It's relatively easy to get it working as a kernel module at least. I got it set up on a NixOS box without too much trouble.

Not something I'd want to do with my filesystem though. ZFS is different story it it isn't on the root fs because it might be packaged by the distribution.

Fair, I still don’t use it on my main machine, just a shitty laptop that I keep around to play with.

I'm with you. You're not my parents.

I mean they'll shoot protesters execution-style and retroactively declare that person a terrorist before they've even done any investigations.

It's not Nazi Germany, but this administration has certainly demonstrated that they're not above inventing reasons to justify their actions later.

Despite the problems, this stuff is still a rarity among most people. And most people understand that.

It’s obviously getting worse, but that’s not a reason to give up all hope.

I don't think I disagree with anything you said. I think cynicism is lazy.

Can't speak for every graduate program or every school, but when I was in grad school at University of York, we actually used Overleaf with LaTeX a lot, since it allowed shared collaborative editing.

I liked that because it's still an open format.

I mean, all I did was use a large chunk of free time and Fable tokens. I wish I could say that my big brain and software engineering prowess is what got it working, but mostly it was just staring at text and not having anything better to do.

That is actually why I got into LaTeX in the first place!

My resume was initially done with LibreOffice and I'd send recruiters a PDF, and they would ask for a .docx, and when I would send that they would screw up all the formatting by inserting their ugly logo on the top.

When I "ported" my resume over to LaTeX, I would send the PDF and they'd ask for a .docx, I would say "Oh, the resume is done in LaTeX. Here's a link to the source and instructions on how to compile it, feel free to do what you need".

Then they would just submit the raw PDF.

..or they would just not submit it at all.

As far as I am aware that never happened. Every time this particular situation has happened, I have gotten a callback.

If you did this to me, fine.

If you had done this to a recruiter that funnels screened people to me, I'd make sure to not interview you. It shows total lack of awareness of how to deal with non-tech people, verging on arrogance.

…what?

How would that work logistically? You would get a regular resume with formatting that isn’t fucked up and you would think “this is a guy who I shouldn’t hire”? You’d have a stack of resumes, all of which are broken, and you’d see one that isn’t and that would be a red flag?

How exactly is it “arrogant”? I didn’t like that my resume formatting was breaking because of the people who insisted on inserting their ugly logo on top the page. I had historically asked them to stop doing that, or at the very least to show me the end result before they submitted, and they would simply not work with me. I think my solution actually demonstrates a lot of awareness in how to deal with “non-tech people”.

The recruiter wouldn't compile anything, they'd just tell me "this guy sent me a GitHub repo instead of a CV", or more likely just not mention your application. A recruiter who reliably funnels screened people to me is worth far more than any single application, so that's how it plays out logistically - you get dropped and never hear about it. "As far as I am aware" is carrying a lot of weight there.

The arrogant bit is "here's a link to the source and instructions on how to compile it, feel free to do what you need". A recruiter asking for an editable version wants something they can drop their letterhead on and forward to the client. Handing them a build task assumes they have both the skills and the inclination to meet you on your toolchain. Nobody expects you to be their typesetter either; the difference in skills isn't the problem, assuming the difference away is.

That mismatch is the part I'd actually be screening for. A company is mostly non-engineering people: sales, support, HR, PMs who can't read a diff. The recruiter is the one non-technical person in your hiring pipeline, and how you handle them is a sample of how you'd handle the fifty you'd work alongside. If the instinct is to make them come to your toolchain rather than meet them where they are, that plays out in every meeting and every "quick question" from sales for as long as you're employed. The CV is the one document whose entire purpose is to sell you to a non-technical audience, and handling that poorly is telling.

I've maintained my own CV in LaTeX for ~20 years and would never dream of sending a recruiter a Makefile and telling them to work it out.

Sent to me directly? Fine, I'd read the repo, probably be impressed, might even see if I could improve mine from it. That was never the scenario though.

I don't agree with you being mass-downvoted, since you're just espousing your opinion, even if it's one I don't agree with.

That said, I think we're at a fundamental disagreement here; the recruiters would screw up the formatting in a way that would make the resume say things that are flatly untrue. It's not just aesthetic. For example, I used to put the amount of experience I had in different technologies, and because they would break the alignment it would look like I had more years experience with Node.js than Node.js had even existed at that point.

When I would politely ask recruiters to, at the very least, send me the updated resume with their ugly logo so I could point these things out, they would universally agree and then never actually do it before sending it to the potential employer. This was literally 100% of the time, there was not a single outlier here. That's not nothing; a competent interviewer might think they've caught me in a lie and not move forward. I'm no exception; if I saw that a person said they had more experience with a technology than the laws of physics would dictate, I would assume they're full of shit and pass on the resume.

So you tell me, what exactly should I do? Waste my time and the technically incompetent recruiter's time and the interviewer's time because they think I'm more qualified for something than I ever said I was? Or I could simply, hear me out, create a situation where these "non-tech people" can't screw this up, because they invariably would. I guess you can call it "arrogant" if you want, but I really think it's considerably less douchey than wasting everyone's time.

With the advent of LLMs they could point Claude to the LaTeX source and get it in any format they want. Or they could, and I think they largely did, just forward the raw PDF (which I always provided), maybe using Preview to insert their ugly logo somewhere where it doesn't screw up formatting. If they had asked me to do the logo insertion, I would have inserted it myself because I'm not incompetent with typesetting.

Frankly, though, the resume is actually working as intentional, because I do not believe that I would be a good culture-fit on your team so it would be best not to waste your time anyway.

To be fair, I actually emailed HN moderation before I submitted this because I actually sort of agree. They said I should go ahead and submit it because there might be some interest in this.

That's solid

Uh, what?

I actually think a lot of people cared enough to do this; the entire Wine project sort of exists specifically because people want Windows software on Linux.

I know multiple people who have said that they won't use Linux specifically because it doesn't have the full-fat desktop version Office on there.

"Unnecessary"? Sure, I guess, I don't like MS Office and I don't use it, but a lot of people seem to really like it, whether or not they should.

I'm not talking about WINE, I'm talking avout what you had Claude build to use it.

If this were a proof of concept and you had the ability to say what you did different to make it work better than previous attempts that would be great, but i don't think you know.

The stuff that was done differently was the shim to get the activation working, and the fact that modern Wine has native Wayland support that helps avoid a lot of graphical glitches.

I'm not entirely sure what your point is though? Are you suggesting I don't know how to write software? I've been doing this for a very long time, well before generative AI.

Yeah, I think I mentioned it here a few months ago, but I got Office 97 working with Wine, and I was sort of flabbergasted at how usable it still is. It worked fine with my system's TrueType fonts, it does all the formatting I care about, and given that it's nearly 30 year old software it runs obscenely fast. If I weren't a grumpy die-hard CLI person I would probably still consider using it.

All that said, there are a lot of people who want the absolute latest MS Office. I don't get it either.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this actually, though it looks like there's a good chunk of overlap in what we were doing.

I suspect what they're doing is better than what I did. I just was happy I got something working and wanted to share.