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setopt

1,406 karma · joined May 26, 2024

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setopt··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
n’th’ed?
setopt··on The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory
I haven’t followed the news. Sounds like IBM is bad news for Fedora long term?
setopt··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Indeed, I did switch to a rubber-like PenTips nib after that, and it made the writing experience really silent. Unfortunately it also felt somehow clumsy to write with – worse than just plastic-on-glass writing. It’s hard to describe, but it somehow made the «turns» in my handwriting feel awkward, and despite sticking with it for months I couldn’t get used to it. There’s perhaps other brands out there that make better ones, haven’t looked around further.

In my case, I eventually went back to a mixture of laptop and paper for most tasks, and now just use the iPad for highlighting (Zotero), lecturing (using Notability on projector as a blackboard/whiteboard), and occasionally to make figures and slides. But I stopped using it for note taking or drafting.

setopt··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Interesting. I wonder what’s the difference in our usage, perhaps the amount of force we normally use when swiping and writing?

Regarding noise, one of the main reasons I stopped using it was because my partner complained about the «scratching» noises when we were home officing together during Covid lockdown, and I personally also found it loud. I didn’t get complaints on the iPad before getting the screen protector.

Regarding the friction, I personally found swiping uncomfortable over time, but I guess that might depend on a lot of factors, including force used when swiping and skin type (oily vs dry skin, skin thickness and sensitivity, etc.)?

setopt··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
Paperlike is indeed nice for handwriting, but it has drawbacks. The increased friction makes it uncomfortable to use your fingers to navigate the iPad for long, and since it makes the finger motion along the screen less smooth, it sometimes prevents the iPad from correctly interpreting drag-and-drop or multi-finger gestures in my experience. It also makes writing very noisy compared to the stock iPad, and also compared to paper, so if you have a shared office you might want to reconsider. I ended up removing it again from my iPad. But to be fair, this was on a $400 iPad ~5 years ago, so perhaps high-end iPads with newer Paperlike versions work better.
setopt··on git's –end-of-options Flag
Which the parent poster said in their comment?
setopt··on FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System
In what way? Do you have concrete examples?
setopt··on Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries
I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
setopt··on Logseq 2.0 Beta (DB version) is here
I also went back to Org-mode some years ago (most recently via Howm-mode). I loved what Logseq had to offer, and setup monthly donations for a while, but after the long period of apparent stagnation I lost faith and jumped ship.

It’s sad because Logseq felt like a more focused tool than either Emacs or Obsidian, and really nailed the UI/UX that I wanted. But the interface was slow and buggy, and both the Org and Markdown backends are sufficiently non-standard that I didn’t want to continue writing my notes in that unless I believe Logseq is going to be around for a while. And I’m not at all excited by the large investment in the database backend, given that being backed by plain text is their largest feature from my point of view.

setopt··on Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)
Selection bias. The average scientist doesn’t write oversimplified popsci articles that go viral.
setopt··on The revenge of the philosophy majors
It seems everything has a use if you wait long enough. Number theory also seemed famously unapplyable until modern digital cryptography came along, and same with non-Euclidean geometry before general relativity.
setopt··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
Yes, you can subscribe to an arXiv RSS feed for your specific research field (or register to email notifications if you prefer that), and get an overview of everything going on in your field.

In my field (condensed matter physics), most colleagues appear to monitor arXiv at least weekly.

setopt··on Emacs, how it all started for me
Don’t know about GP, but I’m reasonably happy with chatgpt-shell.
setopt··on Emacs, how it all started for me
> (e.g. `vertico` + `unordered`)

I assume you meant orderless?

setopt··on The Traditional Vi
`set compatible`?
setopt··on Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior
Note that fast breathing doesn’t necessarily mean high oxygen uptake. Deep breaths result in higher oxygen uptake (since you spend less time just moving the same stale air up and down your airways), and deep breaths are usually easier to perform when breathing slowly.
setopt··on Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
I guess Norwegian schools will have to use smaller / alternative search engines now?
setopt··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
Which autocomplete mode? fido-vertical-mode, completion-preview-mode, or something else that I should maybe look into?

