rwl

Does it even work on Wayland? I always thought this was a feature of X. I really like it too but the inconsistent support seems to catch me more and more often these days.

You don't have to just "stare" at the source; you can interact with it! Emacs is incredibly well documented and you can learn a ton with just C-h f (i.e. M-x describe-function) and C-h v (i.e. M-x describe-variable). In an Elisp source file, use those commands whenever you don't know exactly what a function or variable does. Read the description, and click on the hyperlinks to see the source. This is IMHO the best way to learn how to actually get things done. If you don't know what function or variable you're looking for, M-x apropos and its variants will be helpful.

I don't have a good reference (other than the Elisp manual) for high-level design patterns, but in general, Elisp is very flexible and already has what you'd need to implement any patterns you know from elsewhere. Decide on your data structures first. Probably the most important lesson you might not know yet is to use buffers, not strings, to do most text manipulation.

Ah yes, I guess you‘re right, that‘s why all the serious developers continue to use CVS.

Yep, it’s not for everyone, and their docs are pretty clear about that. OTOH those same docs contain a variety of arguments that git isn’t really designed for everyone either and that fossil might be a better fit for projects that have just one or a handful of developers, which AFAIK is the vast majority of projects on Github. My experience is that it is certainly an adjustment but the docs are good at explaining (and justifying) the differences, and the built-in features are very useful, especially for anyone looking to reduce their dependence on a centralized host that’s become unreliable.

I started using fossil recently and have been quite pleased with this aspect of it. I miss a few things from the git world (mostly magit and its magical ability to stage individual hunks of a diff) and there are a few rough edges, but I totally agree that having a wiki and issue tracking inside the repository makes so much sense. fossil‘s simplicity is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has to use git from a CLI. Well worth a try for anyone on the fence.

Yes, I'm aware. The problem with anchors is that the author has to take care to make them both unique and human-readable across the whole document. The problem with URL text fragments is that they generally become too long to be a citation. Both need quality-of-life improvements in the tooling before academics will consider using them.

For example, it's pretty easy to use CSS counters to create as many automatically incrementing counters as you need. Page number, section number, theorem number, etc. But (a) you can't do this in raw HTML, which means you can't rely on this working in any user agent that has poor support for CSS; and (b) you can't refer to the values of those counters outside of CSS. Thus, there's no way for you, as an author, to write the write the equivalent of LaTeX's "See Theorem~\ref{thm:foo}" in HTML and rely on having it auto-numbered and rendered correctly wherever your readers are. So the number has to already be there as text in the HTML, and you need a separate, document-unique id attribute coordinated with the number to use for linking. This means you need a separate compilation step to produce the HTML, so you've lost pretty much the only advantage that HTML had over LaTeX.

But fundamentally, the problem is that citation practices assume that the reading format is controlled by the author/publisher, so that all readers are looking at a common view of the document, whereas the Web assumes that the reading format is controlled by the user agent, and user agents vary widely. Thus, on the Web, you need formatting-independent citation practices, which have not yet evolved, or at least not become widely used, because it's too hard compared to page-based media, which have been working for centuries.

Citations. Until we can cite specific passages in HTML as quickly, easily and readably as we can cite pages in paged media, HTML will remain a second class citizen for serious scholarship.

I don’t need it with me all the time; I‘d prefer to just log in to a website on a real computer! But you can’t do this in the EU in practice without a banking app on a phone, or some other piece of hardware that you have to pay extra for and is certainly not more convenient.

Right, I suppose this is theoretically possible here too (I'm in Austria), though I haven't looked into it that carefully, because all the options here seem to cost more than my current bank account and as far as I can tell still require a smartphone.

I wouldn't necessarily mind a dedicated piece of hardware, but if it's dedicated hardware, I feel like the bank ought to provide it, not make me pay for it. And I'd much rather it be a generic piece of hardware that can also be used as a second authentication factor for other things, like a Yubikey. I've looked around but have not found any banks that offer this. The only one I had heard of no longer offers it.

Sure, the world is a better place with fewer serfs in it, but what exactly is of "higher value" than being a research mathematician? It's already a profession that consists essentially of exercising our highest and most distinctly human capacities: creativity, abstract reasoning, and passing the results of those on through a distinctive language and culture. I don't think the comparison with serfs is useful.

I'm sure most research mathematicians would like more freedom from some of the drudgery of their work (grading, admin, etc.), just like the rest of us. But we should be aiming for a world that allows more people to become mathematicians, not fewer.

I love the idea and wish I could get something like this in Europe. The main reason I "need" a smartphone over here is that EU banking regulations make it nearly impossible to do online banking without one. Anyone know of similar projects over here that would satisfy that need?

Presumably the 40mb of data is not from Wikipedia, but the Javascript tracking code bundle needed to turn it into a doomscrollable social media feed. ;) By those standards, I think it’s pretty lightweight! For comparison, the Instagram iOS app is 468.9mb, more than ten times the size…