vinceguidry

evil-mode... sigh, i wanted to love you so much.

if you're, as you say, coming off of decades of vi muscle memory, i'm sure evil can do the job of not making you relearn anything just fine.

if you've, like me, trained your muscles to relearn quickly, you'll eventually want modal editing that actually works the way emacs works. and evil... is hacks on top of hacks, you pay a severe price for the seemingly seamless integration.

when i wanted to customize evil, i quickly realized that what i wanted wasn't vi in emacs, it was modal editing in emacs. i landed on boon, then used that until codex took over.

https://github.com/jyp/boon

now, i have my own editor that i use when i can't trust the clanker, though i suppose it would be a lot less work to just use nvim.

I'd say it's more annoying to encounter HN comments that only say "this is AI" than the AI content itself. This article addresses a very important pain point and is trying to approach it at the right level. Of course the authorship is LLM-assisted.

If only there were a filter that could detect these kinds of comments and collapse the thread.

The article, (not that anyone ever seems to read it before commenting) does dive into the game's politics and comes to the conclusion you mention, right down to the Alex Jones comparison. It also has this to say:

> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world. “Famous conspiracy theories always turn out to be just antisemitism,” this website’s regular commenter Ross theorized after reading a piece I wrote about the thoroughly unpleasant Pierre Plantard, the man behind some of the most outlandish tales surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château. The more conspiracy theories I examine in depth, the more true this proposition seems.

While true, in 2026 if you're still conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, you're part of the problem. Something something Epstein.

You could have explained why he was wrong before injecting your opinions into the discussion.

He's wrong because the epistemological formula is the justified true belief. The infallible oracle simply gave Archimedes a true belief, the needed justification, sensors that can actually give meaning to the precise number, would take hundreds of years to develop. Archimedes would have to sit there with the oracle and develop modern physics together before the oracle can be said to have given him knowledge.

And AI won't have given us any actual knowledge until it can fit its findings into the mathematical establishment. I forget who it was that said that society doesn't know anything until you can teach it to a room-full of undergrads, but that's about right.

And you will have to actually show your intellectual work before your arguing here will actually accomplish your goal of sounding smart.

You have to get them excited about the subject. Do something cool with it. Of course, you have to be well-versed enough in the subject to be able to do that for the uninitiated. But if you're always the smartest person in the room and you're not motivated or in the position to be constantly finding a newer crowd, then this resolves down to meeting the folks you're with where they're at, then pushing the conversation into deeper grounds. If you're really that much smarter than them, this should be easy, if not, maybe you might have something to learn from them after all.

Or you could just, yannow, give up on the intellectual rat race. It's pretty exhausting, and winning at it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.

Or just learn how to teach.

That's because we're missing an abstraction, salience. LLMs and biological minds alike have salience functions that both use complex and seemingly inscrutable means to answer the question "why am i paying attention to this right now?" And those salience functions are tuned the same way, the way the Greeks worked out thousands of years ago and called logos, reason.

When you think about it that way, you can bridge the two types of cognition more usefully. The how of intelligence, what attention consists of, can remain completely different, while the why can feel so universal that humans can easily forget they're talking to a machine.

One of the stranger aspects of Roman history is that for centuries, there was a fight over who gets the public space. You'd have the local mystery cults defacing whatever the Christians put up and vice versa. Assimilating local traditions rather than demanding people just adopt theirs fits in with a faith that aims to be higher than all others. Jesus has no need to fight Vishnu, and never did.

We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.

> Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole.

No matter how good physics gets, it can't solve the mind-body problem, that exists at a level that the very activity of using repeatable physical experimentation cannot provide a usable answer towards. A person can believe that physics could create a solution, but it would just be yet another belief about metaphysics in a sea of many.

> The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material.

What is the black-body speed of an idea? I'll let you assume the idea is spherical. If your position is that an idea is just neurons firing in the brain, then you need some kind of way to account for changes in said speed. What is so special about that hundredth monkey... on the physical level? All you can use to guess at this answer is... more ideas.

> I know with metaphysical certainty that you are bound by the workings of a materialist world, because I am defining certainty using my own consciousness, and you are a part of my materialist model. But hearing this from me is not enough for you to prove to yourself in a metaphysically strict sense that you are in a true material world, even if we're both in a true material world, because your definition of certainty is based on your own consciousness, and we do not share the same consciousness.

