The complication of PPT led me, with the assistance of LLMs, to design a simple but powerful enough alternative editor of slides based on a markdown format that uses reveal.js as presentation engine https://github.com/juanjosegarciaripoll/quarkfoil
The markdown format is very useful because I can edit the human readable content easily enough and it is easy to get assistance from the LLM in tasks such as designing diagrams, finding typos, completing bibliography, adding paper crops, etc.
This looks nice. In your looking around, did you encounter iA Presenter (https://ia.net/presenter)? I'm a huge fan of their very opinionated way of building a good presentation.
Probably not the best for the types of decks you shared though.
No, I did not dig around into commercial software. I wanted a simple open format precisely because I've had both Libreoffice and PowerPoint break large sets of slides in weird ways.
I forget who said it, but Python isn't the best at anything but it's decent to good at nearly everything, and that's why it's become so popular.
I do a lot of what I need symbolically in SymPy for dynamics analysis. Past that, I can't speak for it. At University I used Mathematica, but I just don't need all it can do at this point, so once again Python has proven to be "good enough." Matlab will be a similar story (e.g., I've never seen a good alternative to Simulink in Python).
But for everything else outside very specific domain tasks? Mathematica and Matlab are terrible for a lot of reasons. So I'll go out of my way to stay within the Python ecosystem, though I'm not afraid to pull out the specialty tools when I just can't make Python do the task near as well and/or nearly as quickly.
I've had a lot of fun vibe coding my own text-based email client and reader using mostly Python's stdlib. It is my daily driver and found no problem with parsing so far. It also leads to a very efficient and simple HTML reader submodule.
I use mblaze as it's just a suite of commandline tools that are conducive to the Unix philosophy (easy to pipe output to build more complex usecases), but I'll take a look at yours to see how it compares. Thanks for sharing!
Maybe you don't live in any European country. 2FA with cell phone has become compulsory for most banking procedures in Spain, to the point that I can even no longer assist my parents without being present there with them. Even when there is a web app, this randomly forces the user to confirm identity via phone. Every day this extends to more and more official proceduress these days (e.g. loging to EU pages, regional government paperwork, access to hospital records and prescriptions...), and unfortunately it seems to me that the phone as official ID might be the future. In this scenario, projects like this one cannot be really useful without some standardization or layer that makes it acceptable by the government.
In two banks I was in in last 20 years before and after Payment Services Directive implementation, I was a secondary user to the account. I could do almost anything on the account which saved my mother lots of stress. It's enough for her to check balance and outgoing transactions and rest lies in my hands. Wouldn't that help you as well?
In Poland we have a rather well-functioning digital services platform. Tho, two weeks ago news outlets raised a small tantrum that our digital identity wallet application may be non-compliant with the upcoming EU standards. But as for now, once you log into the application (there are few ways - ID card with chip, 3rd party login by bank and so on), the session is kept for a year.
After that's done you can log on desktops by QR code or pass data from app to app.
mObywatel app tries to include all the essentials: from digital ID copy (identity confirm, validation for you and someone else) your DNI-equivalent protection (won't allow to process your personal information in some cases). There's healthcare services handling (prescriptions, but we also have a dedicated app), inbox/outbox for official matters, payments and taxes, section for car and vehicles (penalty points, accident reporting), environment (reporting accidents, air quality, flood alerts) and travel (rail tickets wallet, tips and warning for traveling destinations - atm it shows that Spain is on 4th level terrorist threat). Tbh, it's way better than used to be few years ago with complex login flow that could break midway.
It's all convenient stuff but older generations are already digitally marginalized and we may indeed head into the future where we won't be able to do anything without a smartphone, in both real and digital life.
Many banks restrict the number and capabilities of secondary users. In the end I had to get a power of attorney, but for me observing these changes is just a warning. I see a pervasive use of a phone as means of authentication and the compulsory nature of hardware-bound digital IDs is penetrating our society. That is a barrier for elderly people but also for other groups, specially when those requirements are not accompanied by standards (i.e. why does a French person need to get a new ID to work with Spanish bureaucracy) and also because the phone itself is an unsubsidized cost. Not to mention when one is travelling to countries with locked networks, losing the phone or, closer to the topic here,the lack of trust on generic phone platforms, which enforces a duopoly (Google Android + iOS) preventing new technologies to enter the market.
We actually moved to Europe a number of years ago, and have lived in two different countries here. In my experience, there's often alternatives for 2FA that they'll tell you about once they know that you do not own a phone.
I don't know what's new on this. For the last two years all Office apps I own have insisted on saving to OneDrive first. I have always had to explicitly click on the path and select another folder. Every. Single. Time.
I am not familiar with Janet but have been a long time lisp developer. Could you perhaps add a few lines to the readme explaining how the build process for jwno works? Would love to give it a try, understand how it works and hack around :)
Not necessarily. A three or four year PhD in Europe is a short time to acquire a solid network (a lot of time is spent in training, unless the student is very proactive) and not all PhDs broaden their horizon to have a well differentiated topic to pursue after the degree. I would argue that true independence is actually acquired in the early postdoc years, but it requires a lot of work and a lot of luck.
TBH, 40% attrition rate is less I expected. Since each academic can train more than one PhD and postdoc every few years, which is the case, some attrition is required because the system cannot grow exponentially. The desired outcome in this context is that this talent incorporates to industry or other sectors where this expertise or problem solving skills are not wasted.
It's not hate but unwillingness to support a guy promoting extreme right wing Nazi parties in Europe. That's a no go in my agenda. The only reason I don't delete my profile is I don't want anyone to use my name.
I believe they are so aggressive that they have broken their shopping cart code. For instance, as Prime subscriber I usually get at checkout preselected options that would be aimed at getting people subscribed. Like two separate boxes stating "Free delivery". Weird.
Good enough for my work as scientist and also as science communicator. Some slide decks from a recent course can be seen here https://juanjose.garciaripoll.com/cern-lectures/
The markdown format is very useful because I can edit the human readable content easily enough and it is easy to get assistance from the LLM in tasks such as designing diagrams, finding typos, completing bibliography, adding paper crops, etc.