue is that Apache Software Foundation should admit that the OpenOffice is dead and just redirect the site to the LibreOffice instead. Currently, they just damage the open source by allowing downloading effectively abandonware that doesn't represent the quality of the open source office software: people download OpenOffice, find many problems (that long gone in LibreOffice), decide that open source office is bad, and go to the proprietary alternatives.
LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].
The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!
The best thing for users maybe. A special kind of hell for the people investigating. And since there are numerous non paying users vs only so many people who have the skills to fix things...
It's incredibly useful to know what problems your users are facing. It doesn't necessarily mean fixing any one particular bug, rather should help prioritize future work.
Of course the developers only want to interact with other developers, never those stinky users who don't even know the proper technical jargon for the bugs they're finding. But that doesn't mean we should pander to developer wishes.
I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report and try to triage or reproduce. Otherwise the least they can do is figure out Bugzilla signup.
The case being discussed here is LibreOffice. Yes in general that is also true, but non paying users don't contribute anything. If they paid at least there's an expectation of fixes. Or at least the money can be used to hire a separate support team.
Lean is a great idea, especially the 4th version, a huge level up from the 3rd one, but its core still deficient[1] in some particular scenarious (see an interesting discussion[2] in the Rock (formerly Coq) issue tracker). Not sure if it might hinder the automation with the AI.
"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]
From a quick web-search: Apparently it was an open-source community project, but the governing organization created a for-profit entity and transferred most of the assets to that entity (brand, website, etc.). Gitea apparently still uses MIT licenses, but the community felt it was a betrayal of the open-source ethos. forgejo is a community fork of Gitea when the issues mentioned were not suitably resolved.
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