Yet ANOTHER reason to hate Overleaf 🤮 Now it has built-in 'AI assistance' that sends your draft papers to a third-party LLM. It also means that it shills for the product from right within the editor. - ThreadSky

emily.space • 120 days ago

Yet ANOTHER reason to hate Overleaf 🤮

Now it has built-in 'AI assistance' that sends your draft papers to a third-party LLM. It also means that it shills for the product from right within the editor.

Comments

michaelaye.bsky.social•120 days ago

Give Typst a try! Powerful potential successor to Latex with much cleaner syntax and also has online account.

emily.space•120 days ago

I need to use LaTeX still until journals support submitting in Typst.

michaelaye.bsky.social•120 days ago

A practical way may be to convert the Typst file to a LaTeX file and submit that LaTeX file. But I haven’t tested that route myself, possibly soon.

siravan1349.bsky.social•120 days ago

I have done this. Not the easiest option but definitely doable. I prefer Typst for actually writing the paper and plan the same until journals start accepting Typst. You can use pandoc for conversion and then manual edit. Painful but doable.

michaelaye.bsky.social•120 days ago

Not something Emily will be a fan of… ;)

michaelaye.bsky.social•120 days ago

We might be able to train and use an AI for that. Things are getting incredible these days. the whole morning I developed several modules without typing a single line.

siravan1349.bsky.social•120 days ago

Pandoc is already doing a decent job, but still has glitches, especially for math formulas.

emily.space•120 days ago

I already searched and this isn't easily possible. Sounds like a lot of hassle to deal with all the possible formatting differences.

michaelaye.bsky.social•120 days ago

I see. Pity. I’m secretly waiting for Myst Markdown anyway to take over this space. Because then papers can become webpages without much effort! I think they already have some collaborating journals!

gudrunlotze.bsky.social•120 days ago

It is also a bit annoying because it blocks the spelling correction, at least for me.

sciencesocks.bsky.social•120 days ago

Omg what?! And no way to opt out???

carighan.bsky.social•120 days ago

I'm so happy that my days of having to use LaTeX are behind me. Not because its bad in itself (just annoying tbh), but because the tooling around it has steadily devolved over time, and that's with me having left over a decade ago.

Overleaf seems... wild.

emily.space•120 days ago

Yeah, Overleaf is getting infuriating.

However, editing LaTeX locally is still going strong. I wrote my thesis in VS Code, and it was genuinely really wonderful to work with.

emily.space•120 days ago

Overleaf is 'open source', but you have to pay if you want a server version with most of the useful features (like comments.) Is there a good FOSS alternative to Overleaf? Would be open to self hosting something, I am sick of working with it

richardalexander.bsky.social•120 days ago

I think you can actually self-host Overleaf if you want to. My preferred option is still just a local TeX/LaTeX installation though.

emily.space•120 days ago

There are lots of missing features from the 'open source' version, including commenting.

richardalexander.bsky.social•120 days ago

Ah, fair enough. That is basically the only useful feature…

astrobarker.bsky.social•118 days ago

For me, GitHub(/Lab/whatever git remote) + text editor + compiler

emily.space•120 days ago

Aside from Google (de-googling is hard 🫠) and VS Code, it's basically the only big for-profit company left in my daily stack of tools I use, and I hate it

woses.bsky.social•120 days ago

How big are the limitations of Overleaf? I always hear about Overleaf, but I always use Latex or a self hosted MD instance for cooperative writing. Sometimes I have to show how to Tex or I put everything together from the MD Instance myself.

emily.space•120 days ago

MD?

woses.bsky.social•120 days ago

Markdown

woses.bsky.social•120 days ago

Is also very powerful, but not as Tex

woses.bsky.social•120 days ago

Really annoying but I think is better than anything else.

mfbieger.bsky.social•120 days ago

Yeesh, this is awful to see--is there any way to opt out whatsoever??

chrislintott.bsky.social•120 days ago

If you have technical co-authors, a LaTeX file on github works really well. But you do need people to know what they're doing.

emily.space•120 days ago

That's the problem - especially with a larger paper, there are always a few people who will really struggle to contribute when it's like that.

I might try it next time though as I really don't want my papers to be fed into AI crap. Imagine if you put down some amazing idea in Overleaf and then >

emily.space•120 days ago

> the LLM trains on it and randomly says it to someone else...

I have big privacy concerns! Aside from the fact that Overleaf probably do that already anyway (when something is free you're the product etc etc)

darksapiens.bsky.social•120 days ago

We recently switched to gitlab for this because of the Overleaf changes, and I hadn't used gitlab before… but it lets you do the edits on the website itself, so I could just download the thing on my computer, write the relevant paragraph in the LaTex editor of my choice, and then copy/paste it there

davidedebiasio.bsky.social•120 days ago

On a positive note, my writing is so chaotic it may actually spoil the training

lucadimascolo.bsky.social•120 days ago

not in love with overleaf, especially after the way they changed the project sharing policies

isn't Writefull an extra plug-in to overleaf that could just be turned off, though?

emily.space•120 days ago

It was turned on for me automatically today, and I had to find a way to turn it off. I also guarantee that since Overleaf & Writefull have the same owner, they probably use whatever people write on Overleaf indiscriminately for their AI training anyway 🫤 it's probably buried in their terms that >

emily.space•120 days ago

> they can "use what you write on Overleaf to improve their services" or something, giving them rights to use your stuff freely to train their model 😐

lucadimascolo.bsky.social•120 days ago

from the Overleaf website:

emily.space•120 days ago

That's a bit better, though "open access research texts" inevitably just means that they probably scrape the arXiv

lucadimascolo.bsky.social•120 days ago

yeah, it's just make it "differently awful"

theastrophoenix.bsky.social•120 days ago

Related to this, Overleaf with its monopoly, has also nerfed its free tier making it harder for students without premium accounts to use it. We really are in the era of enshittification of everything that was once good.

emily.space•120 days ago

Yep! I sometimes run into students who are paying for Overleaf just to be able to compile their Bachelor's thesis or something - it's really frustrating 😭

theastrophoenix.bsky.social•120 days ago

That's awful...

I started off using my own laptop to compile tex documents but the number of issues that brings. Incompatible libraries and partial installations that break compilation. Overleaf was great for being a one stop shop. When they bought ShareLaTeX I thought it'd be for the best.

theastrophoenix.bsky.social•120 days ago

That was short sighted naivety :(

justinbuist.bsky.social•120 days ago

I've never tried doing collaboration with it, but I like ye olde LyX (released in 1995) for creating LaTeX. I'd imagine it's possible to store the .lyx file in a git repo and everybody work on it. They'd have to know the basics of Git though.

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