No, Typst the typesetting software is FOSS (Apache license), as is a bunch of the surrounding ecosystem (e.g. the LSP for editor support). The people making it also ofter paid SASS stuff for features enterprises like, but there is no need to use them.

Getting people to write documentation is already an uphill battle, the reality is it needs to be made as frictionless as possible or they won’t do it. IMO this rules out (La)TeX entirely: it’s just too much work that nobody wants to deal with.

I also have a philosophical issue with writing documentation in TeX: TeX is a typesetting program, i.e. it’s a presentation format meant to look a certain way on a page, while documentation should be agnostic to appearance as much as possible. But that’s more a personal objection.

Then why is everyone so nostalgic for the old days of the blogosphere to return? If blogs are all worthless, then we shouldn't care that they're disappearing and/or being put behind paywalls; we haven't lost anything.

I blog for my own satisfaction, and my blog has no ads on it, and I don't charge visitors. I'm happy to have a few dozen readers.

That's what people are bemoaning the loss of: the before times, when people did interesting stuff without regard for whether it could be monetized or not.

Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators some of that money if and only if the creator realizes they have to sign up for Brave's cryptoshit. It's straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak is deserved.

But then again, online ads are the physical equivalent of a crowd of paparazzi following you 24/7 including inside your home, which would also prompt physical violence in the real world.

From my perspective I couldn't care less if one bad guy is stealing from another bad guy.

Nope, they don't "put ads on the site". That's not how it works.

NIMBY homeowners mostly. For instance, these days the Sierra Club mostly exists to preserve property values by blocking all new green energy construction.

I can't guarantee that Waymo won't be enshittified, but one fundamental difference with Uber is that Waymo doesn't need to compete in the labor market for drivers. When the low end of the labor market got red hot in 2023-24, that's when Uber prices climbed rapidly because drivers had other options; Waymo won't have this problem. It won't be affected by other things like ever-rising health care costs or local regulations guaranteeing driver wage floors either.

Yeah, drivers want to maximize their hourly revenue, and this is frequently at odds with the wants of passengers. For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow, but that's all over now that they're public, and the classic misaligned incentives between drivers and passengers are back in play.

The cars are increasingly beat-up too, another thing we incorrectly believed was Uber being fundamentally different from and better than yellow cabs.

> For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow

You must have very rosy glasses because calling a tired/rude Taxi operator at 1am and not knowing whether your cab was coming in 5 or 20min was a major drag, so you always had to plan for 20min+ and sit patiently without social media to fill the void.

Having 2 ubers cancel before you get a 3rd commitment, within a short time frame, and only at the airport or a busy concert isn't that bad at all. Modern entitlement IMO

> The cars are increasingly beat-up too

Regular taxis never had an anonymous review system and they often just bought old police cars, used by 2 drivers across 2 day/night shifts . Good chance the night driver drank on the job too

Uber requires them to have a newish car which in my experience is usually a decent hybrid. A big improvement IMO (although I do love old crown Vic's from back in the pre Uber days).

If anything the biggest issue is Uber not strictly enforcing reuse of other authorized drivers accounts, usually by immigrants without official company clearance

I frequently have to wait 20-30 minutes for an Uber or Lyft pickup at my apartment in south Brooklyn. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm usually going somewhere like Bay Ridge if I'm ordering an Uber and not somewhere popular. If it's after 1am I just open both Lyft and Uber and book both because at least one of them will just park the car and not come and wait out the timer before it assigns a new driver. I wish the situation is them just canceling, but drivers get penalized for that but apparently don't get penalized for parking at a gas station waiting for you to cancel and pay the fee or sit out the 10 minutes.

One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.

During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.

At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.

Book Uber Black and 99% of those issues go away. Have taken more Ubers than I'd like to admit, so I'm comfortable calling this a large enough sample size to qualify as anecdata.

Remember back when Uber was basically 100% Uber Black? That was nice.

Yep, I used it back when it first rolled out in SF in 2010 or 2011. All black crown vics.

Expecting a taxi you've booked to actually pick you up is entitlement?

What kind of terrible service do you put up with for this to seem reasonable to you?

