aaplok

I like baking. There are machines that can bake bread at an industrial scale that I cannot compete with. There are home kneaders that do much of the work very well. I use one of those more often than not.

I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel".

Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place.

Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.

I contend that this is natural evolution. Every GUI app is a browser nowadays, and that leaves a niche for leaner apps to fill. This is what TUI apps seem to be doing.

Cross platform GUI is hard unless you elect to build a website and navigate through chrome via electron. Cross platform TUI is a lot easier.

> Do we trust them or don't we?

GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves.

Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.

One thing I like with pandoc is that it produces clean html or latex code (it can also produce clean markdown with the right option).

If you compare this with the HTML produced by typst or hevea, this is super useful, as we can then roll out our own styles.

> Mathematicians are, indeed, also paid to teach, peer-review, go to conferences and learn mathematics, but all of that better result in some damn good theorems.

As a mathematician who publishes theorems, I think this is mistaken. New theorems in abstract and pure fields of mathematics never had the economic value of what mathematicians are paid. Even creative works of art can be displayed but mathematical papers are unread by anybody except a tiny number of people who wouldn't want to pay all that much for them if they had to.

The economic value of mathematicians is to teach mathematics. Proving theorems is how we build the credentials we need to be trusted to be allowed to teach it. Teaching young and less young people how to navigate through a mathematical problem is how we make ourselves useful.

LLMs coming up with counter examples to obscure conjectures (albeit old and important to a small number of people) is only a threat in that it removes this ritual of belonging.

Many people are excellent teachers (and very competent mathematicians) without publishing new theorems, and many theorem producers are atrocious teachers.

Perhaps the pecking order may change. Or maybe something else will happen. Maybe society will decide to replace all its teachers with AI, or that mathematics is no longer worth learning. I don't know. But what I know is that nobody saw any of the papers I wrote or the theorems I proved and thought "that's money well spent".

Doesn't the quoted sentence indicate they did? How would they have known it has been updated since otherwise?

Because I have personally never seen "jazzes" pluralised and I didn't think of it.

Maths and math are both used, and the reason I used the plural form is not because I insist on anything but because it is the most commonly used of the two. I personally don't mind either forms.

With that said, linguistically using the plural for either is a bit odd, since that would imply you can pick "a" mathematic out of many, or "a" jazz out of many. But linguistic is not math (nor are lingustics maths), logic doesn't always apply.

For me it's about having a distraction-free environment. I dislike having useless information cluttering my screen real-estate.

Even now that I moved away from text-only, I typically work only with fullscreen windows. All I want to see is what I am focusing on at the moment.

Actually I think that maths and jazz have something in common in the general public peception that you have to be smart to "get it".

Nobody will try to perform a deep intellectual analysis of Lady Gaga's or Ed Sheeran's work the way they analyse Coltrane or Miles Davis (or Mozart, or Stravinsky). Those musicians are intellectuals of the sort Einstein is, unlike Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran (in the collective perception). Jazz is intellectual music.

And when they analyse something, "smart" people use maths.

I am putting scare quotes around "smart" here to insist that this is largely a social perception and expected behaviour. However, maths can sensibly be used to analyse art, just like it's used elsewhere. This is not patronising, it is more that maths provides a useful language to talk about patterns.

GP reported on an opinion and called it insane. That's not an ad hominem.

There is a difference between judging an opinion and judging a person. If the response had been something like "what is crazy is to think the world can just switch off its dependence on petrol suddenly", I would not have reacted either.

> It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair

If your intention is honest engagement with people you disagree with, you should refrain from ad-hominem attacks like this. Work with their arguments, not with their tastes or appearances.

If your intention is to ridicule them and convince yourself they are not worth discussing with, then ad-hominem is fine, but not engaging at all is better.