To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.
Are you even reading what I wrote? What's with the childish tone, someone dropped your keyboard rate when you're a kid or something? Emacs is a tool, not a religion. There are plenty of talented, accomplished programmers who can relate to what I said, and never even used Emacs. There's no "Emacs setup" for me, just like there's no "ricing my browser" - I do expect my web browser to work exactly the way I want (or at least as much I can get out of it) - that requires managing extensions, keybindings, extension settings, security options, disabling some annoying features, etc. It's an instrument, and requires the same type of "maintenance" and tweaking. Sure, it might not be as constant as for Emacs, but after all - web-browser is a targeted tool, Emacs is a universal one.
Whoah, whoah, whoah, you two, this is a happy post, not an angry post. Nothing to get wound up over! Part of the point is that you can both just go and do you!
We're not fighting, we're just "emotionally explaining things to one another". That's what my wife says to calm our dog, when he makes a concerned and scared face over a regular, non-confrontational conversation. Just to be clear, I'm not comparing you to our dog, I just thought it's a funny anecdote.
"Emacs is a tool, not a religion" yeah that's my point. You framed not investing in it as a delusion. We can all agree on the importance of tooling. I am responding to the tone of the sermon you wrote.
Like the cartoon character once said: "Yeah, sure, I mean, if you spend all day shuffling words around, you can make anything sound bad"... Re-read again what I wrote. Specifically about delusions. I can't believe I have to re-quote myself just to prove you my point about something you just made up in your head.
> Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home.
> Emacs is the cook's home kitchen.
The two sentences are adjacent. I read them as connected. If you meant them to be unrelated, I hope that this sheds light on our disagreement.
How often do you fish out a single word in a paragraph that has no semantic, emotional meaning to you personally and automatically flip the entire book, just because of one word?
What I meant is that viewing Emacs merely as a means to achieve a singular goal and to extract specific value (e.g. "I've heard Magit is nice") is shortsighted - approaching it as a strategic, long-term investment yields far greater returns. I'm not preaching for absolutely every programmer to use it.
Come on, now tell me how I think of everyone who doesn't approve my web-browser tweaking habits as "catastrophic failures"...
You keep doubling down on your own perverted reality you composed out of thin air and somehow I have to apologize? Can you be I dunno, less emotional and more substantive? There's no controversy in what I wrote - it is pretty simple and straightforward:
Programmers write programs. That's the definition of the job. Any personal tweaks - scripts, snippets, extensions, packages, configs (for VSCode, IntelliJ, Vim and yes Emacs too) are also programs. Saying: "I don't want to maintain my programs" sounds to me like saying: "I don't want to be a programmer". It doesn't matter what I use - Emacs, Sublime or Macromedia Dreamweaver - configuring and maintaining it is not "kind of a job", "part of my job", or "someone else's job". That is my job as a programmer. Period. End of discussion.
Why the fuck you keep pouring your own made up shit from one pitcher into another, thinking it's about to turn into gold, is beyond me. And somehow I'm the dude that should "relax". Well, sure, let me then apologize for my inability to explain to you something that a six year old would get off the bat.
Now allow me to explain to you kindly, why you're fucking wrong here. You probably have no idea how difficult it is to write anything meaningful in English. Especially these days. For someone for whom English is not a second or even a third language, it can be an enormously hellacious ordeal. I take pride in my English. I think it's quite possible I would never write so colorfully in any other of the three languages I have. For me, each paragraph has meaning, has voice, its own character. It takes time to write. It takes patience, humility, imagination. Machines can do it already, but their language still lacks something. Something ephemeral. Something that would make us watch for two hours, humans doing crazy acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil. I wonder how long would we watch robots doing the same? Well, who knows, maybe we'd be watching robots dancing for two hours. LLMs are getting better with languages too. Which makes it more difficult to write. Properly structured text gets blamed for being generated. Sometimes I deliberately don't fix mistakes, even though it makes my eye twitch. Darn, I'm so pissed I can't use em-dash anymore, goddammit.
I don't owe you an explanation why I do it, why write anything at all. Why HN. I'll say it anyway. I do it because I still recognize people here. Living, dreaming, learning, fighting, hating, daring, loving people. I don't get paid for it, I don't seek recognition, I am not trying to build a name. I share my opinions because nothing is more important for our species than storytelling. And we need to share stories, listen to them, re-live them, learn from them. That's why many of us would go to watch Nolan's rendition of a 2700-year-old story. Even if we don't like the movie already.
