> This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.
SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.
They had an invite only one in the bard days before it was rebranded to gemini. You didn't just need to get the invite link but actually link your discord to your google so I didn't bother.
Just goes to show that google's attempts at chat have been a big flop and even though google chat exists they don't use it.
> otel is at odds with the observability business because these actors have little interest to contribute back to telemetry agents since anyone can reap the rewards of that.
To reinforce this: pandoc has been the go-to for a long, long time and they have encountered and addressed tons of issues, which is especially important for two underspecified and over-provisioned formats like HTML and pdf.
Go through the revision and bug history to see a sample of issues you're avoiding by using a highly-trafficked, well-supported solution.
The only reason not to use it is when they say they don't support a given feature that you need; and the nice thing there is that they'll usually say it, and have a good reason why.
The other reason to use pandoc is that while you might currently want PDF as your outbound format, you might end up preferring some other format (structured logically instead of by layout); with pandoc that change would be easy.
Finally, pandoc is extensible. If you do find that you want different output in some respect, you can easily write an plugin (in python or haskel or ...) to make exactly the tweak you need.
I mean everything has dependencies (some of the solutions elsewhere require Chrome and other common solutions require the JVM). At least Pandoc is GPL.
There are multiple ways to "depend", so if pandoc executes some external tool all of the work then might as well use that external tool directly. You will get more control over how the conversion happens, know for what search for when in trouble etc.
Sure, I don't mean that anyone would look at the Latex in between. I'm just saying that if tool x directly calls tool y to do the job then might as well use tool y directly.
Since hammers and nails are a common tool-workpiece example…consider the nail gun.
Theoretically you can drive nails with a 22 caliber blank cartridge without making the “call” through a nail gun. But you won’t finish laying shingles as quickly and easily…
Or to put it another way, there’s a reason assemblers are almost always better than machine code and compilers are almost always better than assemblers for the ends people care about.
I mean why use Latex at all when you could write your own typesetting language? Maybe because you are not a knuth.
You're confusing wrappers with alternatives. The comparison is more like if somebody published a script called html-to-pdf.sh which directly calls, e.g, chrome, would you want to use this script or use chrome directly? I would prefer the latter because (1) I would know what actually does the conversion, (2) I would know what to search for on the web should I need to tweak the output. This knowledge gives me more power as I know the actual converter. The wrapper script perhaps only helps with what the command line should be.
> I’ve yet to use an LLM that can consistently provide sources that back up what it’s telling me.
Mmmh, that would have been my take as well up to around end of Q1 2025.
Theses days, the flagship LLM's have reduced hallucination by quite a bit, and are also way better at citing sources (you sometimes have to nudge them).
ChatGPT 5 has been very decent on that particular axis.
In my chats with 2.5 Flash it gives me the direct sources lol. Also not going to lie, I've found 2.5 Flash generally gets straight to the point with sources a lot quicker than Pro. To the point I don't really use Pro.
Edit - just used Pro, gave me a direct source. Who knows...
SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.