> I personally find more modern (like MacOS 10) styles to look the best, and flat designs to be just as usable as more skeumorphic ones.
Shouldn’t we separate looks from usability? KDE’s multifunctional search bar (similar to Spotlight on OSX) was a game changer for me. Every time I booted back into Windows (to play Anno 1602) I felt crippled.
Never cared much about looks, but functionality like that is what separates a great UI from an OK one. For me at least.
Computers being fast enough to do this in biology education is quite along way out. They probably used a farm of Nvidia racks for several months to obtain the simulation.
Personally I doubt that an atom-scale simulation of a cell is very useful for education. Rather, I’d approach it in a hierarchical fashion, where progressive coarser scales are used to model progressively larger systems.
This way one learns not only about a cell, but also about principles of modeling, and that each model comes with assumptions, simplifications, and errors.
Choosing the right scale of modeling for the problem is crucial. In this case they have chosen a very fine scale to model a rather large system. But what’s the scientific insight gained?
What would keep some entity that has its SWIFT access revoked from switching to China's CIPS or even crypto? Would it be merely an inconvenience, requiring the change of a few processes, or would it create hard problems?
When people say "revoking somebody's SWIFT access", I think they really mean putting them on national or international sanction/embargo lists that prohibit them from doing any kind of business with them (in particular, sending payments in their name or for their benefit), rather than actually, technically removing their SWIFT network access.
Since SWIFT is not the only, but certainly the largest financial/interbank messaging network, I suppose the effects are similar, but "disabling SWIFT" to me always sounds like an implementation detail.
I don't think anyone would arbitrarily just ban all trade like that. And if that's what they did intend, that's what they would say and the consequences are much bigger.
It's kind of a 'de facto' ban however, in that, it's hard to pay people otherwise.
I'm sure a Swiss bank or two could immediately broker transactions 'by hand' though, that would be a pretty easy way around things.
That said, you could be right. If that's the case, I wish they would make it more clear.
Yes. This whole thing is just once more revealing the cluelessness of our political classes. SWIFT is just a messaging system with verified identities, some schemas and a bit of business logic on the side. It exists because wire transfers predate the internet, not because it's clever or actually critical infrastructure.
Disconnect Russian banks from SWIFT? OK, submit your SWIFT formatted messages to banks via this helpful REST API instead. The outcome is the same.
The politicians know what it means. They need 'something' they can do publicly.
Russian Oligarchs have their massive yachts in ports in Europe. They are talking about 'no safe haven' but it's BS.
If they want to do something, they can go after those ships. That said, many of them hold dual citizenship which makes legal problems.
Also, the corrupt oligarchs serve as a conduit for money fuelling out of Russia to the West, I mean, they are kind of doing the West a favour to Russia's detriment.
Europeans need to come together right now and pledge to absolve themselves of Russian Oil. It means major investment in Nuclear.
Germany also has to start assuming responsibilities of leadership. They are benefiting the most from the Euro, and frankly European integration as they are sucking jobs and talented workers in form Spain, Italy etc. they have to share the burden of things like military leadership.
Poland right now is supporting Ukraine in all sorts of ways, it's amazing to see, and they are not a rich country.
Unlike the wave of migrants in 2015, these neighbouring refugees are being welcomed.
It exists because banks need a way to know that money is coming to them, it more or less balances books. You are right, a Swiss bank could just call a Russian bank and say “hey we are sending you this money”, but A it would be a pain in the ass, and B, they could risk getting in trouble, but they are Swiss so they can do what they want hahaha.
The two systems aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be a SWIFT member or participant and also use CIPS or cryptocurrency, though I think switching to crypto for payments would create a ton of procedural issues for most financial institutions.
Fair, but if the US pulls the trigger on SWIFT censorship, that may not be completely destructive, and will only incentivize further expansion of the SPFS network to make the SWIFT attack less powerful next time.
In the short term, both. Longer term yes, many countries would migrate to other systems which mitigates the value of SWIFT. Fear of that happening is part of the reluctance to use it as a political weapon.
It would come down to people would not be able to send money to them, I.e. they would say you can’t send money to Russia anymore, and if an institution went around SWIFT to send money and they get audited they could get into a lot of trouble.
> I'd speculate the whole action is to force the West to a new deal with Russia, so they can balance China.
I think any trust that Russia still enjoyed in the west is gone as of today. A few days ago the official Russian position was "Nobody is planning an invasion of Ukraine." Today, Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is not how you make deals.
