This fits into the broader evolution of the visualization market.
As data grows, visualization becomes as important as processing. This applies not only to applications, but also to relating texts through ideas close to transclusion in Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. [0]
In education, understanding is often best demonstrated not by restating text, but by presenting the same data in another representation and establishing the right analogies and isomorphisms, as in Explorable Explanations. [1]
With a tool like this, you could imagine an end-to-end service for restoring and modernizing old scientific books and papers: digitization, cleanup, LaTeX reformatting, collaborative or volunteer-driven workflows, OCR (like Mathpix), and side-by-side comparison with the original. That would be useful.
> Prism builds on the foundation of Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform that OpenAI acquired and has since evolved into Prism as a unified product. This allowed us to start with a strong base of a mature writing and collaboration environment, and integrate AI in a way that fits naturally into scientific workflows.
They’re quite open about Prism being built on top of Crixet.
Previously, this existed as crixet.com [0]. At some point it used WASM for client-side compilation, and later transitioned to server-side rendering [1][2]. It now appears that there will be no option to disable AI [3]. I hope the core features remain available and won’t be artificially restricted. Compared to Overleaf, there were fewer service limitations: it was possible to compile more complex documents, share projects more freely, and even do so without registration.
On the other hand, Overleaf appears to be open source and at least partially self-hostable, so it’s possible some of these ideas or features will be adopted there over time. Alternatively, someone might eventually manage to move a more complete LaTeX toolchain into WASM.
I’m wondering what’s the proper way to draw Venn diagrams.
I’ve seen that Graphviz has a “nice to have” mention about them, and there are a few simple JS libraries - mostly for two sets. Here’s also my own attempt using an LLM [1].
But maybe someone knows a more general or robust solution - or a better way to achieve this?
In the future, I’d like to be able, for example, to find the intersection between two Venn diagrams of three sets each etc.
There are many other so-called models of computation that are useful for representing ideas such as actor models, abstract rewriting systems, decision trees, and so on. Without them, you might feel that something is missing, so relying on assembly alone would not be enough.
I found out about milk.com when I was thinking about how to make an Android app completely from scratch (assembling DEX bytes from zero, kind of like writing an assembler for the Dalvik VM). That’s when I came across the author of the DEX format, Dan Bornstein — and I was surprised he actually owns a domain like that.
In education, understanding is often best demonstrated not by restating text, but by presenting the same data in another representation and establishing the right analogies and isomorphisms, as in Explorable Explanations. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40295661
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368323