cenazoic

May I have an invite, if anyone has one to spare?

This is a bachelor's thesis from University of Uppsala submitted in March 2026.

I was having trouble accessing the Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet site (linked in headline) directly, so uploaded it here (link expires in 3 days):

https://temp.sh/CVzcQ/emacs-arch-thesis.pdf

The patch author, while claiming LLM discussions are (implied "hidden") in "internal mailing lists", didn't link to the "constructive and collaborative" conversation that indeed occurred (publicly). That seems a sort of dishonesty itself.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-06/msg00...

In a different thread about a different LLM-generated package, here's RMS himself:

> • As a disclaimer it was generated with LLM. I think ELPA has a > • prudent policy to not allow this for now until there is legal > • clarify, but does this apply to nonGNU-ELPA also?

RMS: It does apply, for the time being. It is not a final decision, it is tentative.

(link: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-05/msg00...)

GNU (and/or the Emacs project in particular) does not seem to be acting in ludditic or reactionary ways, but thoughtful ones.

> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing.

I can’t find it now, but I recently read a history of CYOA books. There was a discussion about the fact that although they feature a nameless, race-less, gender-less, age-less, etc, “YOU”, the covers almost universally depict a male protagonist.

This was because market research (in the 1970s, IIRC) showed that while girls will buy books with boys on the cover, boys wouldn’t buy books with girls on the cover.

I wonder how true that remains.

Thank you, looks great!

Have you seen Behind the Parentheses, by Mark Jones Lorenzo? It goes into quite a lot of technical details about how things like eval/apply were implemented for example, and the larger academic and business contexts eg FORTRAN and earlier language development.

I’m a Lisp newbie (and mostly here for the Emacs Lisp) so a fair amount was beyond me, but I still found it quite readable and interesting.

That Gruenberger piece is a fantastic read and still applicable today.

“Overall, 76% of female murders and 56% of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim.”

https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...

Archive: https://archive.is/gIquW

Just a morning note (over coffee) of appreciation for the line “… when I stumble through the saloon doors…” and the whole macguffin, really.

See also: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-2/tb140gerrard-holon.pdf for some background.

Title slightly edited for length.

It really is! We were there one afternoon when a high school choral group was practicing (the museum does a lot of outreach through the Stax Music Academy) and visitors were encouraged to sing along. It was truly magical.

If you’re lucky, you can also catch the Rev. Al Green leading his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church service.

The font is IM Fell English:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English

There’s a copy online at HathiTrust:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b258249&seq=9

I don’t know, I read it as more of a meditation on ‘writing out of range’, both literally as per language constructs, as you mentioned, and metaphorically, as in ‘we’re in the wild blue yonder of weird nowhere now.’

That said, I’m a newbie to Emacs, and I belatedly (after posting the link here) remembered reading something about ‘the point’ in Emacs:

“By default, the cursor in the selected window is drawn as a solid block and appears to be on a character, but you should think of point as between two characters; it is situated before the character under the cursor. ”[^1]

Which made me think maybe things are even weirder than the author thinks. :)

[^1](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Po...)

Yes! I’m a 50+ woman diagnosed as a teenager, and daily magnesium changed my life. I rarely get a migraine these days, and I’m glad to hear it’s effective for others.

I think this speaks to a common misunderstanding of ‘literary’ fiction vs. ‘genre’ fiction - the former is typically more character- or idea-driven, while the latter is story/plot driven.

I’m not making the argument that one is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other; rather that their goals are different.

I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.

Additional hardware details cam be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/s/IvGbXLzzZG

See:

https://rfinder.shop/product/rfinder-m6-dual-band-dmr-4g-lte...

(Read the paper, didn’t watch the video)

I am a 54-year old undergraduate in computer science. I don’t know from Curry-Howard (or Hurry-Coward), but this paper made me giggle with delight and glee. (Knuth invokes this delight in me as well, although I don’t understand most of his writings, yet.)

If nothing else, it’s inspired me to implement half-ass easter-egg achievement systems in any future ‘serious’ software I write.

