TeX, LaTeX and Friends

4:35 AM

@Skillmon Thanks for detailed review comments

6:15 AM

@JosephWright I'm not fully through it, I think half way at most. And I don't guarantee to have spotted all issues, for large parts I just scrolled over it noticing that some \exp_args: and \cs_generate_variants:Nn have shifted...

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon Got it

David Carlisle

9:34 AM

@JosephWright I found the spec for the UCD files.... Leading and trailing spaces within a field are not significant. However, no leading or trailing spaces are allowed in any field of UnicodeData.txt. For legacy reasons, no spaces are allowed before or after the semicolon in LineBreak.txt and in EastAsianWidth.txt.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Sigh

David Carlisle

@JosephWright TR44 unicode.org/reports/tr44/#Character_Properties

Rmano

10:37 AM

@samcarter thanks for tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10128/…

samcarter

10:48 AM

@Rmano You're welcome! Without such an addon, I would get totally crazy!

Rmano

@samcarter I was envying the one they add to GitHub, now I have it also here. I think it's very handy.

David Carlisle

@samcarter but we thought you were crazy anyway

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle <3 Oh, so I can talk about ducks all day long :)

David Carlisle

11:11 AM

@samcarter ooh lunch

samcarter

oh no :)

Skillmon

11:29 AM

@samcarter tridactyl would have you covered as well: Press v hit the numbers showing up on the top left of the code-block window-thingy, then hit y...

samcarter

@Skillmon Is this also available in an emacs version? /duck und weg :)

Skillmon

@samcarter why would you like to cripple your fingers with all those strange key combinations?

samcarter

12:21 PM

@Skillmon That's exactly what I was wondering when I saw the shortcuts of this addon :)

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon You got your wish ;)

Skillmon

1:07 PM

@samcarter why? f is easy to reach, gt is first press g then press t, so no two keys pressed simultaneously. The times in which I need to press two keys simultaneously are very few.

@JosephWright the "don't document the lot" wish?

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon Indeed

@Skillmon github.com/latex3/latex3/pull/1271/commits/…

Paulo Cereda

2:08 PM

Who loves tables? overleaf.com/blog/…

4

David Carlisle

2:21 PM

@PauloCereda good thing to have dinner on

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oh no

Skillmon

2:56 PM

@JosephWright github.com/latex3/latex3/pull/1271/commits/… adds a Nx variant to the documentation instead of removing it.

(but might be correct, is in a macro block, not a function)

Ulrike Fischer

4

mickep

3:18 PM

@UlrikeFischer Oh, somebody is enjoying the sun! :)

While @DavidCarlisle is trying to unbend the lines (tex.stackexchange.com/q/697060/52406) :))

(now he will blame the language...)

David Carlisle

@mickep did you understand that question?

mickep

@DavidCarlisle Well, I guess that line bends down. (Of course not!)

David Carlisle

@mickep It looks OK to me:

3

mickep

@DavidCarlisle Oh, the rhomb class! :)

Joseph Wright

3:37 PM

@Skillmon That's in the code block, no?

David Carlisle

@Rmano you are looking at the wrong image.

Rmano

@DavidCarlisle you is bending in the wrong way ;-P

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright I hadn't had the time to look at the code yet, but is there a debug option to find all the x-variants if one wants to change the code of a package?

samcarter

4:05 PM

@UlrikeFischer Any nice cars around? theguardian.com/travel/2021/oct/02/…

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Not at the moment: would be doable as it's all non-expandable

@UlrikeFischer I guess I could/should move them all to the deprecation module, but that would be awkward here: I think easier would be to patch \exp_args:N..x

David Carlisle

4:30 PM

@UlrikeFischer just grep ':[enNvVof]*x' on your generated files?

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle that could work.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Sounds like how I've been doing the changes

@DavidCarlisle @UlrikeFischer I see you are assuming this will get merged ;)

Rmano

@JosephWright hmmm... can we have then a nice blog entry explaining this for common mortals 🤯?

