dleslie

Emacs integration over ACP.

They've got Zed, VSCode, Jetbrains... But no Emacs or NeoVIM

Anecdotally, the only American liquor that was widely missed was Bourbon.

I say it in past tense because Bourbon drinkers in Canada are switching to similar liquors. "Corn Whisky" is selling well, now.

Even if it ends up back on the shelves the damage is done. Many will avoid American products until the day they die, and endeavour to teach their children to do the same.

America doesn't need anything from the rest of the world, or so is claimed, so the rest of the world should not burden itself with purchasing American exports.

Android jumped the shark when the default launcher introduced a search bar that couldn't be removed.

The problem isn't that it can edit remote files or run remote shell commands.

The problem is that it appears to do this via an AI Agent. This broadens the security concerns significantly.

Ugh. It's never enough, is it? They can't simply be happy making a decent profit and maintaining a reasonable customer relationship.

They always have to squeeze, crush, and destroy. Rob every customer, ruin every product, so they can enrich themselves.

I highly recommend asking if your library has access to Kanopy. It's a video streaming service for libraries, and works on a monthly token system.

My local library has access to Kanopy, Libby, and Blackstone. And as a Canadian, I've got CBC gem as well.

The available library of films, documentaries, books, and so forth is enormous. All bereft of ads, and mostly bereft of slop.

It's mostly AI generated drivel on their home page now.

Android allows parents to monitor and control what apps children use, and for how long, on their devices.

So I block chrome, and require my permission to install any app. They get thirty minutes a day on devices that lack a browser or social media apps. Not even any YouTube.

They can browse the web on PCs that are visible to the whole living room.

This brought me a great deal of joy to stumble across.

I am not affiliated in any way with this company; it's simply that their website brought me joy and I wish to share that joy.

If its purpose is to be the output of a hobby then it is art; if it is shared with the world, then it is performance art.

Art has utility, of course; but we're discussing primary goals.

As I mentioned, projects that take a long time make for interesting artistic statements. But if the goal isn't performance art but is utility, then alacrity matters.

Many other niche projects have enjoyed enough velocity to have meaningful utility, in my lifetime. Linux was still niche when I started using it in '94.

Because it's the question that I'm interested in. I use Emacs still because it's astoundingly mediocre at all things that I use it for; but always mediocre and never terrible. I would like to know if there's something it's the best at, besides being predictably mediocre.

Velocity is important because we all eventually die.

I've been following Haiku since it was announced. In that time a couple of personal friends have passed on, and a number of family members. In that time children have been born, gone to school, grown into adults, and had children of their own.

Projects that drag on forever make for an interesting artistic statement, but if their goals in any way include utility then velocity is important because time is important.

Emacs isn't the best code editor. It isn't the best note taker. It isn't the best document writer. It isn't even a good lisp.

What is Emacs the best at these days?

The best tool is the one that makes completing tasks better: faster, easier, cheaper, or superior.

It takes significant usage and training to overcome the overhead that Emacs imposes. There are other tools that are fast, free, and capable which do not have this problem.

Even tools which are reasonably extensible. Like VSCode. There's good reason that all the new agentic development environments aren't forks of Emacs or NeoVim.

It launches with a scratch buffer, menu bar with populated menus, a functional mini buffer, and so on. All of this is opinionated defaults and configurable with elisp.

And yes, much of Emacs is broken out of the box and it's been that way a long while. That's not a good thing.

Emacs isn't ready for the masses. Broken defaults, and a brittle experience once features are made working is standard.

I've used Emacs for thirty years now. I don't recommend it to new users.

My experience with Emacs 30 is that Eglot will prompt and show nothing of meaningful assistance beyond a name. That leaves me to run a google search to find whatever binaries fit the description.

They host binaries already; why not host all of the binaries necessary for the supported features to function?

Emacs makes many opinionated choices about defaults; if it didn't, it would launch to little more than an elisp REPL by default.

What's important is that _you can change it_. Good defaults ensure that Emacs doesn't repel new users and casual users and users who are not interested in fiddling.

And this isn't a matter of color theme default, or font default; this is a shipped feature that _does not function_ without changes to the defaults! By default, it does not work.

Well that's a nice change; I'm still on Emacs 30.

But note that this is not the default. Users have to enable that behaviour, and know to enable it. That's a bad default.

Tree sitter support is half baked in the same way official LSP support is, only kind of worse.

Eglot won't help you get your system ready for LSP work, it will only avail itself if what's there. It doesn't even auto detect and configure that, either. There's no user prompting, so you'll have to read the docs to know that this even needs to be done.

Similarly, tree sitter support doesn't include the grammars! And those aren't typically sitting in your package repository, so users have to find a grammar and compile it themselves. There's not even a good recommendation given by Emacs on where to get them, leaving users to hope that whatever repository showed up on a Google search is both in good working order and safe to use.

It's really quite a failure on Emacs.

Firefox will continue to exist and be maintained by open source efforts.

I often wonder if the current model has been driving away contributors, since it _feels like_ contributing effort to support someone else's paychecque.

     It has good emacs support with geiser-chicken.

I wrote the initial support for chicken some 11 years ago; it wasn't _great_, but I see that Jao and others have worked on it some since then. Glad to see it's working well!

   - Strings and symbols passed to foreign code are not copied, they are
    passed directly, any mutations done by external code will be visible on the
    Scheme side.
  - Complex numbers, C structs and unions can now be passed directly as
    arguments and returned as results when interfacing to C code.

Those were major bottlenecks for any FFI-heavy Chicken Scheme app, and would often result in brittle and unsafe abstractions to work around. Glad to see this changed.

Cryptonomicon has the use of a highly custom version of Emacs called OrdoEmacs.

https://dev.to/hyenast2/neal-stephenson-s-cryptonomicon-and-...

This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article:

> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.

IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.

If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.

For most nations, if they find themselves in need of a 5th generation aircraft for defence then they've already lost, or are better served to prepare for a grossly asymmetric battle.

I have HDMI adapters which perform a similar function.

It's awful. Earthworm Jim and Sonic 2 are both great examples of how the art suffers; and the why is in the video I linked.

The waterfall in Sonic 2 was not meant to look like a fence.

True enough; but they want to make it about Canadian Dairy, Softwood Lumber, Steel, Aluminum and so on.