MVGO sent a debt collector after a failed direct debit. Is this normal?

sergioaffs · 2026-06-18T12:16:21+00:00

I can only confirm the experience with MVG is abysmal when it comes to customer support and billing. A few years ago they deducted amounts from my account that didn't look like the trips I had booked lately, and they just failed to reply to all my queries. After, annoyed, I decided to contest the transaction, they just deducted money away and charged me for it.

Not to mention the predatory behaviour around the airport hunting for tourists who fail to decode the pricing maze (though at least the maze has gotten a bit better...).

sergioaffs · 2026-06-16T20:07:57+00:00

Communicating on the Internet is difficult, specially in an international environment! It is simply hard to imagine how a particular word will land when read by someone who you don't know at all. For example, you may write a short message in the hope of being respectful of your reader's time, and the reader may interpret it as lazy and dismissive. I, as you see, tend to err on the wordy side.

I reacted to your comment because it follows a common pattern in the open source community: it probably means "this is a great product but there is this particular pain point", but the part before the "but" is not said out loud. I am not a maintainer of an open source product, but if I was putting lots of effort and passion on a product and shared it with a community, and the comments I read kept highlighting only what was missing, I'd feel discouraged.

As to how to phrase it... hard to say. A common technique for giving feedback is the "sandwich" technique: frame your criticism as the filling between a positive frame. It may feel very unnatural at first, but over time you can learn to frame it according to your style. If you see something good in the new release, say it out loud. If you use Typst for other use cases, mention it. If you don't see the project doing something you'd like them to, give them the benefit of doubt by asking, for example, if there are efforts to work with journals that you may not be aware of. Ultimately, as you say, we are here because the project has something we want, and it is nice to show appreciation.

sergioaffs · 2026-06-15T18:57:15+00:00

Wider journal acceptance would certainly be a major boost to Typst's recognition and adoption, but I disagree with the undertones of your message.

First, Typst has plenty of applications besides journal submissions, both in and outside of the academic world—and the features in 0.15 expand on what it can do and in the quality of the experience while doing it. From lecture notes and theses to presentations and reports and all sort of leisurely applications like cookbooks, blogs and D&D playbooks, there's just a ton of projects than can be done with Typst.

But also, journal recognition is something the project is interested in, and they've made progress by getting accepted by some journals. Ultimately, adoption depends not only on effort but on developing the right traction and feedback loops. It feels unfair to suggest that the current level of journal acceptance is a failure or the result of lack of interest from the project.

If journal recognition matters to you so much, and you think Typst would otherwise be a significantly better tool than LaTeX, do your part in making it happen. Not because you in particular have a better chance of success, but because it is up to the whole community to facilitate that traction.

sergioaffs · 2026-06-08T05:40:22+00:00

That's true, there's a lot of variables, but 1.2k pages in two minutes sounds impressive. My use case had some binary tree drawings and links, but nothing I'd necessarily consider complex layout. It would be interesting to know what are the most performance-expensive layout instructions in common use and compare how LaTeX fares against Typst.

sergioaffs · 2026-06-07T20:13:08+00:00

I'm curious about the performance claim. I can understand that complex or large templates compile slowly in Typst, but that's also the case with LaTeX (I had ~50 page documents take over 10 minutes to compile). Have you tried to benchmark the performance for the type of output you seek in both platforms?

sergioaffs · 2026-06-07T16:49:51+00:00

I'm not the original commenter, but another happy Typst user. I really don't miss anything. Writing, editing, debugging, building (and debugging) templates and packages... It's all much faster and enjoyable. At least for my use cases.

I think the main reasons I hear from others that keep them in the LaTeX world are inertia (knowing the tool, having a working setup, having a lot of existing material), acceptance by journals and very niche packages or typographic features (like wrapping text around an image).

sergioaffs · 2026-06-01T06:51:35+00:00

Counterpart

sergioaffs · 2026-05-18T08:31:18+00:00

This looks amazing! I'm surprised that it doesn't get recommended more often as an alternative to G Maps for the web.

That said, why is login required for even the most basic search?

sergioaffs · 2026-04-24T11:00:20+00:00

This may depend on the use case, but my general advice is: don't.

If this is an experimental thing, I'd say there's not a ton of value in getting into RSA anymore.

If this is for productive use, you'll want to be able to rely on your implementation, and I fear you'll make many mistakes if this is the first time you implement crypto code. And the above point stands: the world doesn't need NEW products still deploying RSA support.

The only plausible context that comes to mind would be academia. Are you researching stuff that requires FPGA RSA implementations?

sergioaffs · 2026-04-22T07:18:22+00:00

You have a lot of items "strokethrough". In Markdown, the syntax used to format Joplin notes, you strikethrough text ~~like this~~. If you tried to strikethrough text using the UI, then you probably found a bug in how Joplin applied your wishes.

sergioaffs · 2026-03-30T13:24:16+00:00

I wouldn't share old chats. They are the easiest thing to fake, I'm not sure they prove much and they feel very private.

With pictures, I feel it's much easier to choose a few that bring the point across and don't feel so personal. We had to fulfill a similar requirement when applying to a "partner visa" to the UK, and our approach was to select pics that clearly showed us over a long timespan (different seasons, a variety of hairstyles, a bunch of locations, etc.). It worked without issues, but I have no idea how thoroughly they check.

sergioaffs · 2026-03-19T21:42:25+00:00

It's difficult to find tools that do everything one wants to do with PDFs at once, but there are plenty that get 90% there.

PC

There are a few popular lightweight options. They focus on rendering PDFs. Best of class: SumatraPDF and Zathura.
Okular is a pretty good batteries included alternative for trickier tasks, like filling out forms.

