12,049 karma · joined January 21, 2010
And CRAN... well... let's just say that people used to point to CPAN as a strength of Perl, too... All that sort of archives, after the first few years which comprise mostly of contributors with deep knowledge and who can produce high quality libraries, turn into dumping grounds for trivial half-assed 'libraries' under the guise of 'community contributions'. Example: try to do trivial compound interest simulations in R. So basic that it's barealy worth calling 'finance'. There are (at least) three packages on CRAN that claim to do this, except that (depending on which variable in the equation you want to solve for) they all provide only part of the solution, in mostly incompatible ways. And this is because very few of the people putting code into CRAN know how to... well... write good code. This is not an indictment of those people; many of them are much more intelligent than a bunch of us combined. It's just that for them coding is a byproduct, and with good intentions they share what has been useful for them, it just leads to a situation of 'in the land of the blind one eye is king'.
All of which is completely unacceptable in 2021 for a product meant for a large audience. Messaging is integral to people's lives, to the point where people keep 10+ year old phones because they have messages on them from people that passed away and they can't figure out how to move the messages across or to a new system. As much as it pains me to say, there just aren't any production quality alternatives to WhatsApp that can take over. And don't even get me started on Element/Matrix...
Spaces in filenames are a reality though, especially on Windows (where the home directory itself used to have spaces in it, and also where many home directories on corporate networks are on network drives and start with \\), and any software that can't deal with those kinds of paths has just not been exposed to much (if any) real world use. That was the point I was trying to make - software that can't handle anything but the most bog-standard path names in its core configuration is 'hey guys look at what I hacked up yesterday evening' quality at best. (yes yes it is possible to imagine exceptions, like software that is decades old and ported across platforms; I'm talking about something new that is meant to solve a general problem).
"Update January 6th, 2021 A reader alerted me to a bug with the current groundhog (version 1.1.0) where you cannot set the groundhog library to be a folder containing spaces in the name."
So we are talking about software here that somehow made it to version 1.1 *without anyone ever using a directory with spaces in it with it". This can be interpreted in two ways: either very few people have spaces in their paths, or very few people have actually ever even tried (not even really used, I'm only talking about the most basic trial use) this package. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I know where I'd put my money...
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
Thing is, people complaim about there not being high quality gear, but when someone then makes it, they balk at the price. Yes people, a great laptop will cost you $3000.
I know you didn't, but (without wanting to put words into your mouth), the more abstract claim was that there is some sort of technology path from growing salads to growing other crops, which (I'm claiming) there isn't, or at least not to a significant degree. The things you mention are already solved, have been for many years; it has been a specialty and major export product of our country for decades (as you indubitably know).
"Bulk foods (more properly called staple foods)"
I didn't use that word on purpose. What I roughly wanted to say was "root crops, grains, tree crops, basically anything that isn't herbs or salads", but that wouldn't be accurate either (carrots are root crops but not a staple and can to some degree be grown in substrates). But probably it's a distinction without a difference, in this context. I think it's fair, for the sake of the discussion, to talk about "leafy greens" vs "non leafy greens", even though "but tomatoes" etc.
"Bulk foods do just fine in regular soil where ever they are being grown, and do so reasonably efficiently."
No they do not, at least under other circumstances than precisely the ones we want to get away from, with indiscriminate use of nitrates and pesticides. I happen to have a yield model for various crops in the EU here open on my other monitor, that I've been working with for several months now. Agriculture as we do it today in the western EU cannot be done efficiently without intensive farming methods. Without fertilizer, yields are a factor of 2 to 4 lower. That is an absolutely game changing difference.
"A vertical farm does not compete with in soil agriculture in open air, it competes with greenhouses."
Well I'm not sure any more what we're arguing here. The OP's point was "Vertical farms don't feed people. They are basically a solution to just in time delivery for restaurants and nothing else." Which, to some degree, holds for greenhouses (depending on definitions). The food production problems we have is not that we don't have enough area for greenhouses, or that we can't grow enough leafy greens; greenhouses are so efficient that we're not constrained by land for the demand we have for food that can be grown in them. What we need is more space efficient production of high calorie foods, in ways that don't degrade the environment in the ways and to the extent current methods do. Neither vertical farms nor greenhouses (I mean, 'vertical farm' is just a marketing word for 'multi story greenhouse') will be of any use for that.
But maybe your point is something entirely different and relates to the OP in a different way, in which case our whole discussion is moot.
shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word".
"I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason,"
You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all.
Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.