You can tell it's slop because of the way that it is.
The heading "The type system is gradual, and that is the whole design" is a dead giveaway.
Actually the whole "How young this is" section reads very LLM-y. Claude, I think? It's funny that LLMs have more distinctive authorial voices than so many people.
Yes, Claude, good ear :) The compiler was built with agents; the repo has an AGENTS.md describing how they're used. Without them this would have taken me months instead of days. But the design is mine, and so are the mistakes. The decisions that shape the whole thing, byte-for-byte compatibility with existing .tex, gradual typing with an explicit unknown (`?O`) instead of trying to type all of LaTeX, and review comments living inside the file, come from years of writing papers in Overleaf and wanting more from the compiler than "Missing } inserted". Vitela (https://vitela.artificialfallibility.com/) exists because once the compiler knows more, the editor can show it. Fair hit on the prose, though. I'll rewrite that section myself.
Have you seen Finding Forrester? It's a lot easier to write once you've got a frame and a few sentences you don't like on the page!
It's great to use these tools to give you more time to be a human, but the ReadMe is for humans, and is dramatically improved by being set in your voice. The problem is that when your project description looks like the result of a solid twenty minute prompt session it woefully undersells the rest of the project.
It might be cool! I might bother to learn it! But I'm not going to care more than you about it.
Not to brag, but I caught it on the first sentence.
> ExactTeX is LaTeX with gradual annotation: you name the object you want checked, and what you do not name stays ordinary LaTeX, transported byte for byte.
This "byte for byte" phrase was the giveaway. You'll find it everywhere. I really detest these slop projects.
I understand why it's hard, but it's very funny to get ads for a product I've bought for weeks/months after completing the purchase.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.
But I won't. From the deepest depths of my heart and my soul, I will not and I will never return something I bought for a competitor's product because I was served an ad.
It's not a positive signal, because for the lifespan of that product I just bought, I have removed myself from the addressable market.
Advertisers getting hosed is pretty much standard with digital ads. Platforms and agencies tell you how amazing their adtech is, but various forms of fraud and dodgy practises seem to be rampant.
Well-meaning activists lobbied to make toilets free, but they didn't build a base to support the continued use and maintenance of those now-free toilets.
"Most European capitals are targets for our air force... We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."
> We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.
> We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.
> possibly causing irreparable damage to the entire world
These people definitely don't speak for all Israelis but they certainly do a disservice to all of them. They feed exactly the kind of negative sentiment that more and more people have, with written proof.
This is why I talked about their speech doing a disservice to all Israelis, not their ability to act with authority. If you need an LLM to interpret 2 short sentences, here is what it thinks:
> No. That sentence does not suggest the people are in the government or military.
> It reads like you mean a group of civilians or public voices whose statements harm perceptions of Israelis generally. “Speak for all Israelis” implies they’re not representatives, not officials.
Have you experienced addiction before? Nicotine withdrawal doesn't make your hand move on it's own, it makes you crave a cigarette, and then you pick up a cigarette and smoke it to make the craving go away.
If you crave scrolling instagram, even when you want to be doing anything else, isn't that the same thing? Maybe you can't point at a specific molecular basis - yet (if you were to look at dopamine and other neurotransmitters, I wouldn't be surprised if social media spikes them in a way similar to other vices) - but the outcome is the same.
Right. There's now chemical, biological and digital addictions to account for. GLP-1s seem to help with some of the needy hunger for, not just food, but the dopamine rush of gambling. Science is still waiting on studies to prove this is true, but anecdotally, it's a thing. So there's my hope for the future, that we can science our way out of some of the problems we've created.
They don't though. At least not all, and not most of the newer ones.
All of the DC designs I've worked on the last few years have all included heat absorption chillers driven by engine exhaust (for reciprocating engine power plants) and HRSGs with steam driven chillers for the turbine power plants.
Indeed, we've largely missed the point of the "David and Goliath" story. David rolled up to a sword fight with a handgun.
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