• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • The Gen Z stare is simply the rational response in dealing with customer facing situations where either 1. the customer is problematic, or 2. if the worker genuinely doesn’t know what what to do.

    Responding or engaging to problematic customers (racist, homophobic, misogynistic) can only lead to conflict, reprimand, or lawsuits.

    Responding with inaccurate information or simply saying leads to conflict, reprimand, or poor reviews.

    Both have worsened as people have become more polarised, and management cuts funding and hours for training.


  • Maths feels like a first class citizen in latex. The syntax is ugly, but there is some logic through the legacy jank.

    Typst makes fundamental design decisions that render it unsuitable beyond extremely simply equations. In LaTeX, curly braces are nearly always reserved for enclosing arguments, to avoid confusion with actual brackets.

    Typst uses normal brackets for both its scripting and actual maths.

    For example, \frac{n(n+1)}{2} in latex turns into (n(n + 1)) / 2 in typst. The typst code is incredibly unclear - the first set of brackets with the slash together actually form the fraction operator, so neither end up visible.

    You can see how this would start to struggle even with high school level maths, with bracketed terms and possibly fractional terms in exponents, integrals, etc.

    For example, it is very difficult for me to work out the difference between the following three in typst. That is specifically not what you want from a typesetting language.

    1/2(x + y)
    1/x(x + y)
    1/2^x(x + y)
    

    LaTeX ignores whitespace, so you can just use a formatter to space out your code and ensure the curly braces. This is not even an option in typst, which uses the space as an escape character.





  • Unfortunately this is an increasingly unviable strategy, because even “good” creators have started using clickbaity titles and thumbnails, even if their content has remained the same. Some have even retroactively changed the titles/thumbnails of their older videos to this style.

    Clickbait is engineered by behavioural scientists to be as addictive as possible, and has been proven to trigger similar neural pathways to other addictions, such as drug or gambling.

    Basically every creator with a shred of self awareness has admitted that they hate creating clickbait thumbnails, titles, and phrases like smash that like button and subscribe; they end up doing it anyway because A/B testing with randomised thumbnails and titles clearly show that they work.

    The live A/B testing in particular obscures whether a creator employs clickbait or not - you may be under the impression that a certain creator has remained principled, when in reality you were just allocated to the control group by chance.

    I feel that it’s one of those situations where the game is rigged, and the only way to “win” is to change the rules yourself.






  • Because all in one distros have mistakes or bugs, for which fixes are only available in the next release 6-12 months later.

    Other times, I know exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, but due to the vendors shenanigans (Ubuntu) it’s ironically much harder to fix. Adding extra repos via ppas and managing them is harder than just pulling it from AUR.

    Having problems due to a vendor’s mistake and being unable to fix them was exactly why I wanted to move away from Windows and macOS. All in one distros kind of fail at addressing that. Arch is basically “fuck it, I’ll compile it myself”









  • I don’t think the any interaction definition is too broad at all. Primitive forms of social media such as mailing lists and forum threads form are very similar in functionality to simply following hashtags, or I guess whatever the algorithms suggest.

    The distinction using account based versus conversation/thread based is not too helpful, because the majority of users of modern social media don’t really use it to follow accounts, with the majority of their time is spent doomscrolling generic hashtags or algorithm recommendations.

    The similarities are easier to see if you think of how people actually used these technologies in their daily lives. Pre Facebook, people would log in and refresh their Usenet, emails, and forums threads to keep in touch with friends and interests. Post Facebook, people would log in and refresh Facebook/Insta instead.