I switched from vertico to fido-vertical myself, but still use company for in-buffer completions. I tried corfu and completion-preview several times but didn’t get something I’m happy with from it.

setopt··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
I have been using VSCode for teaching the last few years, and routinely use a VSCode without plugins for that purpose, and Emacs keybindings work fine in its text area (the code editor itself). If it doesn’t work for you, then apparently something is broken on your computer. Not all keybindings work but the ones listed under Text Editing here certainly works for everyone else: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650
setopt··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
Yes. For me, on all MacOS versions from Catalina to Sequoia, the basic Emacs keybindings listed here work almost* throughout the operating system: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

I don’t daily drive VSCode but I use it for teaching, and then basic Emacs keybindings like C-n and C-a and C-k work pretty much everywhere, from the command palette to the code editor, without any plugins.

I also don’t use Chrome as my daily driver, but keybindings like C-a/C-e certainly work in both text areas and address field, or I would have remembered it as one of the annoying exceptions. I do regularly use a few Electron apps, which are based on Chrome, and it does work fine there.

*: There are a few apps that deliberately break the Emacs keybindings. Microsoft Office is one of them, since they insist that Ctrl keybindings on Mac should do the same as it does on Windows, which is extremely jarring if you rely on the Emacs keybindings everywhere else.

setopt··on Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving
Those keybindings work on MacOS for me, but not on Linux (by default).

There is a way to enable Emacs keybindings in all GTK apps on Linux, but it’s quite buggy in practice (many apps define keybindings that override or conflict with these), and I believe the feature is officially deprecated.

setopt··on US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
In many countries, if a contract contains illegal clauses (i.e. requirements that are inconsistent with the law or public policy), that contract is considered void and unenforceable. It depends on "how illegal" each statement is, whether only that part of the contract is considered void, or the contract as a whole.

One extreme example would be that if I wrote a contract requiring you to become my literal slave if you didn’t pay your subscription on time, you would in practice suffer no consequences from not paying, because the contract itself is illegal in most jurisdictions. A less extreme example would be that where I live (Northern Europe), I can sign a contract saying that I waive my right to sue the company I purchase a service from, and then sue them anyway because it’s my right by law and asking me to waive my rights is an illegal contract. Or that where I live, non-compete clauses in employment contracts are illegal unless you offer 100% salary throughout the non-compete timeframe, so I can sign an employment contract with unpaid non-compete clauses and just ignore that part as it’s illegal.

setopt··on US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
setopt··on Leaving Mozilla
They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.
setopt··on How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math
That is perhaps fair, is that distinction common internationally?

Again, in the universities I’ve been to, «applied math» and «statistics» have generally been placed under the department of mathematics. I myself am a physicist, and consider applied physics, biophysics, etc. to be subfields of physics and not distinct fields of study, but I don’t know what outer physicists think.

setopt··on How we made hit video game Prince of Persia
I played it relentlessly as a kid (3-6 years old), and never got past the 4th level…
setopt··on How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math
Are you sure that’s «most» mathematicians?

At the universities I’ve been to (as a student and now faculty), «applied mathematics» and «statistics» have been the two largest divisions. But perhaps that’s a bias from engineering-heavy universities?

setopt··on I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
> not needing the pinky for keys like backspace/enter/esc.

Probably not so efficient in terms of WPM, but after my previous issues with RSI, I somehow ended up pressing those keys with my middle fingers instead of my pinkie. Usually multiple fingers hit the key simultaneously, either long finger + ring finger or long finger + index finger.

Requires more hand movement but certainly more comfortable.

setopt··on The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
Okay. Do you then consider an equilibrium to be inherently unsustainable?

If you take «growth» to be defined as d(something)/dt>0, I’d posit that any equilibrium by definition has zero net growth, whether it’s a static or dynamic equilibrium.

setopt··on The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
> You can't have perpetual sustainability without perpetual growth.

That sounds self-contradicting. How do you define «sustainability» in that case?

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