Posted by jxmorris12 10/28/2025
My goal is to de Google with home nas hosting a bunch of services. I want to take all my Dropbox photos and recreate what Google memories does using off the shelf AI tools on my nas. Then email and finally maps with great PoI data.
Probably not all of what I did is a differentiator that put my learning beyond mediocrity. But a good yard stick is if what I built is useful to someone and even better if one would pay me for something.
People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence.
And I say, maybe. But more than quality I think taste is a way to discern what’s unique and novel. In my mind it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be “excellent” because, as the post mentions, everyone’s “excellent” may be different.
Why do I think this distinction is important? Because if taste is about seeing the nuances that make something interesting instead of what makes it “good” then getting to good taste promotes open minded exploration (healthy exploration) over status seeking.
A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
Having good mentors [on Youtube, among your friends, or a vendor at a localshop] can really help you figure out things much faster, that will have taken forever to discover by yourself.
So don’t fear to ask !
That is exactly what a Japanese swordsmith, a chef, or a craftsman does. Perfecting their work, finding joy in refinement, and taking pride in the process itself.
I used to see tinkering as a form of procrastination. But not anymore. What does that even mean? That we should be doing something else, and devalue this activity? What if this very activity, and the results it produces, bring me deep satisfaction? In that case, it is not procrastination. It is the perfection of the art.
Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will.
If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.
Edit: But why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? :) Which value has a perfectly made sword in a world today? Which value has a perfecly made machs tea? And other things only the maker or a few select people value?
Because people are willing to pay roughly 0$ for your riced terminal and dot files.
A polished japanese sword made by a master craftsmen on the other hand - people are willing to pay good money for.
In fact, it has so much value, that people will bend over, creep and crawl just to get it. And sell their waking hours for it.
Yes, you can have a lucky-pet-rock that you've always had with you, that holds value for anyone but you. For everyone else though - it's just a rock.
Hmm... excuse me?
Linux kernel - most contributors use vim/emacs extensively, with some deep customizations.
Git - Linus developed it in his own heavily customized Emacs fork
Rust - Core team members use various customized setups
Postres - core devs use vim/emacs
Kubernetes - vim/emacs
What the fuck are you even talking about? Majority of high quality shit we use today - probably 90% of all C - from networking stacks - nginx, HAPoxy, OpenSSL, drivers; to compilers and languages; databases; web infra; cryptography; build systems, basically everything written before ~2010 that's still critical infrastructure was likely built by developers in vim/emacs.
All that stuff was developed by those craftsmen you're so dismissively mocking. Do you think they never customized their environments? Spending weeks perfecting configs instead of shipping is a discipline problem, not a tool problem.
What an astute fucking observation you've made, mate!
And so it happens, that webdevs and web infra people (which is the extent of your understanding of "high quality shit") tend to use unixes and consequently vim/emacs as their text editor. No fucking way!
Perhaps, you can even tell just by looking at a piece of code - oh, this is beautiful, clean and clear, bugfree, this surely must have been written vim OR emacs?
Or maybe, just maybe, you're just making shit up on the spot and thinking backwards and attributing software quality metrics and outcomes to choice of a fucking text editor and how riced it is.
Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades.
Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.
Your line of reasoning is something akin to - there are some skilled programmers that have shipped high quality software and wrote the code using lubed mechanical switches.
Therefore there MUST be something about lubing your switches and obsessing over clacks and thocks that contributes to quality of software somehow.
It's some weird bizzaro cargo cult reasoning.
Unix/webdevs often tend to use vim/emacs -> therefore this absolutely must contribute to the quality of software somehow (it has to!)
Except there are absolutely no basis for this claim, as there are high quality software that is written using neither vim nor emacs nor lubed mechanical switches.
> Your line of reasoning is something akin to - there are some skilled programmers that have shipped high quality software and wrote the code using lubed mechanical switches.
No, I can second that the claim of "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form" has been pretty solidly invalidated by GP. You may be able to claim many other things, and some of them might be true, but that point above won't be.
How exactly has it been invalidated?
By pointing out that SOME widely used software (mostly web/web infra with unix heritage) has been written using vim/emacs as the text editor?
Now, you can find endless sea of garbage software on github that is written using riced vim/emacs setups - would you therefore conclude that using vim/emacs leads to garbage software?
The only thing you can conclude here is that to write software (either good or bad) you generally speaking need a keyboard and a text editor.
Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same and about as meaningful as saying that keyboards and text editors lead to "quality software".
Cargo cult insanity.
I cannot conclude that "it leads to garbage software", but I can definitely conclude that "it has ever led to garbage software" at least once, and in some "shape or form".
> Claiming vim/emacs leads to or directly contributes to "quality software" is the same
This (or the alluded opposite) was not the original claim. The original claim was the total impossibility of vim/emacs to have ever led to quality software, in any shape or form. That is the only claim being contested here.
You contorted it to mean that it's literally impossible to write "quality software" in vim/emacs.
I did NOT claim this. Nobody would claim this either.
I wouldn't make such claim even about nano or notepad or any text editor (of which there and hundreds and thousands) for that matter.
What an insane thing to contest even.
Would I attribute quality of software to - in any shape or form - to the text editor it was written in - whether written in nano, notepad or vim or emacs or god knows what else? No, I would not. That WAS the original claim.
Regardless of what you wanted to convey, I hope the responses make a bit more sense now.
> What an insane thing to contest even.
We just simply thought so too.
There are two kinds of people, those that think it is clever to split people into just two groups, and everyone else.
Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.