lightspot21

SOTA = state of the art

...and off-by-one errors!

As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'.

I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

Yep, Overleaf was what we used. Its paid version was very much like Google Docs but on a plaintext editor wrt. to concurrent access. It could even do change tracking, comments, all the jazz, even Git synching (which we used for backups and CI)

The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

I'm curious as to why. If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not? When I joined, I didn't know the language at all, but that wasn't a problem-one would learn on the job.

Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

It doesn't scale. At all.

I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the time all of us were working on the exact same huge document.

Word's version tracking stood no chance. Formatting was regularly off, tables were breaking apart, diagrams misplaced. Syncing was extremely bad, often with entire paragraphs in changes going missing, other times deleted portion were reappearing, all that jazz.

LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) on the other hand, despite its archaic way of working, never showed any of those problems. If a table was placed somewhere, we could be sure it would never get moved to random places, and changes/rewrites would be always synced correctly (as LaTeX source is plain text, merging algorithms/CRDTs have a much easier time).

Also, the Steam client has to be one of the most stagnant applications I ever had the pleasure of using, not sure that makes Valve super efficient.

If said software is fit for purpose already, why the need to induce frivolous change for the sake of changes themselves? If permanent stagnancy is bad, perpetual change is equally bad IMHO.

I think parent refers to Codespaces and vscode.dev, not VSCode proper. These can indeed become gradually more locked down since they are completely online and out of the user's control, and as the UX difference between offline and cloud shrinks, people (especially new generations of developers) will slowly migrate there because of the convenience of not maintaining a toolchain themselves.

IOW, frog being boiled slowly.

They appear to use this library: https://developers.google.com/blockly/

IC design for behemoths like Intel/AMD/Nvidia. AFAIK none of those is gonna let you anywhere near their multibillion-dollar design without being at the top of the field or having lots of experience (>5yrs) already

The same way Microsoft was forced to change to Chromium for Edge - Google forcing Chromium-specific features through the standardization process at a rate exhausting for Microsoft (or any other browser engine implementor) to follow in time without popular sites breaking.

Lead wrapping thick enough to sufficiently protect against radiation damage is very, very heavy. Beyond LEO, excessive weight is still ridiculously expensive.

Used to roam my neighborhood trying to beige box into junction boxes for the bell of it.

I'd be very surprised if this wasn't accidental given the character of this site, but holy moly is the pun fitting. Congrats.

Hmm, a similar scheme we used at a previous workplace - lots of references to ancient Greek philosophers, historians and of course deities.

Uplink

Woah. I haven't heard about this game in like a decade! Thanks for the nostalgia.

Greece has other, deeper problems to fix before it makes any attempts in creating any form of industry. The "pissing money away" happened because of internal problems, which can be attributed to corruption and cultural aversion to any form of entrepreneurship that goes beyond the scale of mom 'n' pop stores.

I am not trying to absolve Greece from its liabilities, just pointing out that Greece is a bad example for austerity not playing a significant role in slowing industrial development.

Source: I am Greek living in Greece.

It’s not as endemic as you make it out to be or there would be a public outcry.

It's a matter of time. Even if it's not endemic in the US (which I severely doubt) it's endemic elsewhere. Don't underestimate the public's ability to put up with things, especially if they are mostly kept in the dark about the most sinister effects.

Banking and social media are also two very different industries. One is essential while the other is mainly bread and circus with a myriad of alternatives

Both are essential. Social media is what you make of it. It can be bread and circus, yes, but it is also an invaluable tool for communication. Losing access to them can stifle your communication efforts by a lot. Why, you may ask? Because network effect is in full swing: "Phone call? Who still does that? Just use messenger like a normal person". No one's gonna bother to call you or SMS you cause 1) you're not on messenger or whatever app they use and 2) can't be bothered to contact you at your preferred non-app way, when the whole friend group has a group chat from which every single interaction and update is broadcasted to everyone. In the end, keeping you in the loop is too much work, and then you start missing out on outings etc. And even if you somehow persuaded all of your friends to use alternative methods of communication, 99.999% of the planet just can't be bothered, especially when they have friends that are reachable over 5-6 different apps, one on each friend.

Don't underestimate the network effect.

Ask them to use something else, or get an exception by explaining that you were banned. It isn’t endemic and there are always options

Good luck if it's a business or public org. Why change their process for what amounts to a minority of customers? It's not worth the cost. Whether these people can't do business with them despite these services being essential to everyday life... well tough luck for them I guess?

Own example: in $COUNTRY almost all banks use either their app or Viber to send 2FA. I refuse to use Viber out of principle, and also their app refuses to work on phones that don't use Google services. Should I be locked out of my banking because of me refusing to support the practices of other, unrelated services that happen to be 'popular'? Note that there is no other way to get the codes - other banks may use SMS but that is expected to be sunset next year and they will switch to the same methods.

IMHO it's disingenuous to say that there are options, when most of the time there aren't any.

It's much more than that. The homepage hasn't been updated in ages. Recently they had the first fully playable game (Wonderputt): https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/577928, with more partially playable.

Still needs work but it's exciting stuff.

Seconding Poetry. IMO it should have been the standard package manager - it just works (TM)

Hah, I've reached 12 too and I'm currently stuck there with no idea how to move forward....

Not my intent to offend anyone and plus I'm not American so I might not know your culture well enough, but please don't. Why should we insert race in technology when 1) it's not useful and 2) it's not relevant at all. I mean, who even cares whether the smiley face is white or black or whatever else? It's just a smiley face. IMHO there are more significant areas to care for.

This would be true if the world were not as highly interconnected as it is. Nobody wants to risk this "failure" being broadcasted and possibly following them through virality. People today are not allowed to "fail safely" so to speak. Not without social penalties even outside their immediate social circle.

and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.

Well, not completely - anecdata but plenty of places on this planet (in the West too) where online dating = you are too desperate and you have no other options = stigma (especially for straight men).

AFAICS Steve wants to ensure that none of the members of the Foundation have more influence than the others. He seems to suggest that Amazon has taken over a significant portion of control lately (IANAL but I think by deciding to not renew the contract of the Executive Director for the foreseeable future, control of the Foundation is vested in the Chair of the Board, aka for now Amazon, and maybe they are trying to do some shady stuff)

This is all speculation, I hope Steve can write a blogpost to detail clearly the situation. He already namedropped, and these tweets with scarce information only fuel confusion, which IMHO can do severe damage, as all miscommunication problems.

The new Roundcube is pretty good these days

yep - that's /pol/ - it stands for Politically Incorrect

4chan's indeed a cesspool, and /pol/, /b/, among some others are the worst. In fact, they're called "containment boards" for this very reason.

I've used both. Godot is so, so much more natural and flexible.

Indeed, LaTeX makes for really awesome results if you can put in the time to learn it (which is not a lot for basic usage). Plus it helps enforce a common style in all docs, and works well with Git.