Often supervisors/professors etc will also resist using typst because of the cognitive overhead on their already oversubscribed time. Typst has about 40 years of history to overcome and that will take a long time to do.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917469

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Alertness isn't the same thing as energy, which is why people who drink a lot of coffee often feel tired but "wired". The brain is alert but energy is low. Abstaining from coffee can "reset" the nervous system to an extent, but alertness and energy is largely determined by insulin levs in the body. So figuring out what works for you with diet is a much better way of getting more stable energy through the day, regardless of caffeine intake.

It so happens that when you solve for this problem, a ball bouncing against a wall, in this wave function paradigm then you end up with a non-zero probability that the ball appears on the other side of the wall.

I'm not sure if there is a deeper explanation at play here but that's how I understand it.

I agree in that sense that physics does not do well here. I actually think physics _cannot_ do well here. Physics (and the "hard" sciences more generally) are good at describing what something is, and how it interacts with things around it. We "know" by assembling individual pieces of information that form a consistent model, then declare that model to be true. When a piece of information outside of that model arises, we then have to call that model in question.

I do not "know" the Earth is spherical from direct experience. I do "know" it from other indirect means - reading, measurements, images from space and so on. I do not also think that Asimov is saying anything about how we know what we know - he just talks about how "science is wrong" is not a true statement. Science is always approximately correct, but how approximate is the question.

So perhaps I'm missing the point entirely here, but I don't understand your distinction of "instrumentalist knowledge" vs other kinds of knowledge. If you say physics cannot explain my knowledge that I enjoy watching the sunrise - then absolutely yes. That is not it's realm. In the same way that physics cannot explain the history of medieval China to me. A common issue among physicists is to assume that this is the only way to view the world, and I disagree with that. There are many systems of knowledge, and each is good at certain things. Rejecting one as the "global" system misses the richness of other kinds of knowledge building.

> From this point of view as our ability to connect experiment with outcome has increased our ability to actually say what it is we are even talking about outside of the purely instrumental has decreased since the 19th Century. Back then we though we knew that there were atoms or electrons or whatever. Light waves or photons. Now, I would argue very strenuously, we genuinely have no understanding at all of what those things are outside of a set of purely instrumental definitions which leave a lot to be desired.

I disagree with this entirely. The existence of QFT, and our knowledge of the inconsistency between say GR and the quantum realm does not negate the idea of photons and electrons as real, measurable quantities. The fact that we have GR does not negate the fact that we still use Newtonian gravity in regimes where it is sufficiently accurate.

All the new knowledge we have learned still is (and absolutely must be) consistent with our old knowledge that has been proven correct in the regimes that they were proven correct.

This is effectively what Asimov is saying (as I understand anyway) - the knowledge that the Earth is a sphere does not invalidate the assumption that the Earth is flat approximately and locally.

I would also argue that the only things we can "know" are what you call the instrumental definitions. We only know what we measure. The rest is interpretation, and self-consistent understanding.

String theory can tell me that we have several dimensions etc but until we have a way to measure and check it remains a conceptual framework to make predictions, rather than a description of how things really are.

GR is much closer to a description. It told us about the precession of mercury, it told us to account for time dilation so we can use GPS satellites. It also predicted black holes, which were conceptually consistent but it's only been in the last ~ 5 years that we have the closest thing yet to experimental verification with the Event Horizon Telescope and gravitational wave measurements. If another theory comes along and explains all of GR with a different explanation for black holes, we will need still more accurate measurements to discriminate between the two theories. Knowledge is only as accurate as we can measure.

AI is still not at the point where I am comfortable letting it run free with my email, but a draft that I can read over and make changes to before sending it out is a game changer.

In my experience uv (haven't tried astral) doesn't quite fill the same niche, especially if compiled packages from other languages are necessary for your workflow (libboost for example)

I've been using it on my Mac M1 and I only notice the memory footprint when I have > 30 - 40 tabs open.

In statistical mechanics there's a concept of "ensemble average" and its provable that if you have a system, the average state of the system over say a 100 realisations ("ensemble average") run for 1 second each, is equal to the the average of one system run for a 100 seconds - under some assumptions of course.

I don't know enough a about human biology to make a statement about whether any of those assumptions will hold true, but maybe someone else will.

Comments on HN are meant to be for civil discussion, even on contentious topics.

Typst looks cool, and I'm probably going to check it out at some point, but a comparison to similar web-based LateX solutions would be more useful than what they have at the moment is all I'm saying.