Interesting Links for 18-01-2018
Jan. 18th, 2018 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- The poorly reported Aziz Ansari exposé was a missed opportunity
- (tags: sex feminism patriarchy viaMorag )
- How public school education can look like cleverness while covering up the lack of intellectual thought
- (tags: intelligence education fraud )
- The 1969 Easter Mass Incident (Blasphemy! Hilarious food-related blasphemy!)
- (tags: religion wtf blasphemy funny )
- LaTex is objectively worse than Microsoft Word
- And here's what Nature had to say about it: http://www.nature.com/news/word-processing-war-flares-up-on-social-media-1.16669
(tags: writing research ) - Pakistani humanist who has had death threats denied UK asylum after failing to identify Plato
- (tags: Islam humanism Pakistan OhForFucksSake asylum )
- I actually feel a little sorry for the idiots that just lost a fortune betting on digital currencies
- (tags: money internet epicfail )
- Why Johann Hari's book is dangerous
- (tags: depression fraud )
- Aziz, We Tried to Warn You
- (tags: feminism consent sex )
- In the etymology of "Abort" (I was under the same misapprehension)
- (tags: abortion language )
- So You Want To Compete With Steam
- (tags: steam games )
- The woman who hallucinated her own brain tumour diagnosis (page 17 of linked PDF)
- (tags: cancer hallucinations brain amazing )
- "A Life Hearing Voices: How I Manage Auditory Hallucinations"
- (tags: voice hallucinations mentalhealth )
- 10 Months of Acid
- (tags: lsd )
- Experiences on acid
- (tags: lsd )
- What effect did the Hawaiian missile alert have on PornHub viewing?
- (tags: porn Hawaii )
Tags:
- abortion,
- amazing,
- asylum,
- blasphemy,
- brain,
- cancer,
- consent,
- depression,
- education,
- epicfail,
- feminism,
- fraud,
- funny,
- games,
- hallucinations,
- hawaii,
- humanism,
- intelligence,
- internet,
- islam,
- language,
- links,
- lsd,
- mentalhealth,
- money,
- ohforfuckssake,
- pakistan,
- patriarchy,
- porn,
- religion,
- research,
- sex,
- steam,
- viamorag,
- voice,
- writing,
- wtf
So You Want To Compete With Steam
Date: 2018-01-18 01:18 pm (UTC)It's tricky. If your plan is "like this existing service that has a monopoly tightly bound by network effects" my question is more like, "how are you going to break through that" than "can you build a good product".
But OTOH, anyone trying to build a large network-effect driven service, or accepting significant investment, is forced to try to gamble on a million-to-one type return. Everyone trying to do that is trying to do something that looks impossible. So I understand why my common-sense "that's actually impossible" warning is lost in a drift of other "you will never succeed" messages.
I actually feel a little sorry for the idiots that just lost a fortune betting on digital currencies
Date: 2018-01-18 01:29 pm (UTC)I'm kind of torn, because having a giant bubble that anyone could invest in was definitely bad (maybe better than a giant bubble that everyone HAD to invest in, but still), and eating up electricity for a useless endeavour was definitely bad. But having a medium of exchange backed by something other than a bubble would be useful in many ways.
I agree with the observation that financial regulations exist for a reason, and financial entities which bypass them (like, say, paypal) can do a lot of damage by usually just-working, but giving you no recourse when they don't work.
But with physical cash, you always have the choice. You can give small-ish amounts of cash to people directly if you want. You can put money in a bank. You *can't* put money in something that looks like a bank but isn't. That seems a difficult but useful compromise.
But online, you don't have that option. You always have to pay the transaction fees including insurance on people who fuck up and need protection, even for small transactions when you'd rather they were cheap and unreliable. And you always need to be at the mercy of large institutions which the government can confiscate your money from. Which is fine as long as the government is always reliably trustworthy and never randomly capricious and authoritarian.
And the idea that maybe something other than that would be nice is buried under a pile of "but the thing other than that is bitcoin which is stupid" :(
Re: I actually feel a little sorry for the idiots that just lost a fortune betting on digital curren
Date: 2018-01-18 01:41 pm (UTC)Bitcoin is definitely bubbly, but is currently around $12,000 which is higher than it ever was before start of December.
Re: I actually feel a little sorry for the idiots that just lost a fortune betting on digital curren
Date: 2018-01-18 02:23 pm (UTC)Re: I actually feel a little sorry for the idiots that just lost a fortune betting on digital curren
Date: 2018-01-18 03:52 pm (UTC)But, also, some sympathy for the people who lost money. Losing your life savings is not good.
This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my tone.
Date: 2018-01-18 01:59 pm (UTC)I don't think that study showed that Word is "objectively better" than LaTeX -- partly because as the conclusion says "For example, LaTeX users in our study attained better performance in the typesetting of mathematical equations, and it is not surprising that LaTeX users are typically in disciplines where mathematical formulas are frequent (e.g., mathematics, engineering, or computer science). Indeed these disciplinary preferences fit with the original motivation for the development of TeX (the basis of LaTeX) in the 1970s, which was to provide a powerful means to typeset complex mathematical formulas."
