I like baking. There are machines that can bake bread at an industrial scale that I cannot compete with. There are home kneaders that do much of the work very well. I use one of those more often than not.

I still think it worth my time kneading dough by hand. It teaches me the various properties of flour, how external factors like humidity or temperature impact the overall process, and I believe that it makes me a better baker, even when I use a machine, because I am better at controlling what the machine does. When I get a new brand of flour I will make sure to bake everything by hand first to "get a feel".

Kneading by hand is also very relaxing to me. This is probably the main reason I bake in the first place.

Programming, and other activities are not very different. We now have machines that can do it faster, at a fraction of the quality many people deem good enough. If you hate coding, that is probably all you need to use, and learning a new language might just be a frustrating experience not worth subjecting yourself to. But if you enjoy coding then it should make you better at it, even when you use the machines.

I contend that this is natural evolution. Every GUI app is a browser nowadays, and that leaves a niche for leaner apps to fill. This is what TUI apps seem to be doing.

Cross platform GUI is hard unless you elect to build a website and navigate through chrome via electron. Cross platform TUI is a lot easier.

> Do we trust them or don't we?

GP trusts them for reviewing external extension code, and ensure that it does not contain malware, but not for not inserting exception to their own telemetry if they wrote the code themselves.

Or, more likely, they feel that having two independent actors collaborating on the extension (one by writing and the other by reviewing) yields a more trustworthy outcome than either actor on their own.

That was a rhetorical question.

Mozilla have given us plenty of reasons to not trust them, which makes it hilarious that anybody would think it's noteworthy they're reviewing the code of Raymond Hill of all people.

We could tell it was rhetorical, to imply the position was ridiculous. But when accepting nuance there is a real answer.

> Raymond Hill of all people.

As good as he's been, he's still just one person with a hobby project. Yes please review it!

And what if he gets hacked?

One thing I like with pandoc is that it produces clean html or latex code (it can also produce clean markdown with the right option).

If you compare this with the HTML produced by typst or hevea, this is super useful, as we can then roll out our own styles.

> Mathematicians are, indeed, also paid to teach, peer-review, go to conferences and learn mathematics, but all of that better result in some damn good theorems.

As a mathematician who publishes theorems, I think this is mistaken. New theorems in abstract and pure fields of mathematics never had the economic value of what mathematicians are paid. Even creative works of art can be displayed but mathematical papers are unread by anybody except a tiny number of people who wouldn't want to pay all that much for them if they had to.

The economic value of mathematicians is to teach mathematics. Proving theorems is how we build the credentials we need to be trusted to be allowed to teach it. Teaching young and less young people how to navigate through a mathematical problem is how we make ourselves useful.

LLMs coming up with counter examples to obscure conjectures (albeit old and important to a small number of people) is only a threat in that it removes this ritual of belonging.

Many people are excellent teachers (and very competent mathematicians) without publishing new theorems, and many theorem producers are atrocious teachers.

Perhaps the pecking order may change. Or maybe something else will happen. Maybe society will decide to replace all its teachers with AI, or that mathematics is no longer worth learning. I don't know. But what I know is that nobody saw any of the papers I wrote or the theorems I proved and thought "that's money well spent".