applicative

Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein - simply wordplay with limited actual content.

I agree with the last point, but note that Barbara Fried is a law professor with no philosophical training whatsoever - nevertheless she started writing about the matter and is a published notable of sorts. (This is irrelevant except insofar as the topic was 'trained philosophers')

Moreover, in her book, she claims not to be consequentialist, quite, but had infected her sons:

> Finally, I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, "What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labelling it 'the Repugnant Conclusion'?" Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person-alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us as one.

> This book is for all my boys: Joe, Sam, Gabe, and Matt.

(Needless to say, 'counting everyone as one' doesn't entail consequentialism, nor have most consequentialists had that principle.)

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Facing_Up_to_Scarcity/Q...

Two million dead Hindu; ten million forcible refugees; thousands of ancient villages burned to the ground — it ‘was a huge boon to India’

That isn’t what happened. You are inter alia combining the loony but causally inevitable ‘war on terror’ with … the Arab Spring (which Assadist - Putinist propaganda has linked in your mind to imaginary Libyan slave markets) Ask you preferred AI how many Kurdish language universities there are in the world and where they are and what their students think of your imaginary Putinist antiyankee brain slurry.

That my every movement is known to Google, Meta, Apple, et al, is much more disturbing than any autocratic effect of the dismal Patriot Act. The idea that ‘the state’ is the thing to fear, or even worth a moments’ thought, is basically childish and premodern. Witness eg the apotheosis of Snowden for revealing nugatory CIA corner cutting … in the same historical period when the above mentioned are completely hoovering up and relentlessly analyzing every datum about every American.

> Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!

it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup - and you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles, calling a C compiler, etc. Why not use microsoft word? I find markdowns irritating in many ways -- only those are not among them. Why would I want an intellectual document to be in a programming language?

Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.

Except what you made up was something about markdown and latex, if you look, not something about typst. I gathered you know typst and said not a thing about your cognitions specific to it.

I wish you luck with e.g. automated translation and editing of your typst documents, and look forward to the compile fails when you use 'html support' on these translated files. There are many curiosa with the markdowns but also very very very deep reasons for the uptake, which is only increasing with the AIs.

//I'm not doing pagination//, that was my whole point.

My own attempt to put a typst in deepl failed immediately as 'lang:en' when to 'long:en' and it just kept going, five or six failures in a tiny document.

The markdown files never have problems distinct from translation problems, except e.g. with setext headers. There is a reason for this, and it is in fact the reason why the tokenizing world of ai has a secret love of md.

It is perfectly serious, though hobbled by various recalcitrant forces. For example, if I write using only ye olde original markdown devices, pandoc will render as it would commonmark. The core commonmark idea is to have an unambiguous specification of /the original syntax/ -- which emphatically didnt exist: the perl regex script was the only actual specification.

Part of the problem is that people want to say 'markdown' but John Gruber, pissing on the corpse of Aaron Schwarz, falsely claims total possession of everything that comes under that head, and that there must be no independent specification. This simple fact totally destroys the entire milieu. 80% of complaints about 'markdown' are due to his recalcitrance. Thus there can be no spec, no spec specifying extensions, etc. He does not want anything like html to be defined as he will lose ... I'm not sure what, since he is deeply evil, as this one case shows with total clarity. Industrial interests would be enough to get an html-like convention if it were otherwise.

Yes that was the point. It was good. Ukraine had an identical plan -- same as Russia had the feared plan in the SE, where state institutions failed.

As an experiment, I recommend to you to put a markdown file into google translate and make pdf via your preferred markdown parser. Now make the corresponding typst document, put it through google translate and enjoy compilation hell.

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers of all sorts have been principal participants of the lists for almost two decades.

I would rather use microsoft word than write in raw typst, which is no different from trying to think in raw latex - even if in some fields it is necessary. I certainly cannot write unless I can output to docx.

A hundred things would be completely impossible to me without a 'lifeless' text format like markdown. The inclusion of a turing complete programming language into document composition - the principal labor distinctive of advanced civilization - is obviously pure insanity, even if it is necessary in the mathematical case. What one needs are ways of introducing the exact features that e.g. wordperfect 5.1 had already completely perfected: paragraphing, sectioning, noting, emphasizing, citing, etc. These are the internal semantic features of actual expression of actual thought, things that must be preserved e.g. by a translator - as sexy typesetting need not be. Considier the question: What is that which must be preserved by a translator? It is the question: What is thought? If I am typing typsetting commands not relevant to this, I am not writing, I am not thinking, I am not constructing a reasoned argument: I am doing high quality page-scale finger painting.

For example, I now consider it intellectual malpractice to give advanced students a translated text for close study, without also supplying the original in parallel. I can do this by simply zipping two markdown files together header to header, paragraph to paragraph with a simple script making html - the original in, say, smaller type narrower column at left margin.

The translation can be changed or an alternative constructed or a new one produced automatically by one of the translation devices. This is an operation that is basically impossible with genuine typesetting, though each md file compiles to pdf e.g. via typst after a markdown->typst process.

