backtest on data collected after the day of release. Unless they have a time machine, or are themselves consuming the power you are measuring, it won't leak any data.
WYSIWYG for professional word processing is like training wheels - it lets you start being productive on day one, but if you don't spend the effort to learn how to work without them, they get in the way and make you slower -- although you wouldn't know that unless you've seen someone who can do the job without them.
I have not used Word for ~10 years, but not in the last ~20 or so years, after I realized how much time and effort it cost me -- nearly missed an important deadline because of a Word 2 vs Word 6 incompatibility that manifested in a very inopportune moment.
It's been around for almost 30 years. I'm constantly receiving documents from people who've used it for >25years. And there is never use of styles, often spaces instead of tabs, many "new lines" instead of a page break, and a host of other things like that. References are not dynamic (just typed out) meaning that an item inserted in the middle of a list makes many of them wrong.
The vast majority of people who have used it for decades use it mostly as a smart typewriter, because the "pro" features like styles require a lot of discipline and the "let's just press the bold button" is too easy and enticing.
WYSIWYG needs to die whenever anything professional is needed.
I am not a lawyer, but as an entrepreneur I've had to send-and-receive a lot of legal documents with investor's lawyers, almost exclusively in .docx.
I never trust the received file's "track changes", always compare to the latest version I've sent -- and it is extremely common to find a change that wasn't mentioned/discussed, and somehow magically "accepted" or otherwise not tracked in the other side's "track changes". Whenever I point these out, I always got a "oh, yes, forgot about that one", or "I didn't intend to put that in" or "I'm not sure why it didn't appear in the track-changes view" -- but out of tens of these (with multiple lawyers over multiple years), not one was ever in my favor.
Branching might not be as interesting on a single project - but diffing is, very much; and I'm sure it's not more coveted mostly because most lawyers either (a) don't realize how good it makes life for you when you can diff and blame easily, or (b) are abusing the fact that it is so hard to diff/blame on documents, and certainly (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them (a famous Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind).
You are right, this happens a lot when drafting documents out-of-court documents.
IMHO this is a useful "feature" for lawyers. Don't forget that usually lawyers of two parties are working"together" only apparently, when in fact they are always litigating for their client's best interest.
The goal is not to reach a common agreement, but to reach the agreement that best serves the interest of one's client, most of the times at the expenses of the other party.
This is achieved in many ways, one being having text in a contract that the other party is not fully aware of, either because it's not properly understood or noticed.
This means that including in a document text without the other party noticing is a good old trick that quite valuable to any lawyer.
As a lawyer my position on this is that it's the other party to blame if it did not check the document properly (I always compare the documents for differences even when sent with revisions).
> (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them
I tend to disagree with this line of thought. Lawyers have a thousand ways to inflate their timesheets. Using a tool that makes their life more miserable by forcing them to do manual work that could be automated is certainly not one of them.
> As a lawyer my position on this is that it's the other party to blame if it did not check the document properly (I always compare the documents for differences even when sent with revisions).
As a non-lawyer, this is why they say "the problem with lawyers is that 95% of them give the rest of them a bad name". And as I mentioned, I also always compare.
> Lawyers have a thousand ways to inflate their timesheets. Using a tool that makes their life more miserable by forcing them to do manual work that could be automated is certainly not one of them.
I agree, and they do inflate them regularly -- all lawyers I asked to draft NDAs and employment agreements for me charged a few hours worth for the first one "because they had to write it" even though it was unchanged from another client (for sure; I've seen that exact one before).
Still, they need to keep an air of "being busy" and "working hard", and the best way to do that is to occasionally work hard.
They are a (relatively) recent part of the production pipeline. Before introducing horseshoe crab blood, they used to inject rabbits and wait a couple of weeks. Now the wait has been reduced to minutes - which reduces storage costs and increases certainty.
You expect every blog post to find the earliest relevant paper to cite, just so one could look at the year (without reading said paper - which would have made clear that the connection isn’t recent) to assess novelty? I don’t think that’s reasonable.
It’s a blog post. If it was, say, a peer reviewed paper by Hinton or LeCunn that fails to cite Schmidhuber, that would be reasonable criticism in my opinion. (Spoiler: they fail to cite him)
Why would blog posts not be subject to such criticism?
Either the author knew of prior work that argues the same thing and they ignored it, or they didn't know. And if one writes a 1000+ word article premised on this idea, wouldn't one be presumed to know at least in which century the idea originated from?
Arguably these kind of blog posts should be more subject to such criticisms, because the blog posts purport to "teach" the general public about a concept in an authoritative tone (or at least the author seems to pose as knowledgeable in the subject), while for academic papers, everyone who actually reads the paper knows where the ideas came from anyway and it's mainly an issue of attribution (and maybe about fairly distributing the citation count...)
> Why would blog posts not be subject to such criticism?
You're asking why casual comments from amateurs made for fun on the internet shouldn't be held to the same standard as those made by funded career academic experts writing for other experts over months and meant as part of the permanent record of the field?
Personally, I think that's a bit like asking why a friend having you over for dinner isn't always an elegant 7-course meal with wine pairings. I guess you can expect that if you want, but to me it sounds like a child expecting to go to Disney every day: ignoring the economic realities of the situation is a recipe for eternal disappointment.
This is why I hate online arguments. I didn't say earliest, but to give a pointer to the general era, and make it clear how standard the concepts are. They are part of undergrad, it's basic things. I'm not asking for a deep lit review. But modern exposition to anything related to Ai / ML / stats have extreme recency bias and young'uns are led to believe there was nothing before the transformer paper.
I guess it depends on the actual goal of the post. Education? Point people to background. Surely if you have a deep understanding of the subject, you have favored references.
If it's not education, where people are supposed to know everything, who is the audience? If the audience is supposed to know all of the background, then the post is not saying something original to the audience.
I agree the quality of the text itself is good. But I knew the background and I left (well, actually began) already agreeing.
I am happy and want people to write and share stuff. I think it's a really good exercise if only for the author. To be clear, I think the post itself is good except for the gap I mentioned in my original post, which in the grand scheme of things may seem like a nitpick. But if the same type of content makes it to the front page often without me understanding who the audience actually is, I am also allowed to wonder why out loud.
If the blog were about calculus, and stated that an elegant proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus could be found in such and such undergraduate textbook, would you be upset that the citation wasn't to either Newton's or Leibniz' work?
I would want them to point to point to what they think is the best resource. (Assuming the point is educating or explaining something to the reader.) Which, If everyone followed, would automatically point back to newton/leibnez.
At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
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