979 karma · joined March 29, 2018
Theory building was always kind of niche, or at least less prestigious (in comparison with solving well-known problems). Now, because the mad problem solvers are pulling on the blanket so much harder, the marginalization is getting worse.
The root of the problem, completely overlooked by OP is that IEEE 754 comparison is not an equivalence relation. It's a partial equivalence relation (PER). It does have its utility, but these things can be weird and they are definitely not interchangeable with actual equivalence relations. Actual, sane, comparison of floating points got standardized eventually, but probably too late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754#Total-ordering_predic.... It's actually kinda nuts that the partial relation is the one that you get by default (no, your sorting function on float arrays does not sort it).
It doesn't, specifically not in primary education. Also definitely not for subjects with any kind of amount of practical work. Let's see.. foreign languages, sports, physics, chemistry, biology...
Which part of these relevant quotes understand? Or perhaps have counter-arguments?
> shows how low our appreciation of pedagogues has fallen
> Dropout rates for these classes hovered around 90 percent
> learning is a social experience
> an expert is watching you and cares whether you succeed or fail
So the UX definitely shows complete absence of culture of design in this kind of space (eg gameboy UI design, classic dumbphone UI, ...). Small screens need very simple widgets (most importantly grid and vertical list), hand made paddings and proper space optimizations, most likely some bitmap font tailored to the resolution.. You can't just slap some dynamic layout and expect it to work nicely on such a small screen. Everything vectorized will be both costly and of dubious rendering quality, etc..
And of course these things only have "decent", but definitely not "1 month scale" battery life. I guess LTE is the real culprit here.
By "user interface" I mean (like Martin, in the linked video) the surface language, the way you interact with TeX, its syntax and how it presents itself to the user, the programming model. So definitely the kind of thing you'd notice making a document. Leaky abstractions and footguns are basically everywhere when you write a big LaTeX document.
> I mean TeX is basically an overpowered lambda calculus with a focus on text markup and generation.
No, lambda calculus has capture-avoiding substitution, aka hygienic macro expansion if you will. TeX has naive substitution. By the way, macro expansion is typically CBN, which is very much a rare and weird evaluation order (yes, Haskell, i know). TeX is much closer to some kind of assembly language for a virtual machine.
Regarding ecosystem: tons of undecipherable LaTeX packages are basically one-liners (ok, 10 liners) in typst. I know it from experience: I've written my PhD manuscript in typst. So perhaps one reason why there are so many (basically frozen) packages in LaTeX is because they are so hard to write and maintain.
edit: of course, being only a few years old, typst is nowhere near as solid as TeX, but you can already use it for a lot of things and its a breeze to use.
There are some rough edges still, the dom model and advanced programming stuff is not quite there yet (user-defined elements, user-defined settables, advanced layout like chaining blocks for laying text flows). But like the quality of the user interface is several orders of magnitude better than (La)TeX.
So above, `y` is parsed as literal, while `dt` is parsed as an identifier, hence function call.
[1] french, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BbFTEyvIw
This is not a critic of the idea science, ie some kind of pursuit of knowledge using any reasonable means. It is a critic of the modern institution that academic science currently is. As such, yes, some critics are in fact more generally applicable than just for science (as you say, division of labor). But these are particularly visible in science and have specific consequences in this context.
My personal experience is usually quite different. Perhaps i'm very weird but i like to think i'm nothing special. I mostly read papers when searching for something specific (referral by someone in a discussion, searching for a definition, a proof). I almost never read the introductions, at least not in my first pass. My first pass is usually scanning the outline to search which section will contain what i'm searching for and then reading that, jumping back and forth between definitions and theorems. I usually then read discussion/related work at the end, to read about what the authors think about their method, what they like or dislike in related papers.
Abstract and introduction i only read when i have done several such passes on a paper and i realize i am really interested in the thing and need to understand all the details.
I very much hate this "be catchy at the beginning" and its extremist instantiation "the quest for reader engagement". Sure you should pay attention to your prose and the story you're telling. But treating reader of a scientific paper as some busy consumer you should captivate is just disrespectful, scientifically unethical and probably just coping with current organizational problems (proliferation of papers, dilution of results, time pressure on reviewers and researchers). Scientific literature is technical, its quality should be measured by clarity and precision, ease of searching, ease of generalization, honesty about tradeoffs. Not by some engagement metric of a damned abstract.
> 1. increase productivity, by promoting technical progress and ensuring the optimum use of the factors of production, in particular labor;
> 2. ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural Community;
> 3. stabilize markets;
> 4. secure availability of supplies;
> 5. provide consumers with food at reasonable prices.