TIL: Today I Learned

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Truthy said:
No. How dare you. You are wrong. Underthought post. Badness 10000.

I love LaTex. I will name my first born child \LaTeX, with the \ included so every time their name is typed up in a tex file (which I plan to do often), it'll render with the cute little jiggly letters

Let me ask: And what do you use? Microsoft Word? Google Drive? LibreOffice? Are you trying to tell me that some wack wysiwyg word processor nonsense that takes 10 years to open and can't format crap to save its life is going to make my life easier than the greatest fruit of Donald Knuth's ancient bald head? Lemme show you a beautiful equation I made in LaTeX today:

Lovely, centered, ready to go with an equation number, label I can refer to elsewhere and everything. Hobbs, we both know it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what a massive pain in the ass this would have been without a good typesetting system.

If you ask me, everything should come with a tex interpreter. Even CFC. Hell, I'll volunteer my time to make it happen and then I'll run circles around you with beautiful math embedded in all my posts. You're an engineer. You know you'll be jealous of my math. But don't despair. You too would have the power of beautiful math!

Ok, "aw but that's just math, of course you need something fancy and extra for a bunch of Greek letters. Doesn't fully justify the learning curve though..." you say. But no. The benefits don't stop there:
- direct decoupling of document content from document format. As a great artist in Civ IV once said: "once you have tasted format-content decoupling in your documents, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned toward \LaTex, for there you have been, and there you will long to return."
- never worry about bibliography formats. MLA, APA, literally anything else? Who cares. Useless knowledge. LaTex does it for you.
- never worry about inline citation formats. More useless knowledge. Who cares. \cite{author}. Done.
- easy footnotes
- easily embedded figures and tables with captions, titles, and labels you can reference throughout without having to care which one is "Figure 4" or lift a finger if God forbid Figure 4 becomes Figure 3.
- anything slightly unusual is easier in LaTeX than in a word processor. For example, two-column documents.
- gazillions of ready-made templates for everything from presentations to resumes
- no annoying compatibility issues
- no worrying about everything getting screwed up when you convert to PDF
- so stable. so cross platform
- free and open source. No stupid proprietary file format. Don't support lame old Microsoft or creepy Google or feel disappointed using some sad Linux knockoff
- wow your friends and coworkers with publication-ready content
- Infinitely customizable. Millions of libraries to do anything you want. Missing a feature in Word? Don't sit around waiting for MS to come to the rescue. Reclaim your destiny and use an \includepackage in LaTeX

The only legitimate criticism of LaTeX I'll accept is that "underfull hbox (badness 10000)" is the stupidest error message I've ever seen. 10,000 is the maximum badness. What did I do to deserve such scorn? And almost everything is badness 10000. If the LaTeX compiler is feeling a little less moralistic than usual, maybe it'll give you a slap on the wrist with a badness 9000. It's so stupid.

But that's it.
Click to expand...
Thank you for illustrating my point about the people who use LaTeX are extra. :lol:
 
Truthy said:
If you ask me, everything should come with a tex interpreter. Even CFC. Hell, I'll volunteer my time to make it happen and then I'll run circles around you with beautiful math embedded in all my posts. You're an engineer. You know you'll be jealous of my math. But don't despair. You too would have the power of beautiful math!
Click to expand...
Even though you have insulted Libre Office, you still have my amoral support. Go for it, Truthy-san.
Zkribbler said:
:gripe:Dang it, I meant angel, angel, angel! :hammer2:
Click to expand...
Oh.
 
Truthy said:
No. How dare you. You are wrong. Underthought post. Badness 10000.

I love LaTex. I will name my first born child \LaTeX, with the \ included so every time their name is typed up in a tex file (which I plan to do often), it'll render with the cute little jiggly letters

Let me ask: And what do you use? Microsoft Word? Google Drive? LibreOffice? Are you trying to tell me that some wack wysiwyg word processor nonsense that takes 10 years to open and can't format crap to save its life is going to make my life easier than the greatest fruit of Donald Knuth's ancient bald head? Lemme show you a beautiful equation I made in LaTeX today:

Lovely, centered, ready to go with an equation number, label I can refer to elsewhere and everything. Hobbs, we both know it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what a massive pain in the ass this would have been without a good typesetting system.

If you ask me, everything should come with a tex interpreter. Even CFC. Hell, I'll volunteer my time to make it happen and then I'll run circles around you with beautiful math embedded in all my posts. You're an engineer. You know you'll be jealous of my math. But don't despair. You too would have the power of beautiful math!