😉

Joseph Wright

@Rmano Oh, yes, if it goes ahead

David Carlisle

4:46 PM

This is really unfortunate. We stress to users that they should include minimal working examples in questions, I've answered 14 thousand of those questions, some with multiple code blocks to make an example, that's tens of thousnds of times having to select the start of a code, scroll the div then shift select to get the end. The argument that copying should be made difficult on purpose on a site whose entire purpose is to let people ask other people about some code seems bizarre to say the least. -1, sorry (and I very rarely downvote) — David Carlisle 47 secs ago

6

Rmano

4:57 PM

@JosephWright <3

Skillmon

5:30 PM

@JosephWright when I created that link it was in a {macro} environment's argument (but not in the user documentation, in the implementation section -- I guess it's fine there)

@Rmano simple explanation: e better x, end of the story.

:P

Joseph Wright

5:48 PM

@Skillmon In the implementation we have the functions marked up so they show in the index properly, etc.

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle What's the "this" you're referring to? I looked back but didn't find anything.

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon Just think 'Jag' - @DavidCarlisle checked, and the e-type is better ;)

@AlanMunn Follow the link back to the meta thread this comments on

Alan Munn

@JosephWright lol In linguistics we have e-type pronouns. :)

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Ooh - what are they?

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn "This" == the answer provided by the staff contact.

Joseph Wright

5:50 PM

-6

A: Better experience on this website - Copying code to clipboard

After discussing this with the other CMs, we've decided to decline this request. We already has enough issues with folks copying and pasting without attribution, so this would require further investigation to determine whether it would be worth implementing (and how to mitigate the risks). Our de...

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Ah, ok. I hadn't read that response.

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn It's expected (as surely SO ask a lot) but disappointing

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle You know they screwed up things when the TeX.sx people downvoted. :)

David Carlisle

6:06 PM

@PauloCereda burnt duck?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oh no

samcarter

8:42 PM

@DavidCarlisle What a silly reason! Do they really think less people will use the code if it unnecessarily annoying to copy it? If a user needs a solution and gets or finds one on stackexchange, they will use it regardless of how annoying copying is. Worst case the will add some random typos while retyping the thing or miss some lines at the end.

Joseph Wright

@samcarter Well yes, but I'm sure that argument has been made: what's clear is that our use case is not identical to the SO one, so it's a shame we can't get anything 'just of us'

Paulo Cereda

8:54 PM

@DavidCarlisle ^^

samcarter

@JosephWright Maybe copying isn't so important with the incomplete code fragments on SO, but I don't believe this influences attribution. If somebody has a problem, they will use the answer regardless how hard copying is - with or without attribution.

@PauloCereda Ducks are very expensive :)

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter huzzah for terrible economy :)

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Checking, we only need to adjust \use:x to get a deprecation warning for all x-type variants

@samcarter I agree: it's weak

samcarter

@JosephWright The "Devs don't have time" argument is much more convincing.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright ^^ accurate :)

David Carlisle

9:06 PM

@samcarter because they are too busy adjusting the up/down voting icons so you can't tell if you have voted or not.

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle I'm very happy they messed up the voting icons so badly - half a dozen userscripts suddenly appeared and I now have the iconic pen nibs back :)

user1271772

9:29 PM

@samcarter Why wouldn't they have time?

samcarter

@user1271772 ... the company fired many employes earlier this year and repurposed many of the remaining ones for the AI experiments. Reading on main meta, they need to cut all kinds of things short...

user1271772

@samcarter Apart from AI experiments, what else are the developers doing?

samcarter

@user1271772 Collectives and Discussions seems to be their favourite toy these days. People on SO meta hate both of them :)

-9

Q: Update on Collectives and Discussions

We’ve got some interesting and important updates for you today. Notably, a new collective is launching, focused on Mobile Development. There’s a separate post about that new collective where those interested in the topic can consider some specific questions and provide feedback on how the collect...

user1271772

@samcarter Is there a specific Meta post to which you're referring, when you mention the fired employees? Would it be in this list?

samcarter

There also seems to be a bigger project about their network infrastructure ongoing - in which they broke all old bookmarks to per site metas ...

@user1271772 There was a specific post, let me see if I find it.

