@barbara Not surprising. Do you also buy lotto tickets? :) Probably not a lotto them.

@AlanMunn -- I tend not to gamble, but for some reason, that t isn't geminated. Pronounced more in the local Rhode Island manner, maybe even slightly voiced, but not enough to be mistaken for the lado (the national dance of Croatia).

@barbarabeeton Did you see the tweet?

@CarLaTeX Don't worry about nicknames. My manager is Ryan and is a she. Twas a surprise anlt my job interview tbh.

@yo' Oh yes, foreign names are funny. They call women "Andrea", which meaning is "man". Not to mention Nicola Talbot, who is a woman, whereas "Nicola" is a male name in Italian... Foreigners thinks that everything ending with "a" is feminine, it is not so, lol!

@yo' However I posted here the tweet for the mention to van Duck's article, not for the wondering about the nickname :D

@CarLaTeX tell it to me... my niece is Andrea and her mother is Rosario... :-P

Today I learned that (a bit more than in theory) it is possible to run Ubuntu in TeX: Using hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building-the-worst-linux-pc-ever and avremu

@Rmano :D

@barbarabeeton Not counting my grandmother and my moms sister I have only known two women in my entire life with the same name as me. It's super weird when someone says it and is not talking to me XD (hasn't happened in years!) For the last twenty or so years though I've been Tex more than Þórhalla :þ And I still don't run into anyone called that XD

@Plergux I also have a quite rare name (it's a long and fun/sad story). Just curiosity: how is Þórhalla pronounced?

@Rmano Th- as in "through" -ow- as in "bow" -r- as in "true" if you're Scottish :þ -ha- as in "hat" -dl" as in "puddle" and -a as in hat. :þ

@yo' Yes, was the same for me back in the day :)

@CarLaTeX She's not really "foreign", she's as American as she can be :)

twitter.com/tryst_me/status/1466966861271158789

@samcarter LOL, so going to the store and asking for computer crisps XD

@Plergux ooh Chris P. Bacon

@PauloCereda LOL, reminds me of Rowan Atkinsons roll call sketch. :þ

@Plergux ooh

@Plergux :)

@samcarter ooh Bahn twitter.com/shouldhaveaduck/status/1467736119257157635

Great start of the week: installing an siunitx update :)

@PauloCereda ohh!

@samcarter Frank keeps asking questions ;)

@JosephWright ooh pesky Germans :)

@JosephWright Frank wants the party :)

@JosephWright How isn't longtable ever updated? :)

@PauloCereda Ask @DavidCarlisle

@samcarter He wants a picture of me ...

@Skillmon ^^ <3

@PauloCereda QUACKS, MOVES NOSE TO SAY HELLO

@JosephWright Here is a good one: i.stack.imgur.com/fMWpl.png

@JosephWright ooh

@PauloCereda is this @Skillmon on the right hand side?

@samcarter quack :)

@samcarter twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/1467553978200297475

@PauloCereda :P

@samcarter twitter.com/kadoomed/status/1467556913789480960

His bio LOL

ooh

@PauloCereda If you get FMi to adopt you, you could claim that ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=28551 is named after you :)

@samcarter ooh

@JosephWright ask Frank:-)

@yo' An American is a foreigner from an Italian point of view :D

@CarLaTeX yeah, but it's not like there's a language issue like with "Nicola" (which is a boy's name in Slovak but a girl's name in Czech, primarily). It's that "Ryan" is seen as a boy's name primarily, even in US English, so it's surprising to see a US native English-speaking lady with this name :)

@JosephWright PL1 didn't go out?

@DavidCarlisle Went this morning after I sorted the PDFs: I'll fix l3build later

@yo' Ah OK parents choose strange names for their children :D

@JosephWright ah OK, thanks

@CarLaTeX oh they do :) but apparently in that time and location it was seen as a universal name. Like "Lee", for instance, which though went the other way to become more of a girl's name

@CarLaTeX \looks around shiftily

@CarLaTeX My second daughter is called "My-Tilde" (not first name), which also can be written as \tilde\mu. :)

@mickep ooh

@mickep ahah

@Plergux Is @Plergux your real name?

^^^ very nice name -- no space problems on xmas socks :)

overleaf.com/1221984243dhcmwdfppjpq ibb.co/0QdzvVk

can someone help create that structure in latex?

