@MichaelHomer What language is that?

@AndrasDeak The international take on the farmer protests. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/24/…

Not a very good article, and way too polite towards the Thing that calls itself India's Prime Minister.

Why don't they just call It a fascist? Because that's what It is.

I just got a gold badge on something called the discussion tag. Never heard of it. Does anyone know what this is about?

@FaheemMitha meta

Click on the notification for the badge.

@terdon My activity on U&L meta is approximately zero, and pretty much always has been.

And you're not listed here: unix.meta.stackexchange.com/help/badges/110/discussion

Apparently, I'm the only one who has that one.

Maybe you got it on another site? What do you see if you click on the notification?

@terdon Maybe silver or bronze.

One sec.

Sorry, it's bronze. 100 total score. Your gold one is 1000.

Still not sure how I got that many points.

Yeah, bronze. A bunch of them were awarded 12 hours ago. I guess SE changed something.

9 of our oldest and most active users got the badge "12 hours ago".

You have more than enough activity to get it: unix.meta.stackexchange.com/… Probably a bug had caused you not to get it until now.

@terdon I see.

Yeah, bug:

You're being reawarded old badges that were deleted by mistake

@terdon Ah, SQL.

@AndrasDeak I was using pdflatex and datatool with my old files (most letters), and switched to LuaTeX and an actual db around 2019, which is much faster. I was debating whether to convert all my files to LuaTeX. But it could be a fair amount of work. On the plus side, the compilation would speed up considerably. Probably.

datatool is really a rather useless thing. But don't tell the author I said so.

Is there context for this? I slept very little :)

@AndrasDeak Not really. I'm 80% talking to myself.

@AndrasDeak I hope you're doing OK.

OK, I just wasn't sure

@FaheemMitha yeah, just indulging my vices (contributing to open-source)

Most of the things I was asking about here in the last few days was related to this.

But I didn't bother to mention that. Since I doubted anyone would care.

@AndrasDeak That's not a vice.

@FaheemMitha isn't luatex backwards compatible with regular tex? Or is it datatool that it's incompatible with?

Unless you consider that everything should be paid work.

@FaheemMitha I know :P

@AndrasDeak LuaTeX is backwards compatible with everything. That isn't the issue.

But thanks for your concern. I'm all good.

The issue is that datatool is horrific to use, and the slowest thing imaginable. Like an arthritic snail. So I needed to get rid of it.

But conventional TeX doesn't have good alternatives. Hence LuaTeX.

More information available on request. :-)

I think I'm good for now, thanks :)

:-)

Of course snails can't get arthritis...

@AndrasDeak Because they don't have an endoskeleton?

LuaTeX is quite helpful, because you get access to the entire universe, instead of being confined to what TeX has. It does involve writing Lua, unfortunately. But one can't have everything.

Currently compiling all my PDFLaTeX files with pdflatex, with a timer. Let's see how many hours it takes. Sigh.

@FaheemMitha yeah, nor arthron

@terdon One of the numerous irritating things about Lua is this kind of thing.

faheem@orwell:~$ lua5.4
Lua 5.4.0  Copyright (C) 1994-2020 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> a = {}
> print(a)
table: 0x559796b974f0

Apparently the maintainers of Lua think this is helpful. Spoiler: it isn't.

Presumably, a is a reference to a hash structure?

@terdon That's just a Lua array. Lua's only non-trivial data structure.

OK, looks like it stores it as a pointer.

I think.

@terdon Yes, roughly speaking.

If you want to iterate over a Lua array, you have to do it yourself.

There are lots of recipes on the net. Very typical of Lua.

If Python is "batteries included", Lua's motto might be "we don't need no stinking batteries, and if you want them, make 'em yourself".

@AndrasDeak Not as bad as I expected.

real    24m31.408s
user    22m46.001s
sys     1m41.497s

Still, not really something you want to wait around for. That's for all the PDFTeX files in a particular directory. Probably most of my PDFTeX files. Without datatool it would probably be much faster.

@FaheemMitha Is speed so important though? How often do you need to re-compile all tex files in a directory?

Whenever I work on something I recompile multiple times a minute, often. Even a 10-second increase become terrible to wait for. Case in point: beamer slides that grow to 200 pages with overlays.

And you normally want to compile at least twice to get references updated

@FaheemMitha so at least they've made it in our news yesterday

@terdon In general, never. But I've been trying to clean things up. Part of which is checking which TeX files compile cleanly.

@AndrasDeak They? The farmers?

@FaheemMitha yeah

@terdon As @AndrasDeak said, you need to recompile very often when working on a TeX file. And waiting on datatool can quickly become unbearable.

@AndrasDeak Hopefully with some pretense of objectivity.

The corporate press here is really terrible. They keep trying to think of new ways to slander the famers.

The farmers themselves are handling this very well. But they have all the advice (legal and otherwise) that they could want.

@FaheemMitha I saw it on a strongly liberal news site, so if it's not objective they are probably leaning toward the farmers. But I didn't read the article.

And they seem to have a fairly good idea of how the current Central "government" works.

@AndrasDeak Oh? Why not?

@AndrasDeak Oh yes, of course. I had just understood that Faheem is going over already finished projects, which is why I was thinking that it might not be worth the effort.

I was just checking, systematically, for breakage. And there was some.

TeX doesn't change. Nor does base LaTeX. But other things do.

@FaheemMitha because I've already read about the protests and the siege

@terdon OK

@AndrasDeak Ah, ok.

@FaheemMitha haha yes my disabilities are exposed for all to see when i neglect to spell check, but yeah absolutely i am very much about promoting things like letters of appreciation, the people that make the real impact in our lives are never the ones that ensure we are spammed with their presence in all possible in our faces, nope the introverted altruists in world shape its future, and thats the core of my concern about things that worry me, e.g this "incel" ridicule that keeps appearing

in the social media, if i ever got the chance, id sit some these kids down and tell them a few things that would most definitely alter their view for the better, once they know they at least dont have to feel bad about being the outsider in social respects

sorry to clarify my point, the thing about being introverted, is that it inevitably becomes a lonely and isolated life no matter how long they keep at it, and so things like communicating appreciation of the efforts of people of this nature are examples of simple gestures that make all the difference sometimes in giving them the sense of worth that is due, between others in the same fields of study, i just worrry that popular culture is in a sense choking the most important things in the world

Not that I'm following what you're talking about, but being introverted doesn't imply you'll be lonely and isolated.

I spotted signs of a feud during an upgrade

@AdamL What does "incel" mean?

@AdamL I imagine donations are also appreciated.

@FaheemMitha very can-of-worms concept, you better read the wiki page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incel

@AndrasDeak Oh, Well, that describes most of the planet.

Certainly in India.

Oh, never mind. I read the entire description, and I take it back.

@FaheemMitha yeah

it's intertwined with some really toxic circles on the internet (mostly mysogyny-related)

@AndrasDeak Hmm. There's a lot of that going on as well. Predates the Internet, of course.

But the Internet is helpful in organizing different kinds of people.

Misogyny (not mysogyny) is actually big business world-wide. It's central to pornography, at least in my opinion. I don't know what the academics think, if anything.

right

@FaheemMitha I'm not in academics but I consider myself somewhat of a pornographic scholar, ask away

@jesse_b Actually, I said as much to you once, and you disagreed. But you may not remember.

Once upon a time, people thought the Internet would be a way for improving communication and understanding. I guess you have to be careful what you wish for.