When I did my bachelor’s, I wrote every assignment and my thesis in LaTeX—and I absolutely loved it. I loved it so much that I swore I’d never touch MS Word again.
Now I’m doing my master’s, and once again, I’m writing everything, assignments and thesis, in Typst. And boy, do I love Typst. I only had to spend a fraction of the time tweaking it to get exactly what I needed. Most things just work right out of the box. The only “bad” thing, in my opinion, is that Typst isn’t quite as feature-rich as LaTeX.
In my personal experience, oh-my-zsh slows down things too much. You're better off just taking whatever you really like about oh-my-zsh and configure it yourself.
Yeah, for sure. That's why I tried Cursor for a month. But as soon as I ran out of fast requests it became unusable. It had me waiting several minutes for the first token. I didn't realize how bad the experience was, fast requests included, until I used Void. It makes Cursor fast requests seem slow, and I tend to need fewer of them. The differences being that Void requests go straight to the provider instead of their own server first, and their system prompts seem to keep the models more on task.
That's fair. It is not the cheaper option, unless you use free or low cost models from a provider like OpenRouter. Of course, that comes with a performance hit. What I like about it is the flexibility. I run Devstral Small locally for easier tasks and it's free except for electricity. On the other hand, you can use up $20 with Gemini Pro in a couple hours with large contexts. Grok 3 mini has been a good middle ground- more capable than Devstral and less expensive than Gemini Pro.
So I tend to start with Devstral unless I know it will struggle, and then move on to paid models as needed. When I do switch to a paid provider, it's noticeably better than the same provider on a Cursor paid plan, so even though it's more expensive, I feel like there's more value there.
I honestly don't have a proper monthly tally yet. I've used $30 in OpenRouter credits over a couple weeks, but a lot of that was experimenting to compare quality of output.
While I understand the power of Excel for specific calculations like your loan payment analysis, I struggle with modeling "continuous" data like monthly budgets and yearly reviews. Coming from a database background, I know how to model recurring financial data with tables and relationships, but I'm less clear on Excel best practices for this.
How do you structure your spreadsheet to handle:
1. Monthly recurring budgets/allowances
2. Year-over-year analysis
3. Category management
4. Historical tracking
Do you maintain separate sheets/tabs for each time period? Use pivot tables?
I suspect that your database background is causing you to think too formally about how people structure Excel data. For the vast majority, they’re not normalizing data, running queries on sheets, etc. I can easily see this as one tab per account, then pulling in specific cells on other tabs for summaries and other analysis.
Maybe if you have millions of rows you might have trouble with excel. Other than that, from a data storage perspective an Excel is just a database that’s human readable.
There are many ways to skin a cat, but my advice how to try it an excel way (assuming a db backgound) would be..
try dumber things, sounds stupid but you dont need rules and structure, just data :)
denormalise a more often to break down the problem, the data and problem are your goal not structure (as much as db).
Yes period per tab type of thing is quite common, as at some point you want to close the period and never change it.
Lean into the non-standardisation to handle the real world. E.g for most of your budget its one line per item per month but this one are flexes with headcount so that has its own page, and tax is balnced in month x so ill just over type all the formulae there when the real numbers come in.
Also if the model is complex try naming fields and showing the formula in a cell next to it to remind you how its calculated (if not ready using it check out "format as table" to do this for tabular data)
And yes pivot the crap out of everything.
There is also "add to model" which gives you powerbi type modelling in excel which can also be handy and fast.
Not extensive list, and for lots of things db is better when you know how to use it.. but those are some of the "i get it" scenarios for me
I'm writing a game in Flutter. The game has ads, shaders, custom gesture detectors, ... . I can tell you, it is absolutely butter smooth on iOS.
I tried something similar a few years ago and I would have said you're absolutely right. But with the one I'm writing now, it is quite the different experience.
I did a little programming in dart. There are many things to like. And I believe, at the time of writing, that Dart really is great for both java and js devs. Every object that is used has to be an instance of a class, and the event-driven style for reactive programming is pretty much 1:1 to how js does it. So it truly could become the sweet spot for UI development that is appealing to both types of devs.
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