Archived link: https://archive.ph/CowD7

I understand what you’re saying, but I would suggest this is exactly the ‘banality of evil’ Hannah Arendt wrote about.

Total idle speculation: magicians are more likely to be skeptics, and therefore less prone to madness of crowds or self-deceit.

Because it’s in the FCC rules:

“...Amateur stations will be permitted to commence operations after a 30 day period unless UTC notifies the station that its fixed location is within one kilometer of Power Line Carrier (PLC) systems operating on the same or overlapping frequencies. This notification process will ensure that amateur stations seeking to operate in the above noted bands are located beyond a minimum separation distance from PLC transmission lines, which will help ensure the compatibility and coexistence of amateur and PLC operations, and promote shared use of the bands.”

Looks like this, although a quick search doesn’t find it:

43. J. Wooddell, "Design of a CMOS Processor," pp. 2-3, files of J. Wooddell. 44)J. Morecroft to K. Frewing, "FDS Programming," January 14, 1975, files of R.J. Rice, Jet Propulsion Lab.

> Or is this statement necessary but not sufficient for a meaningful life?

Victor Frankl would say that your overall goal is to find your meaning, so I'd say KK's argument is not sufficient for a meaningful life. Without meaning, your 'authenticity', 'uniqueness', etc is empty.

Over the last year, I've been engaging in something called existential therapy. This is less about your childhood (or adult) traumas, fears, etc, and more about exploring and/or finding your meaning. There's a focus on defining your values; you can start to see where your meaning lies through that lens.

It's been surprisingly difficult for me - not in thinking about what's important to me, but about how to incorporate that into something called 'meaning'. Or worse, I may know that, for me, it's a core value that "people should be treated with dignity and respect" but finding my meaning in that is hard. I don't know how to channel that into an action, other than by being striving for things like decency and kindness in individual interactions. (Of course, getting involved in some group, but I've done so in the past and don't feel particularly called in that direction now.)

So the search continues. I envy those who seem to find their meaning early in life (my partner is one of them), but my own (ongoing) search for it has brought with it an interesting and variegated life so far, and maybe that's enough. (Of course it isn't! :)

I've always been a person with various hobbies, some short-lived, others longer, but the pandemic resulted in what I refer to the trifecta of "old-man" hobbies (I'm a woman).

1 - Advanced Squad Leader. Why? I dunno. I think it started as a challenge - ASL is allegedly one of the more difficult wargames. You play defined scenarios with win/loss conditions. WWII chrome aside, I came to realize it's a great puzzle game.

2 - Scouting memorabilia. This started because I wanted to go through ALL (extinct, defunct, current) the Boy Scouts' merit badges, complete the requirements, and then hand-embroider an accompanying badge. I ended up reading way more than anyone should of early Scouting history (pre-1908/"Scouting for Boys") and associated movements. That led me to discovering the Lone Scouts of America, founded by the first president of the BSA, William D. Boyce, in 1915. They were a separate organization from the BSA until 1924, when the Boy Scouts bought the org. Anyway, I became quite charmed by the LSA - a big part of their program was 'contributing' to their national organ, Lone Scout Magazine, and various 'tribe' papers put out by individual boys. So then I decided to go through THEIR program, and started collecting their various degree pins and booklets, as well as LS Magazine and tribe papers. It's still a long-term goal to get a lot of this stuff scanned and online - there's very little out there.

3 - ham radio. What a rabbit hole this is. They call it a 'hobby of hobbies' - it's definitely led me to sub-hobbies in learning to solder, learning Morse (currently enrolled in the CWOps Academy), electronics, kit-building, 3d-printing, and dreaming of designing my own RF circuits. Note, I have no background in any of this, so it's really been a learning experience. It's really been mentally stimulating in a way I haven't felt in a long time.

Good discussion here:

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mastermind.html

What a world, indeed.

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My favorite was browsing a 1902 Ladies’ Home Journal and finding a lament about how commercial Christmas had become, and essentially, how much better things were back in the good old days.

It’s amazing how evergreen that general sentiment seems to be.