Not sure how old you are but I spent half my adult life dealing with a government regulated Taxi medallion system and the other half using Uber in multiple countries and I’d 100% take “post-VC” Uber over old taxis every single time.

FWIW they both still exist so you’re free to choose, which is the nice thing about competition.

Pre booked airport black car taxis have always been a niche within the wider system for a good reason. Uber’s fluid system is not perfect at every scenario.

53, and I live in Edinburgh, where the taxis are well regulated and if one takes a rider then they have to fulfil it.

Certainly privately owned ones skim a lot off the top to pay shareholders and bonuses, but the reality is that the cost of caregiving is almost entirely labor and rent, and those things do not benefit from efficiency gains, so the cost of service just goes up forever because of Baumol's cost disease.

Realistically the only way to stabilize the price of caregiving is to automate the hell out of it, like Japan is trying to do. It's a rather dystopian thought that the only way senior care won't bankrupt us is if we have robots do it all, but what can you do.

The Baumol effect is only one component and not the entire story. Those that run these services will extract as many profits as possible for themselves. When the robots will manage geriatric care, there is no reason to not continue exploiting the patients' wallets.

> labor and rent

Labor, who pays a sizeable chunk of their income on rent... and rent, well is rent. Rent is only expensive when demand outstrips supply, and demand keeps being artificially constrained by existing property owners (of which boomers are a large chunk) not willing to take a hit on their property value. Seems like a self-inflicted problem.

To a first approximation, boycotts never work. The concept exists as an opiate and sop make you think you have power as a consumer and that regulations are unnecessary, but it's a mirage.

I would certainly love to see Tesla implode and I'm crossing my fingers that it happens, but I think it's too early to tell whether the outrage about Musk will amount to anything. Their sales were down in Q1 and Q2 this year but recovered in Q3. That could be a dead cat bounce because the EV tax credits were expiring, or it could be at the outrage did all the damage it was going to do and is over now. We won't know which for a little while.

There is absolutely no reason to buy a Tesla over basically every other EV in 2025 unless full self driving ever becomes more reliable.

I’ve driven 4-5 different EVs over the past couple of years [1] including Tesla’s. They aren’t any better and in fact the infotainment system is worse than even low end cars with CarPlay support.

Sales are tanking worse overseas and being taken over by cheaper cars based on Chinese tech. It’s very much a dead cat bounce.

Tesla is suffering not so much a boycott as a brand failure. The car is sold as a status symbol among a certain group, and they tanked that status. It wasn't a boycott so much as an own goal.

People are explicitly not buying Tesla because of Musk and his politics. What do you call that if not a boycott?

There is no $25,000 Tesla - most of those the conscientious objectors weren't even in Tesla's target audience anyways. The "gotcha" of all luxury tech is that it's only a branding distinction.

Which puts Tesla in a similar spot to the Apple situation, where the majority of customers are the least-likely to demand value, quality or moral consistency from their OEM. Your CEO can embarrass himself in interviews, ship nonsense thousand-dollar novelty products and kiss ass to authoritarians, but people who consistently buy a certain product won't abandon their brand loyalty. In fact, both Apple and Tesla seem to benefit from the influx of liberal and conservative customers who feel "represented" by superficial gestures like interviews, novelty products and asskissing.

It feels safe to assume that both Apple and Tesla will persist long into the future, eager to amend their horrible misgivings coerced under authoritarianism.

People in California were definitely Teslas target audience. The difference is there are plenty of cars that are just as good as Teslas. What are people in the US going to do that don’t want iPhones? Buy crappy ad infested Android devices?

Google is one of the companies that bribed Trump to leave him alone to “settle a lawsuits

It was not brief moment. It was him becoming increasingly open about his far right sympathies that existed for a long time.

If it was a few large files as opposed to many small ones, this is totally believable. iPhones have Wi-Fi 6E chips, and an ad hoc network where the devices are right next to each other can actually reach the theoretical max speed of the protocol (as opposed to real-world connections to a base station, which never do). I've never measured it precisely but I've transferred ~1 GB disk images over AirDrop in a couple seconds.