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Imagine it's 1986 and this story comes from SoViEt RuSsIa. Derek Lowe (who I hold to be adjacent to a National Treasure) would not be obliged to speculate about motives.

The entire bloviosphere would unanimously collapse into mockery.

The word is "corrupt." It's simple.

Get the basics, then follow your nose to the features you want to try. Before you know it you'll be writing your own stuff and sharing it.

The community is the best around.

?

The payoff can be enormous. The investment can be illegible on the front end—it depends on the skills and concepts you already have.

Open an Emacs buffer, switch to Org mode, and start typing an outline. The benefit is immediate, provided those paradigms (plain text, outline hierarchy) appeal to you.

There are many features of Org mode that complement each other powerfully but that are district enough that you can climb one learning curve at a time.

I vividly remember the manual, years ago, overwhelming me! But today there are so many good tutorials the barrier to entry is quite low. Best of luck!

Highly recommend: David Wilson's System Crafters channel, Mike Zamansky's channel, Protesilaos Stavrou's channel. There's an amazing community on Mastodon.

The people living on that peninsula right now are stressed out in a way most of us have never experienced.

https://github.com/emacsmirror/draft-mode

(It was still worth it: huge fun and I learned a ton.)

Both changed everything in an epistemologically qualitative manner. Life before calculus/microwave, and life after calculus/microwave.

How did we warm up leftovers before the microwave?

What did the world look like before I learned calculus?

Could not have said it better myself.

[shrugs in cell biologist]

How about if you go to hell?

> Education is begging to be disrupted.

I rest my case.

Substantively, believe me, I agree with you. Culturally, though, you're proving my point.

“Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience. Based on hypercompetitive greed. (That for a generation was funded by cheap money chasing itself around I search of a drain.)

It’s no coincidence that importing this culture to education produces experiences that are superficial and brittle. It’s difficult to think of a counterexample.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong

She has published all kinds of different work: comprehensive surveys, biographies of key figures, memoir, the works. She’s so prolific, clear, and consistent that you can just follow your nose to whichever entry point strikes your fancy.

But there’s a kernel of an interesting idea in there. Imagine a world where all apps used by everyone were as user oriented as Emacs. Impossible, fantasy, utopian, never, and I agree. But a way to contextualize how much we’ve given up.

> User customization helps in another, subtler way, by making the whole user community into a breeding and testing ground for new ideas.

RMS wrote these words in 1981. Org mode was released in 2003 (! twenty years ago?!) and added functionality that for many users is much of what Emacs offers. Today there is a mature ecosystem of incredibly high quality packages, and Emacs itself continues to become even more extensible, with the underlying infrastructure helping “libraries” become even more well behaved and composable.

This part of the story alone is a staggering triumph, comparable to the success of the Linux kernel and all that it has become, absorbed, encompassed, and grown to nurture.

When your kids get tired of it, can I buy it?

Everything what my ADD brain needs. Nothing my ADD brain doesn’t need. And perfect alignment with libre ideals! May I suggest that you make a tiny update, just so that the App Store can tout your impeccable privacy policy!

https://meetings.ams.org/math/spring2023se/meetingapp.cgi/Pa...

In the 2000 years since trigonometry was discovered it's always been assumed that any alleged proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem based on trigonometry must be circular. In fact, in the book containing the largest known collection of proofs (The Pythagorean Proposition by Elisha Loomis) the author flatly states that “There are no trigonometric proofs, because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem.” But that isn’t quite true: in our lecture we present a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity \sin^2x + \cos^2x = 1.