alt.hn

5/16/2025 at 1:19:20 PM

Rivers

 https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/05/15/rivers/

by surprisetalk

5/19/2025 at 6:29:33 PM

There is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers...

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-...

And if you really want to get into it, there is a rather detailed paper by Alex Holkner: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf

Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.

by antognini

5/19/2025 at 6:42:22 PM

Futility Closet had a cheerful, wholesome podcast for many years until abruptly ending it without much explanation. Glad to see they're still busy. Anyone know what happened? I always wondered.

by rendall

5/20/2025 at 12:36:06 AM

I was under the impression they simply wanted to take a break. I thought the break was to be more permanent... but perhaps they found they couldn't quit it.

by JKCalhoun

5/20/2025 at 11:38:53 AM

They said in their penultimate podcast episode (2021-11-22) that the Futility Closet blog would continue but that the following episode would be their last.

by rendall

5/19/2025 at 9:21:31 PM

I'm just impressed that the website is still around and they are adding new items. They've been going for more than twenty years at this point!

by antognini

5/20/2025 at 2:00:33 AM

> Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged

...

> (squint to see it)

This seems rather contradictory?

by aidenn0

5/19/2025 at 11:28:47 PM

[dead]

by faeeafeae

5/19/2025 at 11:20:46 PM

[dead]

by fdslkfsld