@VisheshMangla there are hundreds of example of front pages on this site or elsewhere if you are getting erros it would be better to make an example showing the error and then post as a question on the main site

@samcarter Haha, nice! (I think of it as \tilde{\mu}, which sometimes denotes an eigeinvalue ...)

@mickep OH, that's even more compact :)

@samcarter Very nice socks, by the way! :)

@mickep Unfortunately not mine, but random picture from the internet

@samcarter Oh, I just assumed you did them in tikz!

@mickep Don't give me ideas :)

@samcarter We need perhaps a pair of tikz-socks packages :)

@CarLaTeX No, but I named my kid Dragon :þ Plergux is a brand name of sorts. :þ

@PauloCereda By the way, I created a playlist for you: weirdspot.fyi/result?share=dd8a9d7e-b163-4e4b-9f74-10643c4f7c71

@mickep ooh

@mickep oh no

@CarLaTeX -- Yes I did! Very nice!

@Plergux Wow a Dragon in family

@barbarabeeton Indeed!

@CarLaTeX As a matter of fact his name is Ýmir Dreki (dragon) so he is a giant and a dragon :þ

@Plergux Ooohhh

@CarLaTeX Actually I am also a dragon, according to the Chinese Zodiac. A fire dragon no less :þ

@Plergux Ooohhh

@Plergux ooh a dreka kindur

@PauloCereda drekakind singular, drekakindur plural :) If you want to make a new word in Icelandic just smush them together. :þ

@Plergux ooh Icelandic is the new German

@PauloCereda LOL, Germanic certainly :þ

@Plergux ooh a neuwort

@PauloCereda :p

@Plergux -- Is double-l always pronounced "dl"? In a former life I worked with an Australian computer scientist who always pronounced "hill" as "hidl", and we always used to tease him about it. But maybe he just learned this from an Icelandic friend? (@AlanMunn?)

bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-59545622

@samcarter ooh a tee-rex :)

@barbarabeeton I had no idea that a double 'll' in Icelandic was pronounced like that. But it seems a very unlikely pronunciation for an English speaker.

@PauloCereda :P

@barbarabeeton Nearly always. There are of course exceptions, some times the only difference being the origin of the word. Thus the given name Halli is pronounced with the dl when derived from the female name Halla (which in turn is derived from Hallur), but the nickname Halli does not have it when used as a diminutive of Haraldur.

@Plergux -- Aha! Another dragon. (How did you find out the fire part?)

@barbarabeeton Also, loans that don't have the dl don't tend to have it, such as Bella and tjilla (chill). :þ

@barbarabeeton The first part of what?

@Plergux fire part :)

@Plergux -- Not "first", but "fire" in "fire dragon".

@barbarabeeton wow, my brain is not working today XD

@barbarabeeton I was pretty sure I read it in a book my dad had way back. He likes all kind of "mystic" stuff :þ But to double check now I just googled "chinese zodiac 1976" and sure enough it said "fire dragon" :þ

@Plergux -- Oh, thanks! Have you ever read any Ann McCaffrey? I think I'd rather enjoy having a fire lizard around. (Our cars have all been named after dragons, ever since the first, Fafnir, a two-cycle Saab. The current ones are Canth and Mnementh, shortened to Nemnth on account of license plate limits. But if mine gives out, I'm thinking of a Mini, which I would name Smaug.)

@barbarabeeton Ursula Le Guin also has dragons.

@barbarabeeton No, I'm afraid McCaffrey is on my mile long "to read" list along with several other authors. Maybe when I've handed in my thesis completely I'll make a start of it. After all, if one wants to write one has to read :þ There are dragons in one of my stories but they don't really feature in the plot as such except as dinner XD

@FaheemMitha -- The image I remember best from Ursula Le Guin was a great blue heron. I love watching those birds -- I've never watched any other creature move so slowly and intently, and when the time is right, snap!

@Plergux -- Well, good luck on the thesis. You're in the home stretch now.

@barbarabeeton I don't remember any herons.

I was thinking specifically of Earthsea, though dragons may be featured elsewhere.

@barbarabeeton Yeah. Hopefully it's only a matter of days now :)

@FaheemMitha -- I'll try to look it up. It was in the first couple of paragraphs of a story, and the scene was quite like some I've viewed.

@Plergux You're writing a thesis? I didn't realise you were a student.

