setopt

In many countries, if a contract contains illegal clauses (i.e. requirements that are inconsistent with the law or public policy), that contract is considered void and unenforceable. It depends on "how illegal" each statement is, whether only that part of the contract is considered void, or the contract as a whole.

One extreme example would be that if I wrote a contract requiring you to become my literal slave if you didn’t pay your subscription on time, you would in practice suffer no consequences from not paying, because the contract itself is illegal in most jurisdictions. A less extreme example would be that where I live (Northern Europe), I can sign a contract saying that I waive my right to sue the company I purchase a service from, and then sue them anyway because it’s my right by law and asking me to waive my rights is an illegal contract. Or that where I live, non-compete clauses in employment contracts are illegal unless you offer 100% salary throughout the non-compete timeframe, so I can sign an employment contract with unpaid non-compete clauses and just ignore that part as it’s illegal.

Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.

They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.

That is perhaps fair, is that distinction common internationally?

Again, in the universities I’ve been to, «applied math» and «statistics» have generally been placed under the department of mathematics. I myself am a physicist, and consider applied physics, biophysics, etc. to be subfields of physics and not distinct fields of study, but I don’t know what outer physicists think.

I played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…

Are you sure that’s «most» mathematicians?

At the universities I’ve been to (as a student and now faculty), «applied mathematics» and «statistics» have been the two largest divisions. But perhaps that’s a bias from engineering-heavy universities?

> not needing the pinky for keys like backspace/enter/esc.

Probably not so efficient in terms of WPM, but after my previous issues with RSI, I somehow ended up pressing those keys with my middle fingers instead of my pinkie. Usually multiple fingers hit the key simultaneously, either long finger + ring finger or long finger + index finger.

Requires more hand movement but certainly more comfortable.

Okay. Do you then consider an equilibrium to be inherently unsustainable?

If you take «growth» to be defined as d(something)/dt>0, I’d posit that any equilibrium by definition has zero net growth, whether it’s a static or dynamic equilibrium.

> You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.

That sounds self-contradicting. How do you define «sustainability» in that case?

> helium not useful for much

Maybe not for a chemist, but as a physicist it’s certainly useful. Liquid He cooling, Bose-Einstein condensation, superfluidity, p-wave triplet pairing in He-3, etc. while being basically chemically inert!

How about glue?

And slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)

To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».

Interesting. Someone should (or maybe have?) run a cluster analysis on the symptoms to define more specific subgroups. But I suppose getting access to the required health data at that scale is nontrivial?

What do you refer to as system utilities? All the stuff now subsumed by SystemD?

Sure. I use KDE myself. I actually like the Gnome default UI/UX more, but I'm really not fond of their "our way or the highway" approach when it comes to customization and interoperability. KDE feels more in line with the true FOSS "spirit", and after a bit of customization, fits my needs better than Gnome.

The point though is that there used to be a «Linux desktop» you could target before the Wayland transition. Fragmentation of an already small market segment is unfortunate.

> Then there’s probably some underlying belief that more volume shows more effort

Hopefully, LLMs will kill that attitude in the long run

I think also a lot of my objections could be worked around if one simply had a "math" macro that evaluates infix math notation as a DSL, similarly to how the CL "loop" macro does a DSL for iteration.

Perhaps this exists already somewhere?

I definitely prefer s-exps over both xml and json myself too!

Interesting question. Much of the difficulty does stem from mentally translating back and forth between conventional notation and s-exps too, since you can’t really avoid the standard notation when reading and writing math and physics papers. And current-day math and physics notation has been optimized to some extent for the infix notation; perhaps one would have invented more expressive higher-order functions or macros to denote s-exp math if that was what everyone used for centuries.

> Pretty compelling, especially "Janet does not adhere to the ancient customs. CAR is called first. PROGN is called do. LAMBDA is fn, and SETQ is def." - a sign of good sense for sure!

Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on.

> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.

I have pretty mixed feelings at this point. I don’t mind it for normal programming, but when I do numerical programming (physics models, etc.) you often get extremely long and verbose expressions that are IMO difficult to parse compared to the math-like infix operator notation used in other languages.

I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.

The argument for Pandoc is that (last I checked) Typst doesn’t compile to e.g. HTML, EPUB, or DOCX. So if you’re writing something that should be available in multiple formats, it might still make sense to type it in e.g. Markdown and then Pandoc it to the other formats, but replacing TeX with Typst.

That said, I agree with you that I don’t see any reason to do Markdown -> Typst conversion unless you have multiple compile targets, as Typst syntax is pretty readable/writeable already.

For now I’m still using mostly TeX or Org-mode, but I made lecture notes for a class I taught last year in Typst and was pretty happy with that. Some things related to figures and tables felt a bit rough, and the Emacs mode for it also felt a bit WIP, but both are probably vastly improved by now.

Presumably a CLI-accessible password manager (like `pass`) or a GPG-encrypted file (like a netrc-style `~/.authinfo.gpg`).

I certainly disagree with the GP attitude, but also with your counter-example.

America is de facto run by the descendants of colonizers. How much control do Native Americans really have over its governance?

Seems the author is active on HN (see the parallel thread)

It’s more like a low-background label: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Are there even still sufficiently large populations of win9x-compatible viruses online to make it a security issue anymore?

I’m curious, are you running i386 devices or more philosophically opposed to deprecation?

Even for ASCII chars, nomenclature in math and physics is usually case-sensitive.