-52

Q: 2023 Layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff (2023-05-10)

A few minutes ago, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar posted a note to our blog to share the news that Stack Overflow has made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by 58 people, or about 10% of our total staff. Impacted employees have now been notified, and have had a chance to speak with our P...

discussion stack-exchange announcements stack-exchange-team company

user1271772

9:44 PM

@samcarter What do you mean by old bookmarks?

samcarter

13

Q: meta.*.stackexchange.com redirection does not work

In 2017, all child Meta sites moved from meta.*.stackexchange.com to *.meta.stackexchange.com. According to Network-wide HTTPS: It's time there is an automatic redirection: We've redirected all child meta traffic from meta.*.stackexchange.com to *.meta.stackexchange.com, and are now forcing HTTP...

bug status-review per-site-meta ssl connectivity

@user1271772 I still had a ton of bookmarks to things like the FAQ list which all broke when they switched off the redirect.

user1271772

@samcarter Sorry to hear that!

I haven't used bookmarks for over a decade I think.

@samcarter So in terms of laying off CMs, it was just Nicolas Chabanovsky (because they decided that the Russian Stack Overflow is no longer important because of a war happening which involves people that speak that language?) and "Salmon of Wisdom" (who I never saw do anything anyway) that were laid off?

samcarter

@user1271772 I'm more worried about the dev team. I read somewhere on meta they lost about 20% of their team.

user1271772

10:04 PM

@samcarter It sounds like they would have lost a lot of people, because only two CMs were lost. Considering that CMs have mainly been doing things that no one asked for and no one wants, I think it should have been the other way around.

-14

A: Please enable MathJax

At this time, we are declining the request to enable MathJax. Given that there seems to be a healthy amount of debate on its merits and the value it may or may not bring, I think we need to give this one a bit more time. While I understand that some questions might benefit from it, I am hesitant ...

samcarter

@user1271772 Given the size of the CM team, that's a significant percentage.

user1271772

@samcarter The CM team is huge! Have you seen any of them do anything useful/helpful/positive lately?

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Strap in... So pronouns can be referential (roughly point to things in the world) or bound variables (vary according to some quantifier they are connected to). So when we say Sara said she's busy 'she' picks out either a third person in the discourse or simply points to Sara. But when we say Every woman said she was busy, we interpret the pronoun either as picking out a third person in the discourse, or acting as a variable bound by every, roughly ∀x ( say(x) busy(x)).

Bound variable pronouns typically can't be bound across sentences: So you can't say I talked to every woman. She was sick So they are quite sensitive to syntax in a way that referential pronouns are not.

user1271772

10:19 PM

@AlanMunn Is this a verbose way of saying that "they" is okay to describe a single person?

Alan Munn

@user1271772 No, this is an independent fact, but 'they' is definitely the preferred pronoun for most of us in bound variable contexts. I didn't use it because it's a distraction that's not actually relevant.

user1271772

@AlanMunn Do you have any evidence to support your claim that it's "definitely" the preferred pronoun for "most of us" in bound variable contexts?

Alan Munn

@user1271772 It's been that way since the Early Modern English period at least in spoken language for antecedents of indefinite gender. If the gender is known, then the gendered pronoun is obviously possible too, although my students, for example, have a strong preference for 'they' in all bound variable contexts.

user1271772

@AlanMunn so you changed "most of us" to "my students"?

samcarter

@user1271772 I wouldn't call a dozen people or so "huge"

Alan Munn

10:29 PM

@JosephWright Gareth Evans, who was a philosopher, argued that there's a class of pronouns that look kind of like bound variables, but are not. These are the pronouns that we get in examples like If a man owns a horse, he probably rides it where the "it" also seems to be a variable (bound to the existential quantifier "a donkey"). Evans called this type of pronouns, e-type.

user1271772

@samcarter why not?

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Probably more than you bargained for. :)

user1271772

e-type meaning existential-type?

samcarter

@user1271772 why should I?

Alan Munn

@user1271772 No, he never explained what e stood for. Many people think it was just a joke, partially because his name was Evans, and partially a play on the Jaguar car.

user1271772

10:33 PM

@samcarter one example would be the fact that until very recently (2018) we used to have only three CMs: Shog09, Robert Cartaino, and Jon Ericson (please correct me if I'm missing any)?

