Yeah, LaTex has been a pain to set up historically, so making it more accessible is very welcome.

that’s cause it’s literally what it is, legalized bribery

amazing

it sure does, the US is just the most blatant about it

Might also pave a path towards governments moving off windows if it can run existing software they use.

yeah the entitlement here is off the charts

If this turns out to be true, it might actually be a sign that Iran won the war and the US is settling on their terms.

Yeah, it’s something that could be done to recover oil in the long term, but doesn’t really help with the immediate problem in any way.

oh for sure

I mean all we can do is wait and see, but there’s nothing magical about this tech, and the geopolitical situation today is very different from what it was in the past. It’s not like Chinese people are too dumb to build a GPU, it’s that there was no real reason to push this tech hard before when you could just buy these chips from NVIDIA. Now that the US is actively trying to cut China off, there’s a reason to make this stuff work. Just look at how rapidly Huawei phones improved and how much progress Huawei is making with their chips in just past few years. Why shouldn’t this happen with other types of chips going forward?

It is a base that you can build on though which is a lot easier than starting from scratch.

The bigger picture is that the oil is depleting at an alarming rate though. Like sure, they can recover what’s left, but once that’s gone in a month or so then what?

I mean China has a proven track record of scaling stuff up once they decide to do something. Look at solar and EVs as two examples. Having sovereign supply chains for computing is obviously recognized as a top priority in China now, so there is every reason to expect that a lot of resources will be poured into making that happen at state level.

yeah I think that would be a very good outcome

the main site has a section on that https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

• Tectonic automatically downloads support files so you don’t have to install a full LaTeX system in order to start using it. If you start using a new LaTeX package, Tectonic just pulls down the files it needs and continues processing. The underyling “bundle” technology allows for completely reproducible document compiles. Thanks to the Dataverse Project for hosting the large LaTeX resource files!
• Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed, and only as much as needed. In its default mode it doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files and always produces a fully-processed document.
• The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input.
• Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled.
• The Tectonic engine has been extracted into a completely self-contained library so that it can be embedded in other applications.
• Tectonic has been forked from the old-fashioned WEB2C implementation of TeX and is developed in the open on GitHub using modern tools like the Rust language.
• Tectonic can be used from Github Actions to typeset your documents whenever a change to them is made:
  • setup-tectonic - Use tectonic in your github action workflows (supports caching and optionally biber)
  • compile-latex - Thanks to Vinay Sharma for creating the action.

Yes, you can run Qwen 3.6 27b on your laptop and have it do useful work, and it’s more capable than frontier models from a year ago or so. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b

It’s kind of funny how China is actually doing these things right now while Americans are talking it up. I think what we’ll see in practice will be this manifesto applied to China.

Yeah, but if Chinese companies get serious about getting into the chip game, that’s a pretty good foundation to build on already.

yeah that’s the key sentence right there

I’m guessing it’ll take a year or two for that to get ironed out. The nice thing about the tau folding process Huawei came up with is that it’s complimentary with euv. So, once Chinese companies do master it, their chips will be that much better.