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Worse is Better

What are you talking about?

So would a single-user OS without accounts be ok?

I think, if there's no account setup, there's no need to request an age/birthday signal. Although if there's am app store and no account setup, you might have trouble.

This is back in 1963 eh? I'm impressed you can remember that.

Who was a memorable show! The first broadcasted show I saw was already in the Baker era, and that was because I was living near the Canadian border. After I moved, I greatly missed it for decades until world demand brought it back.

What I did yesterday is more of a problem.

But none of us here, right?

We are special of course. Edit: Actually just me, I'm special

Ah, the Overleaf model.

Am I crazy to think there should be some way to stop this? It's utterly anticompetitive, but ai don't know any country where they bother trying to stop a small company buying/killing its competitors.


Seems like open source is the way to defeat this. Anyone can easily create a competing service, which they then have to buy out, but the cost of setting up a new one is minimal. Interesting business model that feeds on anti-competitive businesses.

Interestingly, Overleaf is open source [0], although I can't speak to how well the open source version works.

[0] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf


IIRC, it is nerfed out. It is more open core than actual open source, and the paywalled features of the online version are missing.

The competition to Overleaf is just running LaTeX locally, which costs approximately zero dollars and it's faster! But it's a little less convenient for a solo author, and a lot less convenient for a collaboration.

I'm guessing that if you just uploaded a few pages of handwritten text to ChatGPT and asked it to make a font of your handwriting it would do a passably decent job. That might be the way that this business model ends.

You'd think this should encourage people to build carbon-copies of the tools that have been bought out in the hope of being bought out... It's only a sustainable model if it's fringe enough and with low enough purchase amounts to not eventually become an exit strategy for people who might not even have tried otherwise.

I mean there is a solution to this

"Can I buy your company?"

"No."


Which patent are you referring to?


Any patent. The question was who owns a (arbitrary) algorithm. The elaborated answer is that nobody “owns” an algorithm (i.e. has intellectual property rights to it) without a patent: in USA and many other jurisdictions, patents are the IP tool relating to algorithms.


Ymmv, but I've found that you sure do need to import things eventually, and it's not so ergonomic because most projects just end up as mega-notebooks.

Just like Python or any other language that looks easy for the learning examples, there are still hairy bits, they're just better hidden. The difference is that the debuggers for Python are far better.

Mathematica is great for quick stuff, but once you hit a particular level complexity it goes crazy. In this regard I find it similar to Bash.


I also found problems with integrating some obscure functions a few years black, though IIRC the issue was remedies by using the amazing Rubi package:

https://rulebasedintegration.org/


So can you open-source clarc anyway? Even if it's not general-purpose it's surely of interest.

As a sibling notes there's certainly some secret antispam stuff, but surely that's not spread throughout the codebase too?


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