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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Insurances need to cover their expected cost with the rates, otherwise they won’t be able to cover in case of an incident. Nobody will run an insurance expecting a loss, and you can’t force anyone to.

    The alternative is like when we had flood that the state bails out the boomers who bought houses when they were cheap in areas where insurance won’t insure because of risk, paid with taxes by people like me who have a hard time acquiring property because taxes and other cost are so high due to decisions their generation and earlier ones made.

    Of course, this is somewhat exaggerated; they also pay taxes. But it’s also not completely wrong.

    In the particular case of a previous colleague’s house getting flooded, I always had to think of the fact that she chose to fly a certain route for work to save about 2 hours because it’s just so much more convenient than the train.

    I mean it would have happened with it without her flying, but still thought about it.






  • Currently working in LaTeX for work.

    I don’t think you really need looseness (I assume you want to avoid single lines?), you can rather increase the badness of them so that they’re avoided through other means.

    Manual line breaks I only use in tables (thanks tabularray author). In text, I don’t think I have any.

    Negative vspace I also don’t have, what’s your use case? I can imagine it for very specific tasks (a special page like a title page it something similar where everything is set very precisely) but for normal writing, I didn’t encounter it.

    All in all, I think LaTeX shows its age, but the huge ecosystem is the main reason it’s still a good choice despite a little of shortcomings like the arcane macro system, features that are seemingly impossible to implement like accessibility (

    (but it’s still leagues ahead of word)

    My current document approached 50 pages with about 10 tables, 3 figures (tikz) and 10 bibliography entries and it’s perfectly handleable. Just informing having to do that with word gives me agony. I worked on the same type of document in word that was kind of an earlier draft by someone else and stuff broke left and right, and that was without the more complex formatting that I later employed.

    As someone else answered, I’m also looking forward to typst. Unfortunately, PDFs generated by it are currently much larger than through LaTeX (https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/895, fix currently not in any stable version) and package import is a preview. Some features aren’t implemented yet but would be really nice, the syntax seems really sane and it’s fast, so I’m optimistic it can become a strong contender.