setopt

> I don't know exactly what's the logic but sometimes I need to confirm a rm operation with an "y".

I believe some Linux distributions alias rm to either rm -i or -I in their default shell config.

That and the metric system is why en_SE is my preferred locale even though I’m not Swedish or in Sweden

> If you track your config with git, you can track plugins with submodules. This has the added advantage of pinning the exact version (and tracking that version in for).

I did this for a year or so, with the motivation that submodules could replace all tool-specific package managers (for vim, tmux, zsh, etc.).

But honestly managing Git submodules felt like a chore compared to my old `vim-plug` setup. Basically because submodules are a neat concept but not implemented very ergonomically in Git. Eventually I just went back.

If someone has a setup using built-in vim pack that feels more ergonomic than vim-plug et al. then I’m very interested to hear.

Interesting concept, but they should define mob programming on the landing page instead of having to dig into links.

> And the training data has to exist, you can't find millions of pages depicting every thought a person went through before writing something. And such data can't exist because most thoughts aren't even language.

It would be interesting if in the very distant future, it becomes viable to use advanced brain scans as training data for AI systems. That might be a more realistic intermediate between the speculations into AGI and Uploaded Intelligence.

</scifi>

Google Hat, the coming successor to Google Glass.

My 2021 M1 MacBook is still good, but my 2020 Intel MacBook Air (16GB RAM) has felt unusable since 2022 or so. After upgrading macOS past Big Sur it just got unusably slow, would randomly hang or have high idle CPU usage, battery power was short lived, and it was constantly hot. I therefore downgraded it to Catalina and was happy to have my laptop back, until Homebrew and App Store wouldn’t let me install new things anymore, then I upgraded it to the latest macOS again and found it unusable again.

Now I’m not sure whether to install Linux on it (I’ve used Linux as my main OS before the Mac), or try to downgrade to Catalina again and just build whatever software I need from source.

It focused on cloud / collab from the beginning though.

> I refuse to contribute to any project that requires me to give them copyright instead of contributing under copyleft

Please note that even GNU themselves require you to do this, see e.g. GNU Emacs which requires copyright assignment to the FSF when you submit patches. So there are legitimate reasons to do this other than being able to close the source later.

The point is that .agents is a hidden file while AGENTS.md is in your face like a README intended for humans.

Having an in-your-face file that links to a hidden file serves no purpose.

I’m not using Obsidian atm, but my approach is simply to store them in normal notes. So if I have e.g. a topic.md file I’d make a section called `# Links` there which I can click on. That makes it easier to rediscover links in the right context.

(I’m currently using Org-mode, but the approach is the same.)

I disagree, if you apply it in the order (∇⊗∇) f then you should get \partial_i \partial_j as elements of a rank-2 operator that is then applied to a function f. That is, presumably, what you mean by \p_{ij} f.

That’s very interesting actually. Can you call only specially wrapped libraries from Nim, or is any Python library importable? When you cross-compile to JS can you only use pure-Nim libraries or how does that work?

In my experience, Anaconda (including Miniconda, Micromamba, IntelPython, et al.) is still the default choice in scientific computing and machine learning.

To add a different perspective, I love Emacs Org-mode for note taking but gave up on it for task management after a couple of years. Not because the tool is inadequate – my attempts at Todoist or Taskwarrior didn’t fare any better – but because the GTD-style workflow just doesn’t fit my personality.

I’ve now happily used a paper-based bullet journal instead, and am about to transition to a Rocketbook for this use.

The problem is that a GTD-style workflow requires a lot of discipline to stick to daily/weekly reviews, where you prune or reschedule tasks, and it requires you to be strict about deleting tasks you’ll never do. If not, you just get an endlessly growing list of stale tasks, and for me personally the list becomes so associated with guilt and stress that I just burn out and get paralyzed unless I regularly throw it all out and start from scratch. (Is "TODO bankruptcy" a thing?)

Surprisingly, this led me to the conclusion that being able to forget tasks is crucial for me to remain focused, productive, and mentally stable. Being able to start each day with a blank page, write or transfer tasks that I can realistically do today, and letting the unimportant ones silently disappear on old pages without having to consciously delete them, somehow works better for me.

For notes however, Org-mode is great. I’ve found great value in rediscovering old ideas and knowledge 5 years later, whereas finding 5 year old undone tasks is rarely something I want.

Indeed you can get quite far with only the built-in modes. One pain point though is the lack of many major modes, for example there’s no built-in markdown-mode, json-mode, julia-mode, or typst-mode, to mention a few.

I recently did try to run Emacs without any packages for a while. To my surprise, AUCTeX was not one of the packages I missed, the built-in latex-mode works well. I did miss CDLaTeX though.

> What is the modern way?

Pretty sure they mean something that at least involves use-package, vertico/consult/etc. or equivalent, company or corfu, project.el or projectile, and magit.

