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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#101

Post by ohwellhere »

bernulli wrote: post #83
tomrod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands). Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.

I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'. [1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

> it eliminates entities

But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates.

The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo.

There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea.

Not only does it not design, not only does it not eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#102

Post by behnamoh »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #75
aulin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost always crystal clear and self explanatory and slow. Most of the time the idiomatic pandas answer takes advantage of its vectorization capabilities while plain python would require nested loops.

This is one of the advantages of languages with optimizing compilers. In Python, there's a tradeoff between clarity and performance. But in C++ for example, your for-loop is just as fast as any library's for-loop. Edit: My assumption is that many Python libraries are written in C for performance, but maybe that's not the case.

Except that your C loop can be WRITTEN slower than some library’s loop.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#103

Post by officehero »

funnym0nk3y wrote: post #60
dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

Honestly, do you have any idea how to improve the math mess? I did use both Word and LaTeX für equations, the latter is much faster for me. So WYSIWYM seems to have its usecase. But I agree, reading that equation is just awful. My idea would be tooling to partially render tha equation, e.g. rendering sections the cursor is not in.

I use word with embedded latex and I'd say it's almost as fast to write once you get the tweaks and hot keys going (eg. learn to never use the horrible "equation editor"). You make up in overall speed by readibility. Write an equation, render and its just there, write next equation, render, etc.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#104

Post by marcosdumay »

wesleywt wrote: post #78

Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.

Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#105

Post by ohwellhere »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #90
samatman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks). Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?

Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.

This seems accurate to me.

Like complex brains are evolutionarily fit because they can solve lots of disparate problems, hands are evolutionarily fit because they can do lots of disparate things.

Of course, we do also then design violins for our specific dexterity.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#106

Post by amelius »

Pinus wrote: post #6

You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…

My main issue with LaTex is that you can't take a perfectly correct piece of markup, insert it into a container like a table, and expect it to work.

LaTeX makes it difficult to compose stuff. Even HTML did this better.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#107

Post by samatman »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #90
samatman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to get better at throwing rocks). Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw rocks to kill their prey?

Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.

The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands".

Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things, we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you may read as many papers on the subject as you would care to.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#108

Post by dougmsmith »

amelius wrote: post #106
Pinus wrote: post #6

You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…

My main issue with LaTex is that you can't take a perfectly correct piece of markup, insert it into a container like a table, and expect it to work. LaTeX makes it difficult to compose stuff. Even HTML did this better.

No post body was provided.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#109

Post by behnamoh »

miguelmurca wrote: post #67
leephillips wrote: post #28

The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (s…

This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your a…

How did you do emojis in pandoc? I’ve had a hard time writing them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#110

Post by dev_tty01 »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #23
enriquto wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the collective intelligence of an iterative process that rewards useful optimizations.
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