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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • The chat history is the big one for me. It’s not even that it’s not persistent; I’d be fine if it just purged all messages after a set period. The problem is that it seems to selectively purge some messages but keep others. Makes me feel like I’m crazy when I go back and try to find something that I know I sent a while ago, but there’s just a gap.



  • I wasn’t trying to imply that Typst is a replacement for LaTeX. I’m more trying to say that I’m hoping Typst (and any other typesetting alternatives that might be out there) mature enough over the next year or two to become full replacements. It just doesn’t seem to be gaining much attention because of how dominant LaTeX is.

    The main part that’s not open source is their web client, which I’m fine with. There’s a number of people on GitHub that aren’t happy about it though.








  • Every job will have some sort of crunch time. Even just staying in a programming position, the definition of “crunch time” will vary wildly. I’m lucky enough that “crunch time” just means that I set aside all my other tasks until I fix whatever is on fire, but I still get to go home on time unless I really want the overtime pay.

    I don’t envy positions with forced 80-hour workweek crunch times. That’s a sign of bad management.



  • That makes sense. I really like that the documentation is right at the top; many times all I want to do is find the right page in the official docs. You might want to look at how results are prioritized though: right now when I search for something simple like “how to center a div”, that result from Mozilla’s docs is included but it’s hidden as the second or third result. I would expect the page that’s explicitly about centering a div to be the top result, followed by the docs page for the element itself and maybe pages for flex or grid or something. That’s a really simple example, so maybe it’s not the target of this project, but I would still hope that simple topics are covered just as well as complex ones.

    EDIT: I was a bit mistaken: “how to center a div” does bring up the Mozilla documentation for centering an element, but “center a div” brings up a page about accessibility as the top result.





  • I got this mostly working, but it was not easy. Not only does Obsidian have a few peculiarities that make it less compatible with standard Markdown, but Word also does a few funny things.

    Here’s the config.yaml I used for Pandoc:

    from: docx
    to: markdown-smart-simple_tables-multiline_tables-grid_tables+pipe_tables+yaml_metadata_block-superscript-subscript-bracketed_spans-native_spans-link_attributes-raw_html+rebase_relative_paths+four_space_rule
    extract-media: "./"
    wrap: preserve
    markdown-headings: atx
    tab-stop: 2
    shift-heading-level-by: 1
    standalone: true
    template: obsidian.md
    filters:
      - compact-list.lua
      - remove-single-characters.py
      - remove-extra-linebreaks.py
    metadata:
      tags: "tags/go/here"
    

    The three filters:

    • Removed extra linebreaks added between bulleted lists to make them more compact.
    • Removed lines with only a single character in them. Usually an invisible character like nbsp, which made Pandoc’s linter not remove them automatically.
    • Removes linebreaks enclosed in Strong tags. This is an artifact from Word where a line is bolded but has no content: technically the line break is bolded.

    I then ran the resulting file through a RegExp replacement to change the superscript carats into HTML sup tags.

    Even after all this, I still have to go through with an Obsidian plugin to convert the standard Markdown links and embeds into [[Wikilink]] style, since Obsidian will only do one or the other throughout your whole vault.