Perhaps there is a balance to be struck? I have thought long and hard about this, and I have settled on taking notes by typing on my laptop. The benefits are far too many: I do not have to carry my notes around to read them on the commute; I do not have to worry about losing them; I can rewrite them to my heart’s content without messing up the layout; and I feel that I type faster than I can write.
I do partly agree, though. When I am studying a new concept or reviewing old ones, I tend to scribble my thoughts down. I have not been able to replicate brainstorming while scribbling and doodling on an electronic device. The friction of my pen on paper seems to actually wire the pathways in my brain.
I share your wish. Emacs, as wonderful as it is, has accumulated a lot of cruft over the decades and would benefit immensely from a rewrite. A "Neo-Emacs" could be multithreaded from the ground up and drop support for archaic platforms. The rewrite could even be in Rust to attract younger developers.
I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.
One thing LLMs are surprisingly bad at is producing correct LaTeX diagram code. Very often I've tried to describe in detail an electric circuit, a graph (the data structure), or an automaton so I can quickly visualize something I'm studying, but they fail. They mix up labels, draw without any sense of direction or ordering, and make other errors. I find this surprising because LaTeX/TiKZ have been around for decades and there are plenty of examples they could have learned from.
I’m in the same boat. I’ve internalized Vim keybindings so much that there’s no friction between thinking and doing on the screen. If I want to place the cursor on the next line, move to the end and add a semicolon, then jump to the end of the file, I just do it. My pet theory is that because Vim keybindings are unintuitive, developing proficiency required building muscle memory, which offloads cognitive load from my brain to my fingers so text editing becomes mechanical rather than cognitive.
I’m sorry, but any non-trivial Zig code gives me PTSD flashbacks of C. I don’t understand who Zig is targeting: with pervasive mutability, manual allocation, and a lack of proper sum types, it feels like a step back from languages such as Rust. If it is indeed a different way to write code, one that embraces default memory unsafety, why would I choose it over C, which has decades of work behind it?
There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...
I've been using Kokoro TTS with the CLI app, audiblez, mentioned in the "Similar Projects" section of the README. The model is fast and delivers impressive quality for its small size. Some issues I have faced, however, are:
a) It doesn't distinguish periods at the end of sentences from the dots in abbreviations such as "Mr." or "Mrs." The result is an awkward pause between "Mr." and the name.
b) It doesn't handle ellipses well.
c) Words are pronounced the same way regardless of context.
Congratulations on the release! I don’t have much to add, but I wanted to express how much I love hearing about people with no formal software background who identify problems in their daily lives, plan, build, and release software to address them. Best of luck!
> Emacs is a powerful tool, but it also demands a lot from its user. Eventually
I got tired of dealing with the host of plugins and customizations that I needed to keep my system running the way I wanted. I'm at a point in my life where I would rather spend my spare time on hobbies, hanging out with family and friends, and otherwise not messing around with a patchwork of ELisp code snippets that I've cobbled together from various sources.
On the flip side, my experience with Emacs has been quite different. You don't need a ton of plugins to get the most out of it; I've been using the same configuration of under 200 lines for the past six years without encountering any breaking changes. I rely on Magit, Org-mode, Org-roam, and Org-agenda every single day.
That said, using Emacs does require some commitment to reading the documentation. While I agree that it has some outdated defaults, you only need to make those adjustments once.
Congratulations to the Zod team on the new release. At the risk of sounding overtly negative, I can't help but shudder when I think about the number of breaking changes outlined in the migration guide. For projects that rely heavily on Zod, it feels like a daunting task ahead—one that will demand a lot of developer attention and time to navigate. Having maintained a few frontend projects that are 4-5 years old at work, I really empathize with them.
In my experience, large React projects often depend on a multitude of libraries, and when each one rolls out substantial changes—sometimes with barely any documentation—it can quickly become overwhelming. This is honestly one of my least favorite aspects of working with JavaScript. It just feels like a constant uphill battle to keep everything in sync and functioning smoothly.
I have never used Roam before, but I've been happily using an Emacs package called org-roam [0] for the past couple of years. When paired with org-roam-ui [1], it provides everything I need: basic linking, timestamped notes, and a graph view of all my notes. If you're an Emacs user or have used Roam in the past, I highly recommend giving them a try!
It took me a few tries to get comfortable with Rust—its ownership model, lifetimes, and pervasive use of enums and pattern matching were daunting at first. In my initial attempt, I felt overwhelmed very early on. The second time, I was too dogmatic, reading the book line by line from the very first chapter, and eventually lost patience. By then, however, I had come to understand that Rust would help me learn programming and software design on a deeper level. On my third try, I finally found success; I began rewriting my small programs and scripts using the rudimentary understanding I had gained from my previous encounters. I filled in the gaps as needed—learning idiomatic error handling, using types to express data, and harnessing pattern matching, among other techniques.
After all this ordeal, I can confidently say that learning Rust was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my programming career. Declaring types, structs, and enums beforehand, then writing functions to work with immutable data and pattern matching, has become the approach I apply even when coding in other languages.
From the movie, The Life of Pi: Animals don't think like we do! People who forget that get themselves killed. When you look into an animal's eyes, you are seeing your own emotions reflected back at you, and nothing else.
I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.
I understand your perspective. I like to view niche languages as a medium for learning. For instance, I enjoy using Rust in my personal projects—even if many of these projects may never be released—because the lessons on immutability, functional programming constructs, and trait-oriented programming significantly enhance my day-to-day work. Therefore, I believe that learning niche languages, even in the absence of a robust job market, is worthwhile.
I do partly agree, though. When I am studying a new concept or reviewing old ones, I tend to scribble my thoughts down. I have not been able to replicate brainstorming while scribbling and doodling on an electronic device. The friction of my pen on paper seems to actually wire the pathways in my brain.