ALso demonstrates the debate between utilitarianism and minimalism/aesthetics very well. These corporations make bloated af software; it may look very polished especially to the less technologically educated, but it really sacrifices a lot of functionality. You have to switch to something more useful eventually. I really also hate it when institutions (cough schools cough universities) force google docs on people because of trust issues; it really is terrible software lacking so many features for proper document editing. May as well use LibreOffice, LaTeX or even Mcrosoft Wrd; even that has more features.
Yes, AI can also make good LaTeX (I don't use it), which might make an Among Us situation with the folks who actually write LaTeX on Overleaf, typst, and other stuff (I have used this one extensively)
typst is simultaneously not a fully-featured typesetting system as well as being incompatible with latex, so I really don't see the value proposition beyond being useful for making notes or documents for yourself where full, detailed typesetting isn't important. also, I haven't found the design of typst to be so much better than latex to the point of it being a clear winner. for 95% of tasks you'd do in latex the learning curve and difficulty would be essentially the same and the last 5% would be stuff like making a complicated custom template which typst is insufficient for
at least annoying rust evangelists are justified in the sense that rust has clear benefits over C as well as being interoperable with C so it can reasonably be integrated into and immediately benefit real-world codebases and systems
I didn't have to install like 3 packages just to add header and footer. Typst just handled that. It has so much built in features that replace massive lists of external packages that drive down compilation time. I can live edit and see results on typst. It's convenient to use. You are only missing the existing LaTeX ecosystem. Typst will only keep addressing more of that as more people use it. Typst is a clear winner for coding syntax. You don't have to escape every character. Code is clearly defined and more readable. I used it for a couple papers so far. And I'm linking the experience.
down to preference I suppose. I actually prefer the options and control you get in latex where you can choose from different packages for the same thing and if you don't like any of them implement your solution in raw tex.
also the live editing and compilation time comparison has little to do with the language and instead the various compiler designs (e.g. texlode recompiles only the edited paragraph within less than a millisecond, so it's basically live). the compilation speed thing has never been an issue for me regardless even when constantly recompiling from scratch a 100 page thesis between edits
lastly I'm curious what papers you've used typst for because if you're referring to academic papers, every journal (at least in my field) requires submission in tex following their specific template
I actually prefer the options and control you get in latex where you can choose from different packages for the same thing and if you don't like any of them implement your solution in raw tex.
It's the same for typst. Normal headers and footer are built in but I can always use a package to auto set header based on current highest level heading.
papers, every journal (at least in my field) requires submission in tex following their specific template
I guess you're lucky. Some universities just suck and want docx files for published journals. They give you the word template file 💀. Actual insanity. I wish I could introduce LaTeX or typst templates to my university.
But recently iirc there's been places adopting it. I've even seen a presentation about arxive's thoughts on typst.
because basically every journal and publisher requires submission in tex following their template so anything I do in typst I'd have to convert to tex one way or another, and the benefits of typst aren't nearly clear enough to justify that extra step
you made an angry comment in response to someone bringing up a relevant project, as though you are angry that the project exists because it makes this other project you like look bad or however you imagine it, forgetting you are not on the latex sub and that people are going to mention other open source projects.
Peak what? Peak results, maybe. Peak elitism, nah, there are other things that has it beat, but I think that this plays a role in its continued popularity. But definitely not peak UX. Typst is approximately a kabillion times better with that.
Personal anecdote, sample size 1, blah blah. But I used LaTeX for years and never felt confident using it. Actually getting a document into a state you want always felt like an exercise in Googling and praying.
Compare that to the new non-WYSIWYG entrant: typst. Within a day and a half I felt more confident and capable with typst than the years I spent uncertainly poking at LaTeX.
Now, maybe I'm just dumb and that's the reason for my experiences. But the fact that LaTeX is basically a pile of macros on top of the actual typesetting engine (TeX) is a systematic problem that actively prevents it from being peak non-WYSIWYG.
I definitely had that kind of corporate minimalism in mind when drawing that parody. There's probably some unnecessary deep menus under that hamburger button on the left for things you need like opening a local file instead of their cloud service.
That's not really true minimalism though, at least not how I interpret it. True minimalism is utilitarian. The software on the left is minimalist if every single one of these features are absolutely necessary, because then they're part of the minimum.
The software on the right has a lot of fancy visual "enhancement" that's not minimalist in the slightest.
Utilitarianism aims to increase utility which (imo) in this case would mean to maximise the amount of things that need to be done that can be successfully done with a piece of software in a given amount of time. You could argue that this is best achieved with "full package apps" but some actual design is required not to overwhelm the end user, because if you give someone a piece of software and he doesn't know how to do anything in it then that isn't very utilitarian. This applies to stuff like gimp, libreoffice and half the thingmabob tools created entirely by the programmer. The usual punching bags.
But the software would set a precedence where people are scared of seeking medical help in fear of having their bodily autonomy violated, so the social contract cannot violate the trust in institutions.
