Just one data point but my father is in his 70s and has never owned a smartphone, when he wants to Google something he goes to the computer in the basement. On the other hand there are landline extensions all over the house. So yeah it would be more convenient for people like him.

Doesn't the flat line in this context mean that you're at a local minimum, which is where you want to stay? Where being less careful would take more time due to increased number of incidents.

If you can explain to me how you convince a nontechnical person why 6 is not free, I’ll concede the point.

But if not then my original thesis that this is needlessly asking for a pointless argument that costs social capital stands.

> If you can explain to me how you convince a nontechnical person why 6 is not free, I’ll concede the point.

"I said the minimum is at 5, but if you want me to trace the line more accurately then let's take a 2 minute break and I'll do that".

I think the pointless argument here is the one you make.

Mostly free is not the same thing as free, and the scale of ‘carefulness’ is already completely arbitrary. How much more careful is 6 than 5?

You don’t have to argue about it, because the scale doesn’t represent anything. The only thing to say is, sure, we’ll set the carefulness to 6.

I agree with both of you, but consider that if this was a real meeting, you’ve both just wasted 10-15 minutes arguing about a line on the graph of a metaphor. (and yes I’ve seen this behaviour in meetings).

I agree with the original comment, as professionals we can do better than simplified analogies (or at least we should strive to)

Good insight, thanks for that

> you’ve both just wasted 10-15 minutes arguing about a line on the graph of a metaphor

So goddamned many times. And multiply your 2-10 minute sidebar by the number of people in the room. You just spent over $200 on a wobble in a line.

Plus you’ve usually lost the plot by that point.

Curve higher at one hand and one finger more.

I may be missing the point, but I'm not sure there is really an audience for this...obviously nice math typography is important for publishing, but I doubt the set of people who are comfortable with advanced math but who see translating those operations into a traditional plain-text programming language as a barrier, but would be fine with a more math-like syntax, is very large.

It's almost certainly not a large set of people. It's probably no larger than the set of professors and grad students who could use it. But it does seem very useful to those people. Incidentally, that's basically the same people that TeX was meant for originally.

My point is, wouldn't most of these people be fine with coding in Python/Matlab/Fortan/whatever?

Not that it isn't a cool idea!

My kid's writing a bunch of math in Tex and using it with tools like Desmos and Wolfram Alpha, and Lyx and what not, and then when it comes time to build simulations based on that math... he has to transpile it by hand to a programming language. This is terribly sub-optimal. Sure, one can build a transpiler to do it, but it'd be even neater if the authoring tool was more integrated with TeX math.

I guess I wasn't around to see it; do you mind saying why it's failed? Well, I don't know if it's commercially viable, but just speaking for myself I've been looking for something like this for a while.

The ones who use spreadsheet usually don't write code well.

The ones who code usually don't like spreadsheet.

What gets me is that even if you don't code much, if you're using a spreadsheet with formulas, in that moment you are writing code, and doing so in an awful, awful language. Sure, "SUM" is easy, but the moment you have any kind of conditional logic it gets pretty hairy. Maybe there's something about traditional spreadsheet languages that makes them easier than, say, numpy for non-coders, but I don't see it.

That's one of the reasons we started building Quadratic, it's a spreadsheet where everyone - technical or not can work with data in the same place. With our AI integration, anyone can start writing JS or Python for complex analysis or mix in formulas for simpler computations.

U can still google resolver one or was revolver one. It was bascilly the same thing but python.

If you give Quadratic a try, we'd love to hear your feedback - there's a button in the app :)

Maybe I'm in a middle generation? I'm certainly comfortable with programs where you have to save to a file, but for as long as I can remember, always every program I've used that doesn't autosave warns if you try to close it without saving. Web apps mostly autosave these days, but those that don't will also usually trigger the browser's "you may lose changes, do you really want to navigate away?" warning.

In my (I guess biased) opinion, this is a reasonable affordance to expect; throwing up a confirmation dialog is a lot less burdensome than implementing autosave. I would consider not doing so in this day and age an antipattern.

Author here. That's a standard dialog built into the browser, which of course was implemented from Day 1. The problem is that people leave tabs open for indefinite time, the browser regularly saves memory by emptying old tabs and then it's gone.

Am I the only one who cringes at the name of this tool? The implication being that it's a way to churn out low-quality papers, probably with some p-hacking along the way.

> These aren't things that a computer has trouble with

They are irrelevant for executing the code, but they're probably pretty relevant for an LLM that is ingesting the code and text and inferring its function based on other examples it has seen. It's definitely more impressive that an LLM can succeed at this without the context of (correct) variable names than with them.

It's true, this type of nuance usually doesn't make it into papers for every paper they cite (otherwise, they would be 10x as long), but ime researchers take every study with a grain of salt in real life. I guess someone whose only interaction with science is through reading research papers would never know this and have the impression that many questions are much more settled than they actually are (although there are also opinion and review papers that attempt to assess the actual state of evidence at a given point in time).

It can be more efficient when combining both Alt-Tab and Alt-` - if you have several windows open in multiple different apps, it's easier to first Alt-Tab to the app you want and then Alt-` to the window you want rather than Alt-Tabbing through like 20 individual windows.

That being said, I don't really strongly prefer one system over the other; the main cost is in switching between them and using the wrong shortcut for a while (more a problem on the OS with 2 shortcuts, i.e. Linux). This would be helpful to avoid that, but so would configuring whatever Linux windows manager I'm using to only use Alt-Tab.

Can't you just install it in your environment in another terminal and then import?

Sure, but it's a few extra steps. It's been proven(tm) that many people prefer a single, simple thing they can just copy, paste and run, so they can get back to their main concern.

And some may not want it actually installed for whatever reason. Such as when there's no proper separation between dev and prod deps. (I'm mostly just guessing at this point though...)