Earthsea dragons feel a bit more "real" than many others. They're not ravening monsters, but they aren't just transport, either.

@FaheemMitha :D Well, when one has been in the same university pretty much non stop for twenty years one wonders when one stops being a "student" :p But yes, I'm in the final steps of writing my doctoral thesis on the semantics of Icelandic colour terminology. I learned LaTeX only a little over a year ago for the specific purpose of helping me make my thesis as good as it can be :) (and totally not to procrastinate from finishing writing it :þ)

@Plergux Twenty years is a long time.

Icelandic colour terminology?

@Plergux The Devil probably rather likes TeX, because it stops people getting actual work done. Or at least, slows them way, way down.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, but I've enjoyed all of it because I've learned so much more than just the linguistics. I took poetry and creative writing classes, editing classes, I've done lab work, qualitative and quantitative research, translation and interpreting, ethics of research, et cetera.

@HenriMenke Have fixed an urgent l3build issue, next task on my list is pgf support

@Plergux Wow, that's a lot of stuff. As long as you like learning, I suppose.

@FaheemMitha Well, I spent about a month learning statistics and distributional math just so that I could do statistics in my thesis. And I hate maths. So I guess I like learning. :þ I'm also learning Greek on Duolingo and I've recently learned yoga and how to knit backwards. :þ

@Plergux That's a short time to learn statistics.

@FaheemMitha Well, I managed it. Granted, I didn't do very complicated statistics but there sure was a lot of p-values :þ

@Plergux People tend to misinterpret p values. Or so I hear.

So let's say... something like ^\let\a=b is an error, with TeX raising "missing { inserted"

@Plergux as long as you had no þ-values

Assume that I didn't write that \let and it's expanded from for example \othermacro

So I have ^\othermacro in the source code

@FaheemMitha I wouldn't know about that. I just know that my advisor objected to me saying in my thesis that the p-value is the percentage of chance given that I might be talking out my ass. XD

@user202729 yes, what non-error behaviour would you expect?

@user202729 Yes?

@user202729 the standard syntax would (as the error message says) be ^{\othermacro} with the missing brace supplied.

@Plergux Actually, statistics is general is a widely misunderstood topic.

Okay I know, wait, I'm thinking some more

And that's when people have learned anything about it, which is seldom.

How can I view what TeX has just gobbled? \errorcontextlines only show the future, not the past.

@DavidCarlisle no, didn't come across any of those. No room for þorns in a þesis :þ

@FaheemMitha it is bad to make sweeping unfounded generalisations, especially when discussing statistics.

In this case I can see \let\a=b but not the ^ before it.

@DavidCarlisle They aren't sweeping unfounded generalisations.

*digested

@DavidCarlisle given a normal curve one would assume that 90% would be a safe bet for non-comprehension of maths. :þ

@FaheemMitha so you say without any backing evidence, so it must be true.

It's based on direct experience, for one thing. I tried teaching the kids statistics. It was an uphill task. Something like calculus, for example, is a doodle in comparison.

Humans seem to have a hard time with probability to start with.

@Plergux that depends on your sample, If you only communicate people with math degrees then the results may be different.

@DavidCarlisle I didn't realise you required "backing evidence", but I have a PhD in statistics and also taught classes in it. Reluctantly.

And as seldom as possible.

Wait, actually

! Missing { inserted.
<to be read again>
                   \let
\othermacro ->\let
                   \a =bx
l.11 $2^\othermacro
                   $

This is the output

Okay looks like I should read on how to interpret errorcontextlines output

@user202729 so the last line shows the original context with^

Like I said, humans don't so well with probability. Hence the existence of those unholy gambling establishments.

No, even that doesn't work

For example

%! TEX program = pdflatex
%\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\documentclass{standalone}
%\usepackage[paper=a4paper,margin=0.6cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{unravel}
\begin{document}

\errorcontextlines=10000

\def\othermacro{\let\a=bx}
\def\main{2^\othermacro}
$\main$

\end{document}

! Missing { inserted.
<to be read again>
                   \let
\othermacro ->\let
                   \a =bx
l.12 $\main
           $
?

@DavidCarlisle Well, assuming maths people are the same as linguistics people then I'm not convinced. They might show a greater Dunning-Kruger effect but I'm not so sure that actual comprehension follows. :þ Quite apart from the fact that as with linguistics there are several different types of maths which are not statistics.

