Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…
The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.
Academic here. Working on MS Word after years of using LaTeX is... hard. With LaTex I can be reassured that the formatting will be 95% fine and the 5% remaining will come down to taste ("why doesn't this Figure show in this page?") while in Word I'm constantly fighting the layout - delete one line? Your entire paragraph is now bold. Changed the font of the entire text? No, that one paragraph ignores you. Want to delete that line after that one Table? F you, you're not. There's a reason why this video joke [1] got 14M views.
And then I need an extra tool for dealing with bibliography, change history is unpredictable (and, IMO, vastly inferior to version control), and everything gets even worse if I open said Word file in LibreOffice.
LaTeX' syntax may be hard, but Word actively fights me during writing.
That study must have compared beginners in LaTeX and MS Word. There is a learning curve, but LaTeX will often save more time in the end.
It is an old language though. LaTeX is the macro system on top of TeX, but now you can write markdown or org-mode (or orgdown) and generate LaTeX -> PDF via pandoc/org-mode. Maybe this is the level of abstraction we should be targeting. Though currently, you still need to drop into LaTeX for very specific fine-tuning.
Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).
I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/
This is a great option if you work outdoors a lot. As a designer though, I couldn’t get used to the “dusty” appearance of the nano texture (and yes, contrast loss – glossy displays are just more punchy) at least on the Pro Display XDR. You mostly get used to it if you aren’t doing design, I’m guessing.
Def a tradeoff that depends on your lifestyle if you work outside a lot (or want to). It does look nice there in the mountains
Yeah, I think designing a system for the LLM to check its own work will replace prompt engineering in key LLM techniques (though, it itself is a form of prompt engineering, but more intentional.) Given that LLMs are doing this today already (with varying success), it might not be long until that’s automated too.
That’s not the point of this. This was an exercise to measure the strengths and weaknesses of current LLMs in operating a company and managing operations, and the video game was just the simulation engine.
+1. There’s also more upstart motorcycle makers than car makers willing to take a bet on new tech. Plus the difficulty of scaling manufacturing to serve much larger capacity car batteries.
Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.
I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.
We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.
Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.
I wouldn't wait on this. The post has been up for a long time and appears to only be collecting CVs. I applied early last year and never got a response, and many others report the same.
Hi randomsofr, this posting has been continually posted since we are hiring on a rolling basis, not just for a single position. We have made hires for this position over time and continue to have openings.
We mention in our post-submission message that we only reach out if there’s a match, to spare applicant inboxes from negative messages (though perhaps we could make this messaging clearer). This follows what some companies such as Anthropic do and some of the reasoning in this post https://pablofernandez.tech/2023/02/03/you-should-not-send-r...
But I know that different people have different opinions on this, and we might shift to sending notification emails after resume review. I appreciate the feedback and I’m sorry about your experience here.
This is very cool. Great that it’s built out of metal for longevity and repairability. Wonder if they could make the radius of the rotation smaller since that seems like the most likely ergonomic improvement I could see from the demo.
McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.
I usually see people preferring to use the self service in McDonalds or supermarkets when given the option of either, so the consumer must find some benefit to it.
I always choose self service because that's where the volume is. I can wait in one of any Costco lines with 4 carts and 1 person checking them through, or I can wait in the line with 4 carts and 6 self service checkouts.
Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.
Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.
I have a mental list of who the fast/slow checkout people are at my store, would be curious to see numbers but I think the fast people are more than 2x as fast as the slower ones.
I really appreciate the ability at Costco to scan with my phone as we pick up items. Check out becomes a breeze. But I absolutely hate self-checkout grocery stores unless I just have a few items. The idea that I'll run a cart full of groceries through self-checkout is insane. Not only do they routinely not have accurate bar codes requiring some sort of lookup from an attendant. I'll have things which require human clerks to "approve" anyway like wine. In addition, my self-checkout lines don't have the full conveyors like the human checkout lines. So everything has to be moved from cart directly to bag and there isn't enough bag space so you have to start putting bags into the cart which still has groceries. The whole thing is a mess and I hate it.
I don't know what they are thinking, the kiosks are not cheap to install or maintain, they are buggy, and they've put me off from going into McDs anymore. The In-N-Out nearby is cheaper, friendlier with plenty of employees working, (and better quality), so not sure what McD's end game is here.
I don’t like them either. The UX is annoying and it’s way too large. The benefit is that I get to see more options than can fit on the screens and they have photos, but still in person just seems better.
But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.
I watched a show over 20 years ago that showed a fully automated robotic kitchen at McDonalds. I can only assumed they have continued to evolved it and perfect it as the technology has improved. I think it’s simply a question of when it hits the tipping point on cost.
There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.
I imagine kitchen robots are harder than they might sound. Kitchens are rough environments for machines. They are hot, greasy, and steamy. And everything that comes in contact with food needs to be able to be taken apart, washed, and sanitized at least daily.
I hate those stupid things so much. They're really, as far as I can tell, just moving all labor to the kitchen and drive-thru, while considering the dining area an afterthought.
Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.
Even 30 years ago more than half the sales at a McDonalds were in the drive through. Some new McDonalds don’t have much of an inside dining room at all anymore, while having multiple drive through lanes.
Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.
Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.
It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.
MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.
The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.
Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time.
I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.
I never noticed this but VS Code has almost no icons in menus. I'm fine with this though. We aren't supposed to use the menus all the time but rely on shortcuts or the command palette.
UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.
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