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Posted by ggcr 16 hours ago

Emacs in the Age of Magic(commandlinesystems.com)
258 points | 118 commentspage 3
minimaxa 10 hours ago|
Is it too much to ask to format your text in the middle aligned?

Reach out to Qwen, he can help you.

HN avant-garde article formatting to show they are cool.

brabel 5 hours ago||
Read the article in emacs. Looks great as it’s plain text.
sorrywhat 5 hours ago|||
It's a txt file. If you don't know what that is, it's bit like a markdown file, but without the emojis and bullet points. If you can't consume a txt file, that's a failing on your part.
q4y2u35uk 6 hours ago|||
Well browsers can't format plaintext. Better question why is he serving plaintext documents on the web in the 21st century?
imp0cat 7 hours ago||
So text files are considered avant-garde now?
smitty1e 14 hours ago||
I'm still not using AI to do more than get me in the door with finding new features, like: "tell me how to get my matplotlib output into tiff".

The AI tooling seems too unstable still.

jobigoud 6 minutes ago|
I use it mostly as a personal StackOverflow. I describe my issue as best as I can and get answers/suggestions, sometimes a code snippet that I check and paste over, but often still writing my own code or rewriting the snippet so much that it's as if I wrote it in the first place.

The friction makes it much slower than agentic coding but it helps me stay in control and it's still faster than before.

lettergram 14 hours ago||
Here's a fun question - if AI is trained on OSS, particularly with licenses that are copy left... wouldn't that make all the code it generates copy left? wouldn't that mean the weights themselves should all be open sourced.
coldtea 14 hours ago|
Only if the lawmakers and courts side with the way less powerful FOSS side in interpreting the impact of those licenses on the derivative LLM code.

So, no.

lettergram 11 hours ago||
Well, politically, if AI is seen as threatening, they'll see siding with FOSS as beneficial.
coldtea 55 minutes ago||
Threatening to whom? Politicians are in the pockets of the same billionares controlling AI. And even if they weren't, AI is useful to them for controlling everything.
KurSix 3 hours ago||
[dead]
trail_green36 15 hours ago||
[flagged]
noosphr 15 hours ago||
The whole idea of free software seems quaint.

Like demanding commented machine code between 1985 and 2025.

Sure you can get it, but that's not where the software lives even if it's how the software runs.

Reverse engineering closed source software is the simplest thing in the world now. The only reason why more of it isn't done is because it's so boring even minding the AI isn't worth most people's time.

bitwize 15 hours ago|
Fable 5.2 is designing entire devices now, from PCB layout to case assembly.

If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude. Get into business. The only way you're going to make it is to join the ownership class. Or pick up a torch or pitchfork and join the revolution.

piker 15 hours ago||
> join the ownership class

...which is rapidly running away from you. Ignore this nonsense and do useful work. It will be okay.

lopotubez 14 hours ago|||
This is such a wrong way of looking at it. The fact that AI is getting better and giving us better toolings is more of a reason to go and get an education.
bitwize 13 hours ago||
AI is not a tool. It's a service.

Tools are an extension of your mind. AI is becoming like unto a mind of its own. It's taking the power to make decisions away, rather than speeding your execution on such decisions. Note that by "decisions" I don't mean just higher-level decisions, but the micro-decisions about details that go into crafting a thing also. And we're being told oh, just accept this new layer of abstraction (on top of all the others). And don't worry about the details anymore, the machine does them so much better. I mean, sure you can work at a detailed level with an LLM, but on the job they'll PIP you for not just trusting the dark factory. Judgement is the new moat. Wait, Opus 5.5 is pretty good at that too; business context is the new new moat. It's just an upward retreat into fewer and fewer, less and less concrete decisions made by people, until engineering simply isn't done by people anymore; there's only a need for human business people, product managers, and QA testers. And then AI starts coming for their jobs too, especially since the CEO has been using ChatGPT to do product-market fit analysis for what potential things we might ship to maximize profitability over the next FY...

As for university, I actually don't really know what to tell kids these days. Many of them will succumb to pressure to keep their GPA up, and use AI to cheat to ensure that they do. So whatever they choose, unless they are super disciplined, super honest, and super incentivized to come by their degree without cheating, they won't get a whole lot of learning out of it. Especially not for the money they're spending now.

b-man 15 hours ago||
> If you're in a STEM program at university, quit. By the time you graduate, you will have negative value proposition compared to Claude

I hope you are not advising any young people out there.