> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
I recently found out that several researchers, departments... buy a personal subscription for zoom (out of the own project money) even as our university as a MS Teams subscription. Despite if it is effectively "free" for them, they do not use it. So much on public money spend wisely and the quality of the MS Teams software...
Can confirm, my boss has his own paid Zoom while I’m using Teams to save research money. Another assistant professor I know pay for Slack as well.
I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.
Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.
LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.
If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.
Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.
For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.
Last time I wrote anything remotely academic was several decades ago, but at that time, the argument was that you had to use LaTeX because Word documents had no support for simultaneous editing, version control, and editors comments. It is truly bizarre to see the same arguments repeated after so long time but completely reversed, in favor of Microsoft Word. Surely the tools haven't become worse over time, given the popularity of github, Overleaf and such?
Don't most people use git for their latex (or even markdown) version control? All the tools that have been developed for code collaboration work really well for documents compared to messing around with word's undocumented format and binary blobs.
Disagree. Hunspell and aspell have tex modes that understand well what needs to be checked and what doesn’t.
Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.
You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.
I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.
It isn't realistic to teach your collaborators a new system just for your own comfort. They'll just avoid making edits/comments. Especially if you're just a PhD student/postdoc interacting with a full time scientist - who will have much more work to do than fiddling around with your esoteric editing system.
It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.
Sure, I did my phd back in the 2010s and latex+git/svn was what everybody used. Im not saying you cant use word, im just saying the criticism raised of latex above is not a valid reason to.
LaTeX used widely for papers, but it does not cover all. PowerPoint is huge, Word is used closer to Markdown’s level for simpler documents (and Pandoc is a huge helper). All administrative staff is using MS Office, that means Excel is used a lot for forms as well. Then there is OneDrive and Teams for collaboration.
Not so much autocorrect, but Excel is very eager to interpret things as a date, which may be useful when you're dealing with dates a lot, but it disqualifies it for anything related to serious data.
People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.
It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.
My experience has been that there's somewhat of an age divide. I've noticed that fellow junior academics are far more likely to prefer LaTeX, while all senior collaborators I have ever had, preferred Word. So I end up using Word for everything to ensure that it is easy for them to edit/review the paper.
Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.
Even if you write your thesis in latex, all interaction with the administration, grant applications etc. still happens in word documents. Thank God/John MacFarlane for pandoc.
Not sure why you'd not just use discord if cost is that much a factor, it has better calling that slack and ironically given what slack is used for way better code embedding etc.
I took online classes in both Zoom and Teams. I prefer Zoom for that because I can hide most of the UI (and the other people) to focus on the teacher and their shared screen
a lot of companies migrated to teams purely because it was already included in the subscription, IIRC they were forced to take it out by EU in 2023 for being anti-competitive.
No argument there, but annoyingly since they killed Skype (it’s own lovely pile of garbage and spyware), the only thing my parents will use to chat online is Teams.
I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.
I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.
My wife and father-in-law used to use Skype all the time, and when it shut down, the stars aligned as I suggested they try Signal and they both loved it.
Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
The quality of the government reflects the quality of the majority.
The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.
No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
While I agree that the quality of the government is correlated with the quality of that government's people, you do also have other factors, namely the way the government is set up, which matter.
Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all".
Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.
I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system.
Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.
On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.
It’s not directly causal, there is a feedback loop. The government has been failing to address the people’s needs for decades because the people failed to hold them to account. But the economy was decent enough for people to ignore this, except for occasional hiccups like 2008, which was papered over with QE and some crumbs for the masses (rebranded Romneycare under Obama).
Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)
Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.
That's not true. Trump no longer has a majority (see the coming elections) yet continues to be of inferior quality at all times. MAGA no longer supports Trump as they did two years ago, he lost million supporters already, and continues to lose more. He is now a sinking ship.
> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
> That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash.
Wait till AI driven job losses really start to mount. Nothing divides people faster than an empty stomach. The republicans are leaving a poison pill - they will profit from AI and when democrats win and the job losses really start to hit hard, the democrats will be left holding the blame bucket. Obviously they are not exactly crying hoarse for AI safeguards/job protections either because national security/donors etc.
Currently it looks more and more like goverment itself consists of a lot of psychopaths who want to abuse people. Like abusing people is the main reason people go into politics. And then voters select those who want to abuse the outgroup, but don't know that politicians consider everyone as underclass, therefore even their own voters are ripe for abuse.
One of the most telling quotes of our political era is this one from 2019:
“I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
They voted for him to do “good things” where the expectation was he’d hurt the right people. This person stated it a little more plainly than most but I think this view explains the last 10 years or so.
It is possible to argue that basically all modern governments are inherently "abusive", in the sense that, to my knowledge, all modern governments will use the threat of violence to extort wealth from the population, in the form of taxes.
Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.
We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.
As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.
Every government has taxed its population, and past governments often used real violence to collect them. The level of taxes we see currently is abnormal and abusive imo, but taxing in general isn’t.
Corporations need to deliver lots of value to their customers to get somewhere in the first place. If you want power it's much easier to become a politician and just blame corporations and spend the money they make and take the credit.
I don't want to challenge people's deeply held faiths, but I don't think we need the silly "maximise shareholder value" chant in every single conversation thread.
I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
I think your experience is the exception rather than the rule, most people work for a company that dictate the computer and OS to use, as well as the communication tools (teams, slack...) for which they have an enterprise license.
My comment was more on the line "when given options, people will massively choose Windows" just out of familiarity or fear of the unknown, and by people I also mean management. If I was manager, I wouldn't force Linux (which I use exclusively since c. 2000) unto my workers, unless I am ready to set Linux familiarity as a CV minimum requirement, reducing my hiring pool by 90% at least.
The parent comment implies there is some dark conspirancy behind the scenes to force Windows unto us. There might be a couple decades ago, today it is just what people choose if given choice. Windows 11 nags its users all the time, yet they accept it as it was normal and unavoidable.
It's not so much the AI vendors that are the issue. It's everyone else that want to grab some of those LLM profits as well. Apple in iOS/macOS, Google and Samsung in Android, Microsoft in Windows/Office, Raycast, Meta in WhatsApp, a company's helpdesk, random websites, etc. Everyone wants to make a profit by selling you an AI subscription or by reducing the number of humans employed.
> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.