Given that LaTeX is designed for a different use case than Word, it's unsurprising that it does better for its primary use case and less well for a use case it wasn't designed for.
That said, they also point out "One may also argue that given a well-designed LaTeX document class file, document development speed and text and formatting accuracy are significantly improved. Another characteristic of our study is that it is practically impossible to evaluate LaTeX without also evaluating the used editors. In fact, our research measured the efficiency of Word against LaTeX in combination with some editor interfaces. However, recent research shows that it is possible to improve the interfaces to LaTeX by making them do more what the authors expect instead of what the programmers imagined"
These are two points that, between them, pretty much demolish the argument that there's any difference. If the people working in LaTeX *weren't* being allowed to use a document class file, they were having to type crap like this, by hand:
\documentclass[12pt,british]{book}
\usepackage[scaled=1.1]{helvet}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin9]{inputenc}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{0}
\usepackage[active]{srcltx}
\makeatletter
\@ifundefined{date}{}{\date{}}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% User specified LaTeX commands.
\widowpenalty=10000
\clubpenalty=10000
\raggedbottom
\AtBeginDocument{
\def\labelitemi{ }
}
\makeatother
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
That's the opening of the .tex file for one of the books I'm writing, but I never wrote any of that nonsense -- it's all imported by the editor I'm using (LyX -- which is one of the "more what the authors expect instead of what the programmers imagined" editors they talk about).
If they were comparing people creating files *without using class files*, then that's a fundamentally dishonest comparison, and a better comparison would have been making the Word users have to hand-code all the .docx XML formatting rather than use any of the built-in formatting in Word. EVERYONE using LaTeX uses document class files, if they want to get anything done.
So what the study seems to prove to me is that if you artificially hamper LaTeX users' ability to get the job done, then LaTeX is "only" better than Word at the things LaTeX is designed for, but not at the things Word is designed for ;)
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-18 11:22 pm (UTC)I do wonder if one of the issues is that the LaTeX community hasn't spent as much time as Microsoft (or Apple, to a lesser degree) have on the user interface of a document editor? I get the impression, for instance, that LaTeX as a document renderer was a separate program from the editor that people used in the tests; and so, presumably, they switched between the two, which made spotting typos more difficult.
(If the editors mentioned, which I didn't recognise, are anything like standard Unix text editors, they won't have a built-in spell checker, for instance, let alone an automatic typo-correcter which automatically turns “the ” into “ the ”. As a further aside: it was really, really difficult to type the word “teh” just now - my browser constantly corrected it back.)
LyX sounds like it's more integrated; but is it truly WYSIWYG? If not, it will struggle to compete against any standard desktop OS word processor when it comes to just typing large chunks of words and formatting them semi-decently.
More generally, I wonder if this is the same problem that many power-user tools suffer from: once you've mastered them, you have no incentive (possibly even a reverse incentive) to share what you've learned with the general public. The corollary of “I've got my emacs setup just how I like it” is that your ideal emacs setup won't be quite the same, after all. And there being so many flavours of window manager for Unix-type systems means that effort is duplicated across all of them.
As I said, I have no personal knowledge of LaTeX, and I look forward to someone correcting and/or enlightening me. Thank you!
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 12:39 am (UTC)I gather LaTeX is definitely what you want for formulas. Word sucks at them; there are purchasable add-ons, which move Word from "sucks terribly; you cannot do this thing" to "sucks a little bit, and if you're willing to spend an hour per formula, you can probably do this thing."
I was disappointed to find that LaTeX, which I'd been hearing about for years as "the program that allows detailed perfect layout formatting!!!", had substantially fewer options than Word for fiction publishing. (Word didn't have enough features; we were looking for an alternative to InDesign.)
It's possible that LaTeX just suffers from the same problem that most Linux programs and features do: the techbros who love it, don't actually want people to convert from Windows, so documentation all starts with the premise that you've been working with it for years and are looking up "how to do this thing I already know exists" rather than "here is blank screen; what do I do next?"
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 02:39 am (UTC)A comment I saw just today (hobbs in #moose on irc.perl.org) summed it up, I think: "docs are written by people who can no longer tell what is and isn't obvious". I remember when I mentioned a problem I had with the Moose documentation a year or two ago, and I was practically pounced upon by grateful developers, who basically said "hooray! Please write down all that you can remember about why our documentation doesn't work, while you still can!"
We know that Microsoft have spent ridiculous amounts of time and effort on trying to improve the usability of their software. They also have huge QA departments that make sure that all sorts of weird combinations of hardware and software still work. In Linux-land, in contrast, how good the support is for your graphics card may well depend on whether one of the core developers has one himself.
Making software work is reasonably easy. Making it work well, and in a way that everyone understands - including people radically different from the people who wrote it - is far harder.
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 03:16 am (UTC)However, the reaction I've gotten when asking around about "hey I've heard good things about Linux and Windows keeps getting creepier; am thinking of trying it" starts with "awesome! Linux does [list of things] that Windows doesn't and is faster and lots less creepy!" and quickly moves to "please go away and come back when you've learned command-line processing and also absorbed our standard vocabulary. Really, if you're not a programmer, why are you looking at Linux?"
There's a steep learning curve, which is understandable, compounded by elitism and sometimes outright hostility, which is discouraging. It's not quite everywhere, but is widespread enough that I've pretty much given up on anything Linux-based; the "baby steps get started" support is too unreliable to risk getting stuck with a machine I can't use.
(But dammit. I really had been hoping that LaTeX would work better than Word, as well as InDesign, for basic novel layouts. That would've been a substantial enough value to push through the hassles of learning a new OS.)
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 09:35 am (UTC)That said, you don't need to learn a new OS to use LaTeX for novel writing and layout (and in my experience it really is *much* better than Word or InDesign). There are builds of LaTeX, and of editors like LyX, for Windows. If you're wanting to try it out, just go to lyx.org and download it. Unlike much Unix software, it's impeccably documented, and it has a relatively shallow learning curve if you know any other word processor at all. The *one* weird flakiness I would point out is that it always interprets the ' character as an apostrophe, so if you want 'single quotes' you have to use a backtick ` as the opening quote.
It's really worth getting hold of it, looking through the tutorials (under "help" in the menu) and seeing what you think, since you don't need to change OSes.
Linux and the chains of history
Date: 2018-01-19 12:06 pm (UTC)I recall DEC documentation for their VAXes, the classic 3-ring binders with change sheets -- every now and then when things changed in the OS or supported apps you got a package in the mail and you went through the binders and swapped out the out-of-date pages for up-to-date sheets.
This cost money and time and required a process and paid QA documentation specialists and a whole lot of other things that "free" software can't really afford. The Web and Google isn't a no-cost effortless substitute for that sort of an updating process.
(I just abandoned a tutorial for a freeware graphics package API which was one page of pipelined sample code followed by the line "I don't think you need more explanations!")
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 09:07 am (UTC)There are various levels of editor for LaTeX, ranging from just using vim or emacs to using a full-fledged document processor like LyX. The ones mentioned in the article are closer to the vim or emacs end of things than to the LyX end.
As for LyX though, it's actually *not* WYSIWYG, but a different paradigm, WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean), which essentially means it applies stylesheets to your writing. You select a bit of text and set it as "chapter heading" or "subsection" or whatever, but what you don't do is worry when writing about the pixel-level decisions of "this should be fifteen-point and bold" or whatever. The document processor takes care of that for you. This means that what you see on your screen isn't exactly what you see in the final formatted text, but shows you the important information.
Two examples to show what I mean. First an excerpt of a book I wrote, including an image and with indexing (the bits with "Idx" in the text are markings to tell the program they're index entries).
How it looks in LyX
And how it looks in the final PDF output:
And a script, written in normal script format:
And how it looks in the final PDF:
I've written more about how I use LyX, and the difference between its paradigm and the WYSIWYG one (and why I prefer WYGIWYM) at https://andrewhickey.info/2017/11/07/a-nanowrimo-process-post-tools/ . But essentially, you get all the visual information you need to know what your document is going to look like, but without the screen trying to represent the exact appearance of the document you're creating.
As for your point about people not sharing expertise, that's true of the LaTeX community in general, but not true of LyX, which I find to be the second-best-documented piece of software I've ever used (the best documented is Inform 7, a programming language for creating text adventure games -- both take their inspiration from Knuth's "literate programming" paradigm, I think).
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 09:12 am (UTC)Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 09:27 am (UTC)(That may be, though, because when I was using Word stylesheets they were corporate ones designed by the marketing department, while the LaTeX class styles I use are designed by people who want to get their work done...)
But there are a lot of small irritants about Word's whole paradigm that I find difficult to describe, and which don't in themselves sound like major problems individually, but which quickly mount up. Fundamentally, Word seems OK to me for writing a letter or a couple of pages, but anything longer than that and I find it unbearable. I wrote my first two books in LibreOffice (back when it was replicating Word's then-current interface more closely than it does now) and switched to LyX after that, and... just discovered how it feels to have a tool that doesn't fight you *at all*. Having to work in Word when I worked at NCC, after having done that, felt like having to walk in shoes that were two sizes too small.
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 04:24 pm (UTC)Word's decision to attach a swarm of invisible formatting features into the paragraph markers is one of the most annoying and frustrating aspects of the problem.
I'm a power user; that's not going to stop because that's a lot of what I get paid to do, but I would so love to work with a word processor that didn't randomly change the section break types or "revert" to formatting that isn't visible anywhere in the document.
I'll look into LyX. (Can it run portable?)
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 05:09 pm (UTC)But yeah, with LyX, *all* the formatting is visible, user-editable, and consistent. The only time I've ever had a section break randomly change on me is when I've hit the wrong keyboard shortcut ;)
Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 05:36 pm (UTC)Re: This comment reads as grumpy because I've not had much sleep and don't have much control of my t
Date: 2018-01-19 05:41 pm (UTC)Yes, it can run off a USB stick, though may need a little tweaking. https://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/PortableInstallation