Alan Munn

@user1271772 Where did a dozen come from? I've been teaching syntax twice a year for close to 30 years, with classes of ~20-30 each and this is a pretty stable judgement of my students. It's also my own judgement and we have plenty of literature showing that even individuals judgements on this kind of data are in fact reliable, as in there is strong agreement when you do a corresponding experiment.

user1271772

Rosie, Philippe, Slate, Charlotte (Vanny), V2Blast, SpencerG, Bella_blue, Berthold, Dalmarus, Emerson, and Sasha are all quite new.

samcarter

@user1271772 meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/99341/63

user1271772

@samcarter I forgot about Tim Post!

Alan Munn

@samcarter @user1271772 It seems that there's two conversations happening here. :) So the 'dozen' had nothing to do with the number of my students.

user1271772

10:39 PM

@AlanMunn If you click the arrow on the left of the messages, you'll see that the "dozen" comment was a response to something that had nothing to do with your students.

samcarter

@AlanMunn no :) In a class, a dozen students can be huge depending on the subjects. While studying, I was in some courses with far less students

user1271772

@samcarter why did you pick that revision out of all of them?

@samcarter fewer* students.

sorry!

Alan Munn is a linguist right? I felt that I had to do that!

samcarter

@user1271772 I was one of the revs from 2018, the year you mentioned.

Alan Munn

@user1271772 Yes I'm aware of how chat works. :) I just thought you were complaining about my generalization and the 'dozens' comment was part of that.

@user1271772 Then you don't know many linguists...we're very big on the idea that if people say it, it's right. :)

user1271772

@samcarter it was only one of the many revs from 2018, and to refute my assumption that we had 3 until about 2018, it would only make sense to pick something from before 2018 (such as 2017) right?

@AlanMunn Really?

samcarter

10:42 PM

@user1271772 You can pick whatever revision you like

Alan Munn

@user1271772 Absolutely. Criticizing people's language is just a form of bigotry, ultimately. Anyway I need to get going. Nice chatting with you.

3

user1271772

@AlanMunn Wow, you just called me a bigot and then said you have to leave?

@samcarter that's true, but doesn't answer the question.

I admit that I was wrong about 12 being "huge". It just seems like the CMs have nothing better to do than nothing.

It seems you agree:

40 mins ago, by user1271772

@samcarter The CM team is huge! Have you seen any of them do anything useful/helpful/positive lately?

You responded to the first sentence but not to the question after it!

samcarter

11:02 PM

@user1271772 No responding to something does not mean I agree (or disagree).

user1271772

11:13 PM

@samcarter okay but it suggests that you're unable to come up with any examples?

samcarter

@user1271772 No, it does not suggest this. And I find it rather rude that you keep pressing people to give their opinion about a topic completely unrelated to the original discussion about how much dev time is available.

user1271772

11:31 PM

@samcarter Not everything has to be related to the "original discussion", but I will stop pressing you. For the record, not responding to that question does suggest that you don't have an answer, which is okay. Just because something is "suggested", doesn't mean it's "true".

There's also only one person that I asked to give an opinion about that topic, so I think it's misleading to say that there were "people", but no worries, I don't mind ending it there!

TeXnician

@user1271772 Just because you want something to be true does not make it true either, regardless of what things may suggest in international chatrooms crossing language and cultural barriers ;)

user1271772

@TeXnician You seem to want to start a fight. I'm not going to engage with it, sorry.

cfr

@AlanMunn Predicate calculus. I never thought about it in linguistics, but it makes sense. (Historically, anyway.)

Is anyone familiar with the violin plots library? There's a quite detailed question about it which I made the mistake of commenting on, but I rarely use even the standard (presumably less buggy) standard plots.

TeXnician

11:46 PM

@cfr No but according to the manual section “Limitations” this user's approach of using pgfplotsset is supposed to work, so if it does not, it might make sense to bring this to the library author's attention on his issue tracker (github.com/pedro-callil/tikzviolinplots).

cfr

Ac eithrio pan mae'n culfarn?

@TeXnician Thanks. I've temporarily lost the question, but I'll suggest that.

(I saw that in the documentation, too.)

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends