8s2ngy

I was thinking of doing something like this myself. I've been pondering how to use AI to support, rather than subordinate, human work. Instead of using AI-generated artworks for blog posts and press releases, it would be better to use AI to "intelligently" search across humanity's collective oeuvre and find artwork relevant to the accompanying text. Once the AI hype dies down a little, it would be worth thinking about how we can highlight or enhance human creativity instead of downright replacing it.

Perhaps there is a balance to be struck? I have thought long and hard about this, and I have settled on taking notes by typing on my laptop. The benefits are far too many: I do not have to carry