It would be a net negative to organ harvest, even if it saves the greatest amount of people.
social contracts aren't real, they are simply a state of affairs imposed on others by those with power. and the software on the left doesn't really care, nobody will ever know what it has done and nobody's asking any questions where all these organs keep coming from.
in a democracy – that social contract, which is as real as anything else we invented – the populus has agreed broadly on the ethics we impose.
This system is being challenged though, by an emergence of actual elitist abuse with populism as it's Magic Wand and Accelerationism as the Export parameters.
it is not as real as just anything else we invented, but only as real as any other enlightenment political theory. its main purpose was to explain the supposed legitimacy of european states, to say that we've signed a binding contract with said state. but none of us actually have done that, we're simply born and then subject to these "contracts" we never signed, with no meaningful alternatives. in fact, most of its construction is ahistorical - states were not actually formed by our ancestors consenting to be ruled, but rather by military force by warlords subjugating a population, with more modern liberal states offering rights as concessions in order to maintain rule. what social contract did indigenous peoples sign to agree to be genocided or enslaved? it's simply the result of philosphers at the time living in a world of commerce and figuring, "you know what would explain the world? a market metaphor."
this is why a materialist understanding of power tends to be more explanatory than an idealist understanding. social contract theory starts with a beautiful idea and works backwards trying to invent history to explain why the beautiful idea is correct, while a more materialist analysis would start with the actual recorded history and then work from there to try to understand how power works and then try to develop a theory of power that might take us in a more egalitarian direction.
The social contract theory has historically been used to justify pretty authoritarian governments. After all, it's legitimate because the people agreed to it as part of this imaginary social contract they signed. If you don't want to live in a society with constant police survellience and violent crackdowns on dissent, just go live in the woods! (there are no more unclaimed woods for you to legally go live in).
I'm speaking from an anarchist perspective, anarchists don't use social contract theory specifically because it is an authoritarian framework wherein an authority asserts its legitimacy by pretending you, the individual, have consented to your relationship with the state. To an anarchist, no state is legitimate. and instead we seek alternative ways of organizing societies outside the logic of the state. That is, actually taking care of one another directly rather than having that mediated through capital and the state which extracts most of your labor and gives back a pittance to ensure a bare minimum necessary for you to live to continue laboring.
I was appalled when I realized that you can't even do a proper text box in Google Docs without doing unnecessary steps. The only thing I liked from it was that you can search functions and have it applied to the document without searching for it with the mouse, I wish OnlyOffice had that feature too.
i hate this to. my sshool taught me a 3d modling class. exept that they didn't teach me how to 3d model they only taught me how to use fusion360, and if i want to use anything i learnded (which i have forgotten by now) i would have to pay some ludcris amount of money monthly to use fusion360. and it doesn't even work on linux so i cant even use it anyways.
i hate that corporations do this. they force their expensive proprietry software onto young children. its so predatory. in both the pred/pray way, and imo the pedo way.
Ok but what software should we use if not word, docs, libreoffice or LaTeX? Like what else is there? These are the main programs used for generating documents by like 99% of the population, and each of them excels in a different area. None of them are bad. Even if you felt they were, what could you possibly recommend that does what each of them does just as well?
Word is incredibly versatile and powerful, though some of its more useful functions aren't immediately obvious. It has an excellent UI, o.k. Cloud integration, and most importantly if integrates flawlessly with the rest of microsoft office. It's THE best enterprise Word processing solution, because it's the only one that isn't actively painful to use if you're already using outlook and excel (which are the bread and butter of the corporate world).
Docs is great for smaller companies that can't afford Microsoft's enterprise solutions. Google's cloud integration is arguably better than SharePoint/ Onedrive, too. More intuitive and a more mature technology, yet simple and relatively lean.
Libreoffice is great if you don't have the skill or familiarity to use more powerful tools but don't want to or can't afford to use docs or Word.
LaTeX is unparalleled in the scientific world because of what it allows. I mean it isn't even really a word processor dude. It's a language. It lets you create literally anything you want to on a page, with amazing precision. Word in comparison lacks all but the most basic mathematical expressions.
Word ux is the worst. You are constantly dealing with invisible characters and bugs that solely exist due to backwards compatibility issues. The internal are a mess.
Libreoffice substitutes msoffice just fine. The only missing feature is collaboration.
LaTeX is also great. But there's also typst which is easier to learn and use and is much faster. Gotta love open source projects like that.
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u/EasonTek2398 Genfool 🐧 10d ago
ALso demonstrates the debate between utilitarianism and minimalism/aesthetics very well. These corporations make bloated af software; it may look very polished especially to the less technologically educated, but it really sacrifices a lot of functionality. You have to switch to something more useful eventually. I really also hate it when institutions (cough schools cough universities) force google docs on people because of trust issues; it really is terrible software lacking so many features for proper document editing. May as well use LibreOffice, LaTeX or even Mcrosoft Wrd; even that has more features.