Ok, "aw but that's just math, of course you need something fancy and extra for a bunch of Greek letters. Doesn't fully justify the learning curve though..." you say. But no. The benefits don't stop there:
- direct decoupling of document content from document format. As a great artist in Civ IV once said: "once you have tasted format-content decoupling in your documents, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned toward \LaTex, for there you have been, and there you will long to return."
- never worry about bibliography formats. MLA, APA, literally anything else? Who cares. Useless knowledge. LaTex does it for you.
- never worry about inline citation formats. More useless knowledge. Who cares. \cite{author}. Done.
- easy footnotes
- easily embedded figures and tables with captions, titles, and labels you can reference throughout without having to care which one is "Figure 4" or lift a finger if God forbid Figure 4 becomes Figure 3.
- anything slightly unusual is easier in LaTeX than in a word processor. For example, two-column documents.
- gazillions of ready-made templates for everything from presentations to resumes
- no annoying compatibility issues
- no worrying about everything getting screwed up when you convert to PDF
- so stable. so cross platform
- free and open source. No stupid proprietary file format. Don't support lame old Microsoft or creepy Google or feel disappointed using some sad Linux knockoff
- wow your friends and coworkers with publication-ready content
- Infinitely customizable. Millions of libraries to do anything you want. Missing a feature in Word? Don't sit around waiting for MS to come to the rescue. Reclaim your destiny and use an \includepackage in LaTeX

The only legitimate criticism of LaTeX I'll accept is that "underfull hbox (badness 10000)" is the stupidest error message I've ever seen. 10,000 is the maximum badness. What did I do to deserve such scorn? And almost everything is badness 10000. If the LaTeX compiler is feeling a little less moralistic than usual, maybe it'll give you a slap on the wrist with a badness 9000. It's so stupid.

But that's it.
Click to expand...
And the big reason for me to use LaTeX is that it is compatible with version control systems. I know exactly who made every change, when and why. I does have a bit of a learning curve, but this can be smoothed by starting in markdown, and adding LaTeX as and when you need it.
 
Samson said:
And the big reason for me to use LaTeX is that it is compatible with version control systems. I know exactly who made every change, when and why. I does have a bit of a learning curve, but this can be smoothed by starting in markdown, and adding LaTeX as and when you need it.
Click to expand...
The list just goes on and on @hobbsyoyo :p

But ok, jokes aside, you are right that Latex is often a PITA. Part of the problem is that no one is really taught Latex. I think most people learn it on the fly when a professor sneaks in a requirement on a problem set saying "solutions must be typed up with LaTeX and submitted as a PDF." That's just guaranteed to piss everyone off. And while you can figure out a lot as you go, you'll probably remain totally mystified by style files, the box primitives, floats, and "why the hell are my citations showing up as freaking question marks!?" for a long time. I've learned to love it though.
 
LaTeX is an awesome tool and I'm not really knocking it even though I joke. The problem I run into with it is purely about the people who use it and you both have identified the issues - learning curve and surprise deployments.

In college, I was on a design team and the GNC (guidance, navigation and control) subsystem group of said team was a bunch of grad students who were hardcore LaTeX acolytes. They convinced the PI (principal investigator - prof in charge of the team) that the team should use only LaTeX for documentation going forward. I tried to warn them that we were not going to be able to sustain a training program for every new semester of incoming students to learn it and that as soon as the graduate students left, the team would have to port all of their unusable LaTeX documents back into words. It took about a semester before that happened.

I ran into a similar situation in the professional world where one group in a company decided to go the LaTeX route and I warned them that the company wasn't going to wait around for the rest of us to get proficient and that the LaTeX group was going to have an increased work load as they'd have to implement all changes to their own documentation that would normally be handled by the end-users (from different groups) of those documents. And that's what ended up happening as well.

LaTeX is a powerful tool but it's overkill for the majority of non-academic use cases and the learning curve means it can't compete with Word for many instances.
 
Those are good points. Back on topic: TIL grad students make life needlessly difficult for undergrads :lol:
 
LaTeX is great for writing out complex formulas/equations which you can then copy paste into your Word document....
 
From above there fell an angel
Into the fires we call Hell.
 
Today I learned about oldweb.today which uses emulators to show how modern websites look in old browsers.
 
TIL that one of the consequences of the 1875 Civil Rights Act in the US being -partially- repealed in 1883 was that whites-only gas stations, hotels, markets and even entire cities (i.e. sundown towns) were so widespread that blacks had their own holiday guidebook, called The Negro Motorist Green Book, which told them where they could go and be served and/or not arrested or run out of town, and that publication only ended in the 1960s.

I already knew the effects of many discriminatory policies, including the one-drop rule, but the land of the free never ceases to amaze me.
 
From page 368, but I'm wondering if there isn't some validity in being opaque about economic indicators. Simple rumors and news can cause hard-crash speculation that damages the economy even more than the actual downturn being reported. Acquire and track the data, sure, but maybe just keep it in the hands of people who know what to do with it, policy wise. Otherwise it seems to create an artificial economic panic.
 
Today I learned that storm chips are apparently only a thing in the Maritimes. I thought everyone bought potato chips before a storm. :crazyeye:

And that ketchup chips aren't really common outside of Canada.
 
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