noufalibrahim

Yup. I practice western calligraphy but haven't been able to make much inroads into Arabic. Partly because of the lack of high quality instruction material (which is available as books for Western calligraphy) and partly because of the complexity. The fact that it's right to left and I'm right handed presents some challenges too (my hand will come over letters I've just written and there's a risk of smudging them). The nibs are usually cut the other way and I'm still struggling drawing basic letters.

Islam prohibits representational art and so, except for a few pockets, all the skills of Muslim artists went into two things - Calligraphy and geometric tessellations (what's called "arabesque" and which you see on mosques, rugs etc.). The calligraphy itself has several hands (which is what we call "fonts"). The most popular one is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script) which is the one used for the copies of the Koran from Saudi Arabia. It's very legible and doesn't lend itself to too much flourishing. The Basmala glyph mentioned in the article looks like Naskh with the S of Basmala (س) elongated. There are others too. Thuluth (which is used in the copies of the Koran for ornamental work like the titles of the chapters), Nastaliq (which people often call Urdu or Persian because of how those languages are usually written in this hand), Kufic (which is an angular hand that overlaps with tessellations in ornamental work), Mughlai (which is a denser hand that's common in the Indian Subcontinent) and several others. There are even local variants with which you can identify geography. This style is specific to the Malabar coast in Kerala and, as far as I know, it's seen only there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabi_Malayalam_script#/media/...

In a certain way, moving from "Free Software" to "Open Source" started this transition and it's not slowing down.

I was just going to say the same thing. I couldn't afford the rigs needed to run any of these games and never really played them. Now, it's running inside a browser on a laptop.

Fair enough but speed, especially the kind that comes with LLMs, is fast enough to open new ways of working and doing things. We don't have infinite time and if there's something that can give me multiple, for example, UI suggestions in a minute which I can pick from, it's a different way of working than sitting with a UI designer for several hours have discussions. So, while I agree with you in theory, I don't fully agree with you in, what I think you're implying, when it comes to practice.

Isn't this essentially a user space filesystem implementation?

I don't mind the idea of using HTML components and widgets to style desktop applications. CSS and the DOM are widely known and reusing those for desktop apps is probably a good idea.

The problem, as you've pointed out, is that electron apps are bloated and slow. If they became the default and my editor, chat client, terminal, and everything else that I keep open were just thin layers around web applications, I'd rather figure out a way to move things into a browser rather than pull a piece of the browser out to wrap these applications.

> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.

There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.

OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.

As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.

Yes. That is an insight but then again, most marketing emails were templatised slop1.0 from mailchimp and other sites. This just makes it slicker. So, I'm not sure.

I'm not so sure of that.

A friend of mine automated the lead generation and marketing function of his tiny startup using OpenClaw and set of skills he wrote for it. It would find potential leads (from a list of sources), contact them, score them and keep the owner informed via. Slack about what's going on. They actually closed a few deals following up on leads generated by their bots.

I don't do much IF these days and I'm not sure if I will but if I do ever have time to sit down with something new, I will definitely give Loreline a try.

Oh yes. What other software allows you so much to make it your own? Yes, I know the yak shaving argument etc. But what's the fun in opening up some computer/OS/software that looks and feels exactly like everyone elses? An Emacs (and vim) setup is something you can actually have a discussion about with someone else.

Yup. I've aliased it to e and and it works just fine. Sort of "send file into Emacs". I've also added some elisp to say things like e something.c:43 so that it opens it up at line 43.

I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.

Thanks. You should. I remember something I read about a teacher who asked kids to write little interactive fiction pieces using Inform 7 set in different parts of the school and then he stitched them all together into a large story and they could all play it. Everyone's imagination comes to life. You wander into the parking lot and some kid has created a portal there into a mirror universe. I don't know if I'm misremembering or the work involved but it's definitely feasible and not something you can do with a regular programming language easily in such an open ended way.

I've always loved interactive fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp is a great watch. "Before the first person shooter, we had the second person thinker." :)

I wrote a few games using Inform 7 and ran a couple of workshops for it too.

It's not just the technical idiosyncrasies of the language. I've noticed that if you use it for the few hours and get into "the zone", you start to inhabit the world that you're creating and "see" it. The overall attitude is that of a world creator rather than a programmer fixing technical issues. Breaking the flow is trying to figure out how to handle an array or something like that. I liked the experience and this idea that the nature of the language will affect how you interact with it and hence the DX is, I think, not fully explored.

I'd wager that most people have just their parents to go off of and a few recallibrate using their own experiences, learning, and introspecting about them. Those are the few to whom books and seminars are useful as sources.

I think, for a large number of people, self-help (especially the short form high intensity style content that influencers post is just "content" to "consume" - a form of cheap entertainment that's thrown out almost as soon as it's consumed. There's no enduring change. That takes time and an semi-innate desire to change. Then, all these things become sensible and useful.

I'm not a big fan of Ferris but I'm willing to bet that someone who sits down with one of his books and works through it slowly applying the lessons to his or her own life will see some kind of change as opposed to the typical person who just asks an LLM to summarise the book or a video about it and then decides that they've changed.

Not exactly my idea. However, it's pleasant to see two people I admire so much having respect for each other.

DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).

I generally agree. I look at Emacs like a lisp interpreter with text editing primitives on which someone has built a decent editor.

There was a "community" about a decade or two ago. On Freenode IRC, there were regulars who hung around in #emacs and it was quite nice. There were no corporate sponsors or random startups trying to hire from there so it was genuinely just a bunch of people who enjoyed using Emacs and were chatting about it. It's a part of the reason I got really hooked into it. I still use Org heavily for meeting minutes etc.

I guess it depends greatly on where one lives etc. This is a concern I've heard from all my friends in the States.

There is a bubble here. Running ones own business is, on the overall, better than being employed especially given the current world. However, that doesn't automatically equal to startups. There are people who are running their own brick and mortar businesses. They're not billionaires or even millionaires but they've crossed the point where lack of a reliable source of wealth is a source of misery for them. Surely, that's a great thing.

"you're absolutely right. I should have taken human psychology into consideration while creating the plan. Let me fix that."

Was going to say the same thing. It's a very nice trip down memory lane.

Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

+1 to that. I used https://ledger-cli.org/ and the accompanying Emacs mode for a long long time. I used small slips of paper to record cash spends during the day and by bank statements for online ones. Then kept track. I kept a "reconciliation" account to catch misses and it was quite low after several years.

I somehow fell out of the habit but I really need to get back to it.

I needed something to help me stay off the computer (sites and applications) at certain times of the day with enforcement and in a way that's hard to remove. I had some ideas but was able to systematize all that into a proper program that I use daily. It's been very effective and it's much better (for me) than any of the commercial solutions that I've found for Linux. About 40% of the program was done using Aider (before I picked up Claude Code). The rest is using CC.

https://github.com/nibrahim/glocker

AI is no doubt powerful and i think that's reflected on HN. However, a lot of AI news these days is alloyed with hype and falsehood. Some amount of sceptical counter pressure is warranted.

Yup. Claude will rtfm. Most humans won't.

Fair enough but even thing acquired within a lifetime have a hierarchy. Many societies, for example, assume that the kids who are good in Math are smart but the ones who write well or are exemplary in "co-curricular" subjects simply aren't that bright.

As an example, the kid who can solve Math problems has less of an edge over AI than the kid who automatically becomes the captain of the neighbourhood football team but older human beings often assume that the former is smarter.

To improve the user experience.

Thanks. Is this quote from a book?

I see that point of view but there's another that I've recently been thinking about.

Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).

There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.