(Disclosure: I work on https://quarto.org, for the same company that the author of WebR works on) Thanks for sharing that PDF link. It's so good! Would you be willing to write a bit about how you produced that PDF? It's a great example of what places like CIDR should be encouraging in terms of academic publications.

I didn't know Quarto, it looks interesting, thanks for sharing!

cloudspecs encodes the entire state (sql code, R code, view state) in the URL compressed and base64 encoded, since we wanted to be able to send links around to share interesting plots/tables with each other and revisit old plots if the data changes, e.g., if new EC2 instances come out.

The PDF is produced by good old latex, and the state-in-URL mechanism allows us to just use regular hyperlinks for the clickable plot. The limit is the max URL length browsers allow, but we haven't hit it.

Since we use R+ggplot for research anyway in the local environment (emacs+RSS), we just copied the code into cloudspecs, then copied the resulting link into latex. So a bit of manual work if we want to change the plots in the paper.

Let me know if you're curious about specific things or want to collaborate. Cheers!

Science is just Stochastic Graduate Descent, as we used to say.

(FWIW, I'm the technical lead on the Quarto project)

RMarkdown isn't going anywhere! Quarto exists to bring the RMarkdown experience that folks love to a broader set of users and contexts. It is true that we try to keep the .qmd experience in Quarto pretty close to the .rmd experience in RMarkdown, and it is true that Quarto does things that RMarkdown never will. But it's not the case that "RMarkdown is being phased out and replaced with Quarto".

Thanks for the correction!

I might be conflating rmarkdown with knitr because the developer of knitr (who was employed on some capacity by Posit) was let go.

For how long do you think Posit will continue to support both platforms?

I’m dismayed that people are willing to put their names on garbage like this.

If you want the serious version of the idea instead of the LLM diarrhea, just go Jonathan Shewchuk’s robust predicates work: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/papers/robustr.pdf from 1997.

Thanks, didn't know this one! Have some reading to do.

For a library that implements just the two component version of this, commonly known as a double-double, for a mantissa of 107 bits and an exponent of 11, see: https://github.com/ncruces/dbldbl

Presumably because one of the two things are true:

- there's competition, and so if it's possible to rent for less than 1000-eps and still profit, someone will

- there's no competition, which is a cartel, the kind of thing that civilized societies ought to frown upon

Do you know the adage location location location? The competition for good locations is among renters, not landlords. Seller's market vs buyer's market. Doesn't have to mean there's a cartel, it also doesn't mean there isn't one but it's not a guarantee.

I am trying to understand your perspective. How do people buying and selling real estate, the origin of the adage “location, location, location,” not compete on locations?

I didn't say that people didn't compete on locations, I said the opposite.

You said “the competition for good locations is among renters, not landlords.”

There's orders of magnitude more renters looking for a place than landlords willing to rent in the best locations.

You can also just grab the same piece from Substack: https://thenoosphere.substack.com/p/just-how-many-more-succe...

This is the kind of task that LLMs are precisely terrible at; there isn't an abundance of Zod 4 examples, and the LLM will sure as shit will give you _something_ you are now by definition ill-equipped to assess.

I'm confident about this assessment because I maintain a large-ish piece of software and perenially have to decipher user reports of hallucinated LLM syntax for new features.

Are you sure that's not a skill issue? Zod v4 has .mdx documentation which can be given to the LLM as context, including a migration guide. A reasoning LLM should be able to manage.

"It will solve all your problems!"

"It didn't solve my problems"

"You're the problem!"

> "You're the problem!"

He said users sent reports with hallucinated syntax, he wasn't even the one who used LLMs.

I've only tried Claude in Cursor's free trial, but it became very confused during a React 19 upgrade even after showing it a guide. It also kept telling me to install irrelevant dependencies saying my code would not work without them. My experience was more or less shared with several other senior devs using their companies AI subscriptions. Are we all using the tools wrong? Or is there just an expected amount of having to fight with the machine to get a usable result?

> I've only tried Claude in Cursor's free trial, but it became very confused during a React 19 upgrade even after showing it a guide.

I have never used Cursor, but I see more and more people who used LLMs specifically via Cursor complain. It makes me think there's an issue specifically with Cursor, e.g., they try to save on tokens and end up not including enough context in the prompt.

> I've only tried Claude in Cursor's free trial, but it became very confused during a React 19 upgrade even after showing it a guide.

I am working on a Next.js 15 / React 19 app, and at least 95% of code is written by Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, and I barely ever need to "fight" it really. But it's not a Cursor workflow of course. I keep a directory with LLM-readable documentation[0], use a repository serialization tool to serialize my repository into a prompt (this includes both the source code and the LLM-readable documentation), and send it to Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview. It ends up being over 100K tokens per query but works really well for me.

[0]: https://llmstxt.org/

(I imagine you agree, so this is just to expand) a secondary, insidious issue is that administrators diffuse their rules through the bureaucracy. In the case of CS, you start seeing references to csrankings in recommendation letters for grad applications, faculty applications, or even tenure letters. At that point, it can be hard to fight against it.

Please - if I wanted to know what an LLM thinks about this, I would have asked it myself.

I was just coming to comment the same thing. This seems like an ai bot answer. And it's a green username

It really is a "nobody asked" kind of comment.

Amusingly, it is catastrophically wrong, like AI slop typically is.

Can you explain the catastrophe? It does seem AI generated but it doesn’t seem wrong

It doesn't mention soil pH at all. AI didn't mention anything about sending off samples to a soil lab for testing, just "dump good sounding stuff on your soil, that'll make everything better!" It didn't even mention grabbing a recent soil survey to get a rough idea of what soil you are dealing with. It is garbage advice which will lead you to waste money and likely make your soil worse instead of better.

(Context: I’m an IC and told my Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.

I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a manager" - which is perfectly valid.

I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not remove it.

> There’s a good reason management arises.

Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.

It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.

From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit

I'm not entirely sure why when one person quits, the company becomes managerless?