This is perhaps the most hilarious bit of equivocation I've ever seen from a materialist. "I know this with certainty but you won't be convinced of my certainty because our consciousnesses are different." That consciousness is different between people is a part of the mind-body problem, subjectivity cannot be explained with materialism alone.

Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing.

Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.

We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.

I first read your comment as "giving money to kids." That's probably how commenter interpreted it and it makes sense in that context.

> Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness).

Materialism determined that you wrote this essay? I'd love to see you demonstrate that with physics.

You got lucky, mine didn't even start up, even after overnight charging, batteries have such short lives these days.

I don't know what the deal is with Linux and cameras. I've got Fedora installed on this old Retina MBP and apparently Linux somehow stopped supporting the built in webcam. I've never heard of a device losing Linux support but here we are.

I love it. Claim gets made, it's pointed out that there's no evidence for said claim, claim gets justified anyway with some version of "it's logical / rational / stands to reason."

All it amounts to is 'sounds good to me'.

Ah! You're right, I had read somewhere that he'd implemented his own X windows but I suppose I was mistaken.

Vidar wrote one in pure Ruby.

https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11

When has Linux ever been a "complete OS designed to work as a whole"? The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written 29 years ago.

What do you need your tiny routers to do?

My Gen Y brain can do this no problem, and I'm among the oldest of the generation. Anthropomorphizing is fun!

Author's criticism is valid. Using LLMs, like using search engines before them, is a skill. You have to know what to ask and what to accept as a valid answer, what to push back on and when to throw in the towel and try another approach.

I was talking to a very tired friend of mine and she described renting a small tiller from Home Depot. They didn't know how to set the choke and so flooded the engine. They spent hours troubleshooting, no one at Home Depot knew anything about the equipment they were taking money to rent. They eventually figured it out and were tilling their backyard garden well into the late night.

I told her next time just ask ChatGPT. I would have done it myself if I'd been there. She hadn't even thought of it. But a few pictures and descriptions would have gotten them rolling in half an hour tops.

... it always has been?

It's youthful exuberance that can pretend it was ever anything else.

Sounds like someone who has never touched grass. ;-p

You'd be amazed at just how much tolerance human guts can develop for this kind of thing. I recall reading about a hunter-gatherer tribe the discoverer ran across just going to town on horribly rotten carrion. The more rotten the better.

I'm seeing tons of blog posts which seemingly amount to having AI write code. It would have never occurred to me to repeatedly invoke an LLM to do what a simple script could, but I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. 20 line bash scripts replacing entire enterprise software stacks was a meme even in the 90s.

Ask someone to name all fifty states, see how far they get. Then start naming places and ask if they're a US state or not. One of these tasks is far more likely to get a 100% hit rate.

I was hired once to be the Rails guy on a team of competent web developers, that didn't know Rails. I spent two years slowly ironing out issues with the codebase. By the time I was done our velocity had increased to the point to where a two week sprint took three days to complete. They couldn't feed us enough work. We all got pretty good at ping pong.

Until one day our dear team lead rammed a full NodeJS rewrite down our throats.

Very interesting work! I put some effort into getting it to work with models my hardware can actually run well and they just fall over immediately. gemma4 12b runs like molasses on my 2080 super but it was the only model able to, with your harness, actually do anything useful. It was the only useful thing I've gotten any model runnable with my hardware with any harness I've tried, very impressive!

I suspect smaller models need more work than is practical to fit harnesses around. The smaller the model, the more work, and it doesn't carry over to other small models.

Deepseek r1 7b could not emit tool calls to save its life, gemma4 e4b couldn't get the names of files right, qwen3.5 4b gets stuck in dumb rabbit holes, I pointed it at a ruby script and asked it to run it, it tried running it with bash then got caught in a loop investigating.

Noble effort though! I guess I'll keep working on my barebones ruby_llm harness, with very tempered expectations. Each of these failure modes can be worked around, but there's too many of them to work around in the general sense.

Has anyone come up with a decent harness for small local models, say, gemma4 e4b? I'm trying to roll my own but man, the capability gap is real.