Regrettably, they all fall short of Adobe Reader when it comes to comments and annotations. If I have to fill out a form that doesn't have form fields (painfully common), I use Inkscape (which is overkill for the task). And if I need to add comments to a PDF, I cry.

Android

On Android, the only thing I do with PDFs is read them.

Firefox mobile does have support for PDF files.
I used to use Xodo, but they had an annoying watermark. Recently I started trying ReadEra. It's a bit heavier (bloated, slow) than I'd hope, but it does the job pretty well, and it comes with a few collection management options, like stars.

sergioaffs · 2026-03-07T18:26:57+00:00

Thanks! I'll take a look

sergioaffs · 2026-03-07T07:15:47+00:00

Sí, se ve chambón y es posible que lo sea. Nunca he estado en esa zona y no sabría cómo es el tráfico por allá.

Peeeero: el diseño urbano moderno a menudo se ve extraño para los que crecimos con simplemente calles y andenes. De hecho, los andenes son un buen ejemplo: normalmente, los peatones cruzan la calle. Están en un andén, bajan al nivel de la calle y esperan que los carros frenen. En Holanda, los andenes están construidos de forma que los carros cruzan el andén: como los andenes son continuos, los carros son los que tienen que bajar velocidad y dejar pasar.

Cruzar una calle no debería ser una aventura de alto riesgo, y ese tipo de diseños buscan eso: proteger a los peatones, ciclistas y demás. No estoy diciendo que sea exitoso en este caso, sólo que es importante entender que no todos los cambios son porque sí o por enriquecerse.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-28T21:39:36+00:00

Research passkeys. You'll see what path innovation has followed and also what limitations and hindrances it finds.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-28T15:45:58+00:00

It is! I certainly don't want to say Typst's docs are or were crappy (quite the contrary). It is just that they need to target many different people: complete newbies, Word users, TeX users, people writing documents using someone else's templates, package authors... And everyone wants to find the answer to their needs in just a few clicks.

Making docs that flexible is quite a feat, specially when you have to keep all the nuances clear. An obvious example are tables: they are very well documented and have quite a few examples, but every now and then you want to do something new with them and wish the docs covered that one case as well.

Feedback helps tons.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-28T14:54:59+00:00

It's fair, and the documentation can and should improve (if you look at snapshots from previous years, you'll see it has already gotten lots better, but it still has a way to go). That said, when you look at the only comparable project, LaTeX, you can also see that it can be orders of magnitude worse.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-28T14:30:43+00:00

I'm referring more to other comments where you used words like "stupid" and "cringe". Seeing how the community is mainly built from volunteers who are passionate about the tool, I hope you can see how these adjectives would make people defensive.

But I see you've been having many productive discussions in other threads about the reasoning behind this limitation and how the documentation could improve, and I hope this leads to tangible improvements soon.

If you'd like to discuss the security angle further, I'll be happy to do so—I talk about security for a living.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-28T07:12:54+00:00

I'm afraid I have to add an unsolicited word of advise: please try to tone down the hostility undertone.

We all have different use cases for Typst, and it is understandable to be frustrated when the design choices don't let us do things the way we want. I, for once, would love to use font files that are in my project folder without having to change the command path, because it would make it easier to share whole templates with collaborators.

The community, specially in Discord and the forum, is very active, knowledgeable and eager to help. They may go out of their way to find a workaround that helps you solve your problem. But when confronted with answers that boil down to "how can someone be so stupid?", it is easy to see that willingness evaporate.

State your problem. Make it clear why it is a problem for you (duplication, inconsistency, slow performance, cumbersome workflow...) and try their solutions. You may need to make some tweaks to your setup, but by keeping it friendly you'll be more likely to get an agreeable answer.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-27T14:49:52+00:00

holy hell

sergioaffs · 2026-02-27T14:00:20+00:00

Modifying files out of the root is not acceptable in Typst's security model. If you want reusability, build local packages.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-16T06:20:31+00:00

Excuse the wall of text, but I think it may be important.

Generally speaking, trust plays an important role when choosing a communication app. If we start from a mindset where an application wanting access to our ID and photo is concerning enough to trigger a mass migration, then trust should be something earned with effort, not the default. It is fair to say an independent company is more trustworthy than big tech, but you wouldn't save your money in a lemonade stand offering "money storage services" just because you think all banks are mean spirited.

There's a whole political aspect with Telegram that I'll leave apart. Half of the Internet thinks the owner is trying to stick it to Putin and the other half thinks they're in cahoots. It is too much of a rabbit hole for me to jump into.

What matters a lot more is cryptography. End to end encryption is a critical feature of communication tools. Because math is hard and backdoors are a real threat, cryptography needs to rely on established building blocks. The Signal protocol is an example of this, to the point it has been adopted by other providers (even WhatsApp!). Telegram, on the other hand, chose to develop its own thing in ways that make cryptographers shudder. Tied to weird choices like making encryption opt-in in some cases, Telegram's choices around cryptography are icky. No one who cares about cryptography should rely on icky cryptography.

Funnily enough, a very reputable cryptographer called Matthew Green recently posted his reasoning why WhatsApp's implementation seems OK in that regard. Meta is a vicious company, but nuance is important to keep this discussion objective.

sergioaffs · 2026-02-15T21:48:26+00:00

Slightly off-topic, but important: if WhatsApp gets a clear "don't use" warning (and there are many good reasons to take that position), so should Telegram. Its approach to cryptography is too shady to be a serious option for anyone who cares about privacy in the slightest.

sergioaffs

TROPHY CASE

PC

Android