> You can start with a minimal config like Emacs Bedrock or Prelude, and then learn about those options first.

Prelude seems nice but I wouldn’t call it minimal unless you’re comparing to Doom and Spacemacs.

If you create a vimrc, even an empty one, I believe you don’t have to enable syntax highlighting manually.

(The existence of a Vim config file disables Vi compatibility mode.)

I’m highly interested in local models for privacy reasons. In particular, I want to give an LLM access to my years of personal notes and emails, and answer questions with references to those. As a researcher, there’s lots of unpublished stuff in there that I sometimes either forget or struggle to find again due to searching for the wrong keywords, and a local LLM could help with that.

I pay for ChatGPT and use it frequently, but I wouldn’t trust uploading all that data to them even if they let me. I’ve so far been playing around with Ollama for local use.

The precise state of matter studied in this paper I think is unlikely to exist "naturally".

But yes there are states of matter that exist in nature but are just not obvious until you study them carefully in a lab. For example antiferromagnets exist in nature at naturally cold temperatures (see hematite), but unless you’re looking for them, they just look like normal nonmagnetic solids. Thus they were discovered millennia after ferromagnets.

But there are more exotic states that were first discovered in labs and later theorized to exist in nature, but that have not yet been proven. One example of such a theory is that a superconductivity-like state might occur naturally in neuron stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity

I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman.

I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.

> Is there any other lisp/emacs like editor?

There is Lem, an Emacs- like editor written in Common Lisp, which seems quite active.

Do you consider Common Lisp more "modern" than say Scheme or Racket?

As far as I know, the CL spec hasn’t been updated for 30+ years, and most of its design is far older.

I used to do this too, using rsnapshot to backup ssh:// locations.

At some point I switched to instead using Syncthing to sync all my files to the backup server, and then the backup server did local backups from the Syncthing folder to the backup disk using Borgmatic. Works better for laptops.

Now I daily drive a Mac, and switched to Arq backup with a BackBlaze remote, instead of hosting my own backup server. More of a turnkey solution but works fine, especially given all the settings to suspend backups depending on e.g. battery status, WiFi connectivity, etc. when roaming around.

Now that’s interesting, thanks for sharing. Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/synctrain/id6553985316

I’ve tried Möbius before but wasn’t happy with it. Ended up switching to Resilio Sync (proprietary, one-time purchase) some years ago; the iOS client was better, it synced faster, and it was better at working around NAT/FW issues.

But I recently tried Syncthing again, and it seems to have mostly catches up except for the iOS client.

I like Syncthing but it’s not a great option on iOS.

The reasonable assumption here is that without any donations, most of that money from Mozilla Corp would have had to cover what the donations paid for instead. So in practice, every dollar donated might have increased the CEO bonus by say 90 cents, which feels like donating to the CEO.

I currently still use Firefox but stopped donating to Mozilla after that.

I think you misunderstand me. I’ve been using Emacs for years myself, and greatly prefer it over Neovim precisely because everything else is customizable (and because of Org-mode).

I’m picking that point because the parent poster is asking what OP wanted to customize in Emacs and couldn’t. Well, I wanted to customize the echo area, because I find it noisy and distracting, and couldn’t. There are lots of other minor UI annoyances like this – like how the TUI version has a black square in the bottom-right corner that you can only get rid of by changing your terminal background color or editing C code. Or how you can’t, AFAIK, disable line truncation markers if you disable the fringe (the best you can do is to put whitespace characters in the corresponding display char table, but that still takes up one char width at the edge).

Some UI things that are customizable are also needlessly hard to change. For example, I really dislike when major modes or themes decide to change font sizes in section headings or add styling like italics. Hunting down and disabling such settings in each package individually is tiring, and my workaround of looping over every face and disabling those font properties – and affixing load-theme to do this automatically after changes – feels overly complex for such a simple problem. In Sublime Text, for another example, there’s a global font setting to just disable italics completely (or any other font attribute you dislike), and many terminals have simple toggles for this as well. Look also at the workarounds Rougier had to do to manage some of his feats, compared to say what one could easily do by customizing the UI of Atom/Pulsar.

Emacs is overall great, but the UI customization is the least flexible part of it, IMHO.

I’m not the OP, but I think the Emacs UI is the hardest part to customize compared to some other editors.

For example, I’ve tried really hard to just change the background color of the echo area, and it appears to just not be possible without editing the C code. If possible I’d also love to be able to disable the echo area, and just check Messages directly when needed.

Whereas in Neovim you have plugins like noice.nvim that even removes the equivalent of the echo area completely, and shows messages in pop up windows instead. I don’t like that UI either, but it shows the flexibility.

Not obvious what is novel either. Languages like Haskell have had alternatives like the Maybe monad for a long time.