See? No ^

I should reread the error message section

If the tracingall output is readable enough I might as well write a GUI debugger

I also once attended a stat consulting class, where apparently the potential clients considered statistics to be magic. Spoilers: it isn't.

@user202729 in practice I'd do $\tracingall\main$ and get

~.\main ->2^\othermacro
{the character 2}
{superscript character ^}

~..\othermacro ->\let \a =bx
! Missing { inserted.
<to be read again>
                   \let
\othermacro ->\let
                   \a =bx
l.15 $\tracingall\main
                      $
?

Okay I have to admit that I didn't think of tracingall while debugging that one

...

Then you write them on paper?

@user202729 ?

To make sense of the output?

Well anyway

Maybe I'll see if tracingall output is machine-readable enough and make a GUI debugger or something out of that

@Plergux In the general population, 90% would be seriously on the low end. But I'm not clear what your context is.

I'd say like maybe 1 in a 1000 in the world population has any idea what maths is about. In places like India, it's lower.

@FaheemMitha Doesn't matter. I was mostly trying to be funny. :þ

Maybe not much lower.

@user202729 er well it could be more helpfull... errorcontextlines shows the macro expansion context so is fairly reliable and uniform for errors relating to expansion but here you have an error from the primitive ^ superscript and theerror reporting by tex primitives is a bit variable

Well yes

@user202729 never use paper for anything, an emacs buffer most likely,

If all the package writer check input valid before passing them to TeX primitive error messages would be 100x cleaner

But also could be 100x slower

@user202729 if possible at all.

Do like C++, set debug mode and release mode (... then, 100x more maintenance cost)

Thinking about it... in this case othermacro really can't do anything about it

Because how can it possibly know that it's right after a ^?

The stomach is weird.

@user202729 expl3 has debug checking mode that is slow and checks stuff compared with standard mode that is less slow and checks less stuff

Ah yes, I remember reading it somewhere here

@user202729 but even if \othermacro were coded in expl3 it would be no help here. To help you would have to replace ^ by an active version that tested for { and gave a more sensible error message (or worked) given ^\zzz that's possible except it breaks code that relies on ^ having its superscript catcode.

Yes, some things are hard wired into TeX.

To make the problem worse, the TeX executor is the only TeX syntax parser.

@PhelypeOleinik Thanks for the explanation, re

For the "display ^\let" case in this one unravel does help, but in more complex cases unravel will choke on some unimplemented commands.

@user202729 complain to Bruno, you may get lucky and he extends it.

So \dospecials already exists. And that macro is then saved to \ltxspecials while some messing around happens to \dospecials. And after that, \dospecials reverts back to its original definition.

But I'm unclear on the logic here. Shouldn't the reversion happen after the filecontents block is over?

@barbarabeeton guess from where I got the contraction of my name as a nickname... no site let your username be R'mano...

Good afternoon to everybody :-) @rmano hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Is there somebody that can you help this user?

I have put a bounty

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle or you can even get luckier and he doesn't come up with something that will destroy humanity. :)

Made a graph of my past relationships. It had an ex axis and a why axis. :)

@AlanMunn LOL

@PauloCereda \unravel\duck

@DavidCarlisle ooh

Friends, if you use Gravatar, please change your password NOW.

@JosephWright Very nice. Looking forward to it. Thanks for all the effort.

@PauloCereda How did you know my password is NOW?

@PauloCereda oh no (luckily I don't, but thanks for the warning!)

@PauloCereda I have 2FA and so should you :)

@HenriMenke ooh :)

@PauloCereda Mine is through Wordpress. What's happened? (And I have 2FA enabled).

@HenriMenke enabled. :)

@AlanMunn 114 million accounts were exposed, it seems.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29454695

haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#Gravatar

There doesn't seem to have been a breach of confidential data.

But enumeration of all public data of all users is also not great. Prepare for a spam wave.

@PauloCereda Luckily I used a 2 commas and 3 semicolons in my Gravatar password. That broke the CSV leak file.

@StefanKottwitz :)

@HenriMenke Indeed.

@HenriMenke Firefox Monitor warned me. :)

@FaheemMitha \dospecials is redefined such that it is "original \dospecials + custom catcodes + revert \dospecials change". It doesn't need to define an "end filecontents action" because the usage of \dospecials already reverts it to the correct state