This is quite as impossible in typst as it is in latex - huge projects have been devoted to it in latex with complete failure - the necessity of pagination introduces the necessity of precise knowledge of both languages if the page break happens ... in medias sentence - such people e.g. the Loeb library used to have. With html it's a complete picnic, a literal zip operation with a markdown reader -- but of course isn't proper typsetting. The merit is that html is unpaginated. The file for each language itself makes a perfectly sound typst pdf with a keystroke.

If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic.

It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without flatly lying about every other existing instrument. On this site I have never read a single true statement by a typst brigader about latex or markdown, but I have read literally /hundreds/ of lies. If these accounts are real and not bots, the community is fated to die, unfortunately.

I use typst countless times a day, but don't need to lie.

There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.

Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have been written in single file markdowns for 15 years.

Writing directly in typst is good for small things with intense typesetting like ... wedding invitations, advertisements. But it doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers.

Writing is not typesetting.

All the forms need for the composition of all civilized text were present in word perfect 5.1, which unlike Word, Latex and Typst, permitted no typsetting during the process of writing. They were all recovered in the writers' markdowns nearly two decades ago.

It's the reality: it doesn't get hot in the summer and it doesn't get cold in the winter. The climate is 'maritime' and moderated by the immense influence of the Atlantic/Mediterranean/Baltic. On the east coast of USA you might expect the same, but the wind is from the west and thus to some extent reproduces the savage 'continental' weather of the interior. The main body of Americans live in extremely hostile weather environments.

There is really no similary between the most populous areas of Europe and, say, Columbus or Chicago or .... The summers in eastern America are savage and inhuman; the winters, by contrast, are ... savage and inhuman.

People complain about the weather in England, but in fact there are palm and eucalyptus growing in Oxford, though it's bad taste and you might lose one in a bad winter. It never gets hot and never gets cold.

I realized after living in UK and Germany that the religious fanatics who founded USA must really have been oppressed to put up with it.

There has really been one break-through, the actual construction of giant LLMs from the available titanic corpus of text. Even that barely involved much conceptual breakthrough, a few things maybe e.g. transformer. Basically it was a question of the accessibility of a) giant internet corpus of actual people actually saying stuff and b) adequate computing power. The witty surface training, the scaffolding for a chatbot is what made a universal stir. With this, though, we are done with revolutionary breakthroughs. Training for coding involves actual alteration of weights - and as it improves the general utility of the corresponding models will fail. In the end it will be a domain of specialized models. The improvement of this aspect via RLVR etc is what caused a general mania in the programmer milieu.

There is a lot of money in pretending that we are seeing unending revolutions.

> China is going to eat the US lunch on AI

They will forever have superior weights?

Yes, but you can get away with it when you keep 51% of the ultra-high quality brain power of society in bondage. If you want to replicate American greatness under conditions of free competition, you must ~triple the wage. People do not think through what America had in its public schools in the postwar period and expect good results when wages have fallen behind even nursing. Ask your preferred AI to compare nurse:high school teacher:dentist:physician between the 50s and today, keeping in mind that high school teacher pay was grossly suppressed by the bondage of women. The teaching staff of American greatness and economic dynamism was ultra-highly educated women who were paid basically nothing. Teachers are paid in a much lower proportion to e.g. physicians - another hightly trained service, than they were in the 50s. The difference is that women can be physicians. Educator wages and thus competition for them is infinitely too low in contemporary America. If you want to bash teachers, I'm fine with that, the fact is we get what we pay for.

Pay is comically non competitive - a fraction of what it would need to be to reconstitute the sixties.

The postwar American glory period depended on the fact that half the brain power of society couldn’t get a job except in teaching. Now the sort of women who taught me in high school are federal judges and captains of industry. Teacher salaries would need to be two or three times as high to get the quality of the period of American greatness.

Latex is in no sense required by pandoc and never has been, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. Everything you are writing is deep conceptual confusion from top to bottom. You might as well say it has required Microsoft Word since the docx readers and writers came out.

Latex is a typical route to produce pdfs according to your specification, but typst is what I use; occasionally groff. I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text, but only because I haven't yet bothered to learn the typst approach to them.

To produce a pdf, pandoc uses typst, pdfroff, lualatex, whatever you please. There is no particular connection to latex. The idea exhibits complete ignorance.

I pass from markdown to typst pdf via pandoc a few times a day. From that point of view it is just an alternative to latex or roff, e.g.

pandoc -r markdown -w pdf --pdf-engine=typst input.md -o output.pdf

* Jan 8 2026 Iran begins the longest internet blackout in universal world history due to massive protests over economic issues.

"the total average annual cost of ownership—which includes your car payment, depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and taxes—is approximately $12,297 per year (or $1,025 monthly) over a 15-year lifetime"

This was obviously a story - a telltale 'admission' - devised by the military.