If anything, I'd have thought it's likely to go the other way: China gets to play the relatively responsible global citizen that doesn't send in tanks to resolve its territorial claims. Also new potential export markets.
I thought Putin was doing the show of power for domestic consumption where he'd embarass the West by actually withdrawing the armies slightly after he promised and it'd all end in a summit with both sides claiming they 'won', but he's gone well beyond that now.
The discussion reminds me a little of the one around LaTeX in the scientific community. Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks in its own specific and manifold ways (as does LibreOffice).
HTML is still not nice to read, too much boilerplate tags required. Markdown source however is mostly well-readable in a plain-text editor, and offers the basic formatting that serves 95% of the needs.
But the truth is: the ideal text layout platform for scientific writing does not exist.
Markdown+HTML+CSS could be getting close, but it currently still lacks LaTeX's tooling for citations, support for pagination.
MS Word's "track changes" is extremely useful when collaboratively editing (and no, Overleaf's version doesn't come close, unfortunately). But references and citations in Word still are no match for the flexibility of bibtex, even with Papers/Zotero/Mendeley. Figure placing can be a nightmare, although LaTeX is not infallible, either. And you need a Mac or Windows to use Word, and on a Mac it feels like it's running in an emulator.
I have given up on the belief that one tool could solve all this. There are a few good attempts like overleaf and the less-known authorea (which I liked more), but these are cloud apps which complicates writing offline.
The only solution is to choose whatever tool works for the specific use case, learn to live with its shortcomings, and never forget that in the end only the finished manuscript counts.
The problem is not writing or reading LaTeX, properly written LaTeX is very readable. It's easy to maintain and understand, and Bibtex for bibliographies works fine once you've gotten used to it.
The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the preamble. I've done it several times and it basically requires a rewrite. All of the existing tools fail. In fact, in a book I've once edited and made camera-ready in LaTeX, the LaTeX contributions were harder to integrate into the book than the Word files!
Recently I had to deliver a book I've written camera-ready, doing all the typesetting myself, because a large prestigious publisher I had a contract with turned out to be unable to deal with LaTeX. In a sense the problem really is MS Word, it's still the standard and I was astonished to learn about the publishing world in my postdoc time how surprisingly many publishers only deal with MS Word files and do not even use any special typesetting software - many use Word all the way down to creating the final PDF for printing! Looks horrible but I know of several major academic publishers who do it that way.
You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`?
After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal becomes chapter in thesis in about 3 minutes work) and (b) beautiful output, not just in mathematics but in support for many language characters, hyphenation hints, etc.
On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.
The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense.
On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspective distorts the vision a lot, and people get confused.
When one understands the idea of "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand", the rest is liberating.
Most journals I read offer both reflowable HTML and PDF. I don't know anybody who prefers the former.
A PDF (and the paper copy it generates) is more convenient for markup, and for memory. I can look at papers I read decades ago, and know where to go to find things, because of what I might call positional memory. Somehow, my brain has information such as "The key Figure is at top of third page" or "that equation I think is wrong is at the bottom of the second-last page". I'm not alone in this. I suppose it's just how brains work (e.g. people who do memory tricks "store" the information in an imagined space).
When I look at reflowed text, I just get lost. I can't make notes that "stick" with the text if I enlarge the font. And memories don't form in the same way as for PDF/paper.
I suppose this might be field-dependent. I think in some fields the key point of a paper is a single sentence, which could be identified easily in reflowing text and then copied into a separate file. I don't read papers like that, though. That's why, in my line of work, PDF/paper is superior to reflowable text.
Flowed text doesn't mean that it won't be printed. It means that it could be printed the way you want it, not the way the author wanted.
This comes in handy when the author decided that 50% of the surface of paper should remain blank, or using a tiny font. They may find it helpful, others not. Same goes for the decision to have pages at all.
The only aspect where I see in which someone else making an unappealable decision for you is superior, is convenience. Conditional on that other person being an expert in the field [of printing].
> I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
YES!
It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes. PDFs were great to read when I was still printing papers. For reading on screen they are quite inconvenient.
Many publishers have come around in the last decade and offer HTML versions of full papers (after you get through the paywall).
> It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes.
It's not about LaTeX per se. You can typeset EPUBs with it too, if you want. So reflow ability is not a shortcoming of LaTeX.
