Thread

1. askonomm · 1790329035 · focus · HN ↗

   Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

   1. Thanemate · 1790330307 · focus · HN ↗

      > It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.

      It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.

      1. jacquesm · 1790332453 · focus · HN ↗

         I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.

         1. not-my-team · 1790333980 · focus · HN ↗

            I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...

            1. jwrallie · 1790338337 · focus · HN ↗

               Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.

               I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.

               Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.

               1. DanielHB · 1790338991 · focus · HN ↗

                  I thought everyone on academia used LaTex, or at least in STEM?

                  Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?

                  I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...

                  1. xattt · 1790343948 · focus · HN ↗

                     > I thought everyone on academia used LaTex…

                     LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.

                     If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.

                     Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.

                     For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.

                     1. johanvts · 1790345441 · focus · HN ↗

                        Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.

                        Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.

                        You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.

                        I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.

                        1. hgoel · 1790346018 · focus · HN ↗

                           It isn't realistic to teach your collaborators a new system just for your own comfort. They'll just avoid making edits/comments. Especially if you're just a PhD student/postdoc interacting with a full time scientist - who will have much more work to do than fiddling around with your esoteric editing system.

                           It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.

                           1. johanvts · 1790387276 · focus · HN ↗

                              Sure, I did my phd back in the 2010s and latex+git/svn was what everybody used. Im not saying you cant use word, im just saying the criticism raised of latex above is not a valid reason to.

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