It's probably easier to verify Gauss's Law, which then gives you Coulomb's law for free.
Direct verification of inverse square laws is hard! For electromagnetic interactions (ie Coulomb's law) you can use scattering. If you want to do a static experiment (Coulomb's Law the hard way or gravity) you probably need a torsion pendulum experiment. AFAIK the best in the world at that are at UW in the Eöt-Wash group: https://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/torsion-balances
You can tell it's slop because of the way that it is.
The heading "The type system is gradual, and that is the whole design" is a dead giveaway.
Actually the whole "How young this is" section reads very LLM-y. Claude, I think? It's funny that LLMs have more distinctive authorial voices than so many people.
Yes, Claude, good ear :) The compiler was built with agents; the repo has an AGENTS.md describing how they're used. Without them this would have taken me months instead of days. But the design is mine, and so are the mistakes. The decisions that shape the whole thing, byte-for-byte compatibility with existing .tex, gradual typing with an explicit unknown (`?O`) instead of trying to type all of LaTeX, and review comments living inside the file, come from years of writing papers in Overleaf and wanting more from the compiler than "Missing } inserted". Vitela (https://vitela.artificialfallibility.com/) exists because once the compiler knows more, the editor can show it. Fair hit on the prose, though. I'll rewrite that section myself.
Have you seen Finding Forrester? It's a lot easier to write once you've got a frame and a few sentences you don't like on the page!
It's great to use these tools to give you more time to be a human, but the ReadMe is for humans, and is dramatically improved by being set in your voice. The problem is that when your project description looks like the result of a solid twenty minute prompt session it woefully undersells the rest of the project.
It might be cool! I might bother to learn it! But I'm not going to care more than you about it.
Not to brag, but I caught it on the first sentence.
> ExactTeX is LaTeX with gradual annotation: you name the object you want checked, and what you do not name stays ordinary LaTeX, transported byte for byte.
This "byte for byte" phrase was the giveaway. You'll find it everywhere. I really detest these slop projects.
I understand why it's hard, but it's very funny to get ads for a product I've bought for weeks/months after completing the purchase.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.
But I won't. From the deepest depths of my heart and my soul, I will not and I will never return something I bought for a competitor's product because I was served an ad.
It's not a positive signal, because for the lifespan of that product I just bought, I have removed myself from the addressable market.
Advertisers getting hosed is pretty much standard with digital ads. Platforms and agencies tell you how amazing their adtech is, but various forms of fraud and dodgy practises seem to be rampant.
reply