And then someone like you comes, shits all over your charming writing, compelled to do it just because they see a word they don't like. Well, honestly, fuck you. Yeah, not nice, but I'd rather be kind and tell you the truth. You wouldn't be saying the shit you replied to me with to my face. Not because I have muscles, or am intimidating, or weak and miserable, no. But because you're definitely not a jerk, or an idiot. I wouldn't have to spend hours wasting on your ass for no good fucking reason. Seriously, I am a solo father with two kids, it's fucking 1:30AM and I'm having to deal with this shit, because writing for me is still fucking hard. English is beautiful, but hard. Come on, kid, think sometimes. For the sake of fellow humans.
That's beyond the point. We are all someone's father, son, etc. We all have things in life to deal with, priorities to reshuffle, bills to pay, worries to calm down. It simply is bullish and uncivilized to join a forum of professionals and instead of discussing constructively, derail the conversation passive-aggressively, with a single trolling sentence, dragging everyone down into a vain exchange that has zero practical rationale. Come on, don't we all have better things to do?
I do truly appreciate your concern though, thank you for your support. Often, a single sentence with a human touch can remind you how much of our shared humanity we've buried under the noise we've convinced ourselves matters.
Doesn't outcompete include murder? We are a very tribal species, and the history is full of genocides and mass murders, so from a very uneducated viewpoint, this sounds reasonable.
If not that, is it that we depleted the resources they depended on?
Outcompeting includes murder, rape, war, and cannibalism. But we have population overlap for millennia, so that’s kinda factored into numbers.
All primates are resource competing, so outcompeting is also drinking up their milkshakes. But, again, that’s the baseline.
Non-conclusively, from my lay understanding, the tail end of falls into general bi-lateral competitive practices and breeding rates leading to ‘us’ not ‘them’. All columns all the time, not one crisp incident or behavioural change.
[And there’s no indication that ‘they’ geno-rapo-ate us any less than we them… if being slightly better at mass murder was the difference, then yay for our side?]
Great question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
Sure it does. We see cultural displacement in the archaeological record all over the world. Bones marred by marks of damage by weapons. Otzi the iceman was possibly hunted down and smote on the mountainside like the Balrog Gandalf did in.
I’m not saying violence didnt happen, of course it did! I’m saying the evidence is not that neanderthals were simply eradicated like animals that were hunted to extinction and that multiple factors led to their gradual decline over time.
Not necessarily, it could also mean that homo sapiens was just more successful - better fed, bigger population, etc. It's not likely that early sapiens was so organized that they intentionally genocided neanderthals, it's more like they were subsumed etc. A slow process across thousands of years.
Biological classifications are one gigantic mess. There are multiple ways to define what qualifies as a "species". One of them is procreation and viable offspring, going by modern human DNA and the Neanderthal fragments contained in it we where one big happy family all along.
Depends on whether they were considered competing, and whether "we" were as organized, single-minded and competitive as this statement seems to imply - "we" probably weren't, not until larger kingdoms and empires started forming ~4000 years ago.
Ah yeah looks I wasn't on the mark here. The "outcompete" framing is more accurate for neanderthals but for many pleistocene extinctions "hunted to extinction" did happen in some cases so it was not a good comparison. Thanks!
They weren’t shilling at all, it was a passive statement of fact. In fact, they didn’t mention LLMs at all and a kanban board could be built in a weekend without one so it’s not even clear if your comment is on topic
COVID is highly correlated with many other things that would increase dangerous behavior. For example, COVID saw an increase in alcohol use, which in turn would result in increases in road rage and traffic fatalities. I think so much was going on at the time that it's hard to decide what is a first degree effect versus a downstream effect, or even unrelated to COVID and more related to, say, political turmoil of the time that was already ongoing.
We were talking about covid era trends specifically. Covid peaked around 2020-2022 and it's difficult to determine what other trends during that time period are directly caused by covid, or correlated, or even unrelated. Long term generational trends don't tell us as much about what was or wasn't caused by Covid itself.
It's an employee survey so it's not resistant to claims that the number is higher than people know. But I think saying "on all the computers you're given" is an exaggeration at best.
I did think it was interesting that "One in three [employees] have had activity from their employer’s online surveillance used in their performance reviews."
Sounds like if you're being surveilled by your employer there is a good chance you know about it.
I've never experienced anything like that, so it's sort of a window into another world from my perspective.