Publishers send you a Word or LaTeX template, and require your manuscript as a PDF, conforming to that template. If it's LaTeX, generally there's a switch to render the text in "Review mode" with line numbers and similar additional details, and omitting author data if the judgement will be done blindly.
So, the tool itself, regardless of its brand is the proverbial wrong tree to fight with. Also, it's a reality that reading a 25 page manuscript is not very efficient on a screen, at least in my discipline. I have a dedicated "Paper printer" at home for printing such manuscripts and taking a stab at it with pens and highlighters.
In theory, yes. In practice, this only works when the document is using a restricted set of packages. I tried.
I'm fighting not so much with LaTeX, rather with ArXiv. They have the sources of LaTeX submissions, but do not provide other formats than PDF by default. Judging from my own experience in converting LaTeX to HTML, epub, etc., I assume these conversions simply create too much headache.
> reading a 25 page manuscript is not very efficient on a screen, at least in my discipline
The vast majority of papers I "read" I never read back-to-back, rather than Abstract - Discussion - Results - Introduction - Methods, bailing out at any of those points when I have the information I was looking for. I couldn't possibly keep up with the literature when reading every interesting paper completely.
Those that are really relevant to my research I will read in detail, and at that point a PDF is useful, I agree. But before that, I prefer reflown text & figures.
There was some innovation in that regard, e.g. eLife's Lens, that was specifically designed to support reading on a (large) screen. IEEE also has a good system that works on phones (well, almost; so UI elements clutter the text).
I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, because scientific papers are one of the rare species of publications, which are primarily made to be printed, read and mangled with pens.
Even the templates from the publishers came with paper sizes and other crop marks coded inside them.
When publications start accepting reflow able formats and provide relevant templates, producing them is easy with LaTeX.
fwiw, I see a lot of papers on IEEE Xplore that are presented as reflowable HTML on the page with the option for a PDF, presumably generated from the same source.
I think they used LaTeX internally, but I've no way to be sure. They provide latex style sheets and sample files, and so those were my starting point. Of course, they are a big organization, and latex is a simple system, so they might have a program that translates it to something else, e.g. using latex to create PDFs and something else for other formats. But at least at the galley-approval stage, it was still LaTeX.
Using Markdown with pandoc and pandoc-crossref is basically perfect as a substitute of LaTeX. It allows in-line and standalone LaTeX, and citations with crossref.
With the former, can you items of many paragraphs and other complex stuffs one sometimes need in a complex/advanced document? So you can understand why LaTeX had to go the less naive way MarkDown did.
Of course the LaTeX syntax is more capable, but for the simple and common case, it's extremely fussy. The simple case should be effortles. With markdown it is, and in Pandoc you can easily drop to more complicated syntax should you need any of its capabilities.
In my experience this has zero advantage over LaTeX since converting your markdown to formats other than LaTeX will be just as hard as converting from a LaTeX source. It's even harder because you have to deal with an eclectic mix of LaTeX and markdown, and various errors and restrictions in pandoc.
I use the system to write documents that I convert to PDF (through LaTeX), Word, plain text, and HTML, with equations, tables, and internal and external links preserved (citations in plain text turn into footnotes). It works brilliantly, and this would be impossible when starting with LaTeX source. You can embed the target formats directly into the markdown when needed, and have alternative versions for different targets. I do this for things like tables, where I want to directly format them for LaTeX and HTML, rather than rely on Pandoc’s automatic translation. You can write filters¹ that extend Pandoc/markdown to do any processing that you want, so you can create your own syntax with custom translations to any target format.
[1] https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ [This is sort of obsolete now, as you should probably write filters with Lua. But it’s still a good illustration of the possibilities.]
The problems in converting LaTeX usually come from third-party packages. When only a restricted set of packages is allowed then it is quite straightforward. This is the reason many publishers require latex, even if they don't use LaTeX internally (which is often the case).
They convert LaTeX to the XML dialect that their in-house layout system understands.
yes, these are all fraught. Any X-to-Y format exchange is a brew/apt miracle in my experience. It's not necessarily important for a LaTeX document to be render-able in all media, but the maths disciplines, for example, should be asking themselves how they want to be able to search for things including formula, algorithms etc, and finding ways to guarantee that a maxima of media support search/find/read operations on their articles. It's not just about how easy is it to input? but it's very similar to "how easy is it to get back out?" it has been a bit of a mismatch in maths re formulae expressions, and how those are represented visually vs. textually.
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks
The Lyx editor solves both these problems for me. I'd probably be using LaTeX a lot less if I hadn't found Lyx (that quote about fingernail clippings in oatmeal doesn't apply to Lisp IMO, but certainly does to LaTeX).
I used Lyx back in university to transcribe the math lectures. It was good enough that the professor later asked me if I can send him the PDFs and source files ;)
Lyx is great for that exact purpose! I used it too as an undergrad. But it doesn't offer the full flexibility and toolset available in LaTeX, which limits its use for more complex documents.
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain.
For the kind of text that you'd use Markdown for, i.e. text that is mostly just text and not math heavy, LaTeX should be almost as readable as Markdown. For example,
> I think they call it "Schengen-land", named after an obscure town in Luxembourg.
Strictly speaking it's not named after the town, but after the agreements which were signed there, which grant the right of check-free border crossings to citizens of signatory countries.
This is not the only hole in the story. When I would get harassed at 2am by an employee of a half-illegal business I would a) call the cops to shut down the noise, b) team up with a few neighbours to obtain legal counsel how to shut them them down. Why are the residents not doing that, or rather, why is the article not writing about that?
Edit: I don't want to talk down the racial component. It is certainly sad that the article glosses over that part of the story. But still I wonder why the residents are not doing the obvious and call the cops—or if they did, why the article doesn't talk about it.
Isn't running noisy 24/7 businesses in residential areas and repeated threatening behaviour from riders something that the cops should be able to shut down relatively easily?
I have unfortunately had the biggest displeasure of dealing with Dutch police after someone stole my backpack.
They were useless and downright offensive. The crime happened is full view of a security camera and they refused to do anything at all about it and instead performing what I call the “European fuck you”: handing me a form to fill.
Adding insult to injury I was told that “it happened all the time” when I asked them what the fuck are they doing to stop it happening then, I was threaten for my language.
Most cities in europe prefer mixed zoning, so one doesn't get those crazy suburbs. So it's normal to have businesses in the lowest floors with apartments around. But those are often small stores, cafés, restaurants etc, making the city feel alive and provide services to the residents. Not covered windows and buildings you cannot enter, and being a nuisance.
But mixed zoning usually comes with rules regarding opening hours, and a requirement to respect the neighbors' sleep. If a business repeatedly breaks those rules they get shut down.
That's how in works in my city. The rules might be different in different cities/countries, but at least nightly harassment shouldn't be something that one has to tolerate.
In the U.K. there are plenty of pubs in residential areas (as there have been since long before zoning was a thing) and they may often be noisy in the evenings. Some people will buy a house/flat next to a pub and then discover they don’t really like the noise.
There are rules about when businesses may open (and when they may sell alcohol) but a lot of them are historic Sunday trading laws or designed to give convenience stores an advantage over larger supermarkets. I think there are rules about where industrial buildings may be located. I think there are very few rules about where offices may be (and they can be open whenever) and there are probably some generic night noise laws, but eg the pub example above isn’t breaching them (you may see a pub with a sign outside asking people to be considerate or more rarely a pub with a sign that says something like ‘a pub has been here for X years and our neighbours should have known that it would be noisy in the evenings’)
The amount of barbers and hairdressers here is something to behold at times. Or even offices for some types of firms. I think it is reasonable and makes lot of sense to have these types of businesses being available near where people actually live.
I'm not really too keen on dark stores that aren't available for general public. I would much prefer regular store to one, even if that store would only be counter and pick-up only.
There are zoning laws and there is mixed zoning. There used to be many smaller shops in residential areas and since the 70s many shops have closed in favour of supermarkets and so on. In the street I lived before, there used to be many different shops such as fish shops, cheese chops, vegetables, small shops selling carpets and so on. When I moved there in 2002, the only shops left were one butcher, one bakery and one that sold cigarettes and magazines and in 2022 they all closed. These were all located in buildings with an appartment on the floors above, where typically the owner lived.
You would actually need a permit to transform the former shop into an appartment and this is mostly granted. However if you would take such a place and convert it into a 'dark store' you typically do not even need a permit! The Dutch regulations just did not expect shops to be open 24/7 in small residential areas like this and to need 24/7 supplies from big trucks and 'riders' hanging around all day and night, where typical Dutch stores would close at 6pm
