wjholden

Is that all there is here? The quantifier "several" did not prepare me for the wall of CVE numbers in this list.

Yes, I am seeing exactly this at my own workplace. Two things have happened close together: low code and LLMs. I don't personally like using low code solutions (such as PowerBI and Power Automate), but for many knowledge workers this is all they have. Now you can just ask your favorite LLM how to do stuff and it can help you. It's not exactly vibe coding because these people really understand what they have and what they want, they just don't know the syntax to get there.

It's also possible to be overfat without being overweight! These "skinny fat" people often look normal enough but they carry very little muscle. It is a concerning condition because a doctor might not recommend a normal-weight person to hit the weights.

I like to think of this as four quadrants around two axes. Low fat/low muscle is simply skinny. High fat/high muscle is the "big guy/gal" look that I associate with laborers. Low fat/high muscle is an athletic look; unhealthy in extremes (bodybuilding) but generally desirable. High fat/low muscle is skinny fat, which I associate with sedentary knowledge workers.

I'm going to hazard a speculative answer with poor evidence: love.

The ants love one another, as shown by their child-rearing, grooming, playing, the "antennating" mentioned in the article, collective defense, and deliberate handling of their dead.

We don't understand their language, but I have a certain faith that ants experience a very similar kinship for their sisters as we. If they were strictly-rational robots then why would they show these behaviors?

Super nostalgic for me just to see the name. My computing teacher gave me a Knoppix LiveCD when I was about 18 and I immediately fell in love with Linux. Within weeks I was (repeatedly) attempting to install Gentoo on my first computer that I built. What a wonderful project!

Oh man, good on you identifying a product that needs to exist. I've used a few TikZ editors (both online and desktop) and none of them are just amazing.

But, I've taken my papers to Typst. Could you have the agent do the same thing for Cetz, the TikZ equivalent for Typst?

Not OP, but I can comment on my anecdotal experience switching.

Typst is great. I had been using Markdown with Pandoc to write a book. I frequently needed to use raw LaTeX commands, and it was mostly OK but I had a few frustrations with my setup. The biggest was time — my Makefile process was taking several (like 10+) seconds to render everything and that was really tedious when I was trying to get TikZ drawings perfect. My other frustrations were floating figures never appearing where I wanted (common complaint, I think) and weird font issues with certain math symbols in code. (I settled on JuliaMono, which was OK but the experience wasn't a happy memory.)

Maybe six months ago I decided to try Typst. I went through the tutorials and made something basic the same day. Got comfortable and eventually pasted my entire book into Typst and started the tedious process of finding and replacing until it compiled. I still occasionally find a \times or something that I missed.

Unlearning backslashes was the hardest thing for me.

The next hardest thing was switching from TikZ to Cetz. Cetz is pretty good, but just like TikZ it takes an investment to learn. I tried to have AI translate my figures and it was not very successful. Someone wrote a webapp that can translate Typst to LaTeX and the reverse. It is a good way to get started on changing figures, but you'll have to clean up its output by hand a lot.

Though I used LUA LaTeX, I never did find any uses for its scripting. With Typst, I use it all the time. Functions are really easy to write. I recently wrote a REPL formatter to show inputs and outputs in code. I'm happy with it and ought to publish it. My only complaint is that all functions are pure functions; there is not a way (that I know of) to share state from one function invocation to the next.

The templates on the Typst universe are pretty OK, but we need more. I will have to change some of the formatting decisions in the book template I'm using.

One thing I've encountered that I could do in LaTeX that I can't (easily) do in Typst is labels on a NiceMatrix. Otherwise, I've felt like I could do everything in Typst that I needed from LaTeX.

Not OP, but thank you for your sharing this. If you don't mind a follow-on question, I always hear people talk about the "runtime" in languages like Go and libraries like Tokio. What is that these runtimes are doing that you cannot get from the likes of libc and these Windows DLLs?

I think Python might be the first language to adopt a named sentinel value type. Has anyone seen a design like this in any other programming language?

For what it's worth — my last workplace did not allow cell phones in the building and I learned to love it. When people attended meetings, we all made eye contact and talked about the task at hand. Nobody ever got distracted by notifications or tuned out with boredom. And since we all had traditional telephones at our desks, someone would come get you if your family was calling with for an urgent crisis. I miss it.

My kids' school banned phones during the school day. The principal promised that the office would relay any messages if parents call, and they do. I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success. That is, are grades and test scores affected by phone bans? The article talks about graduation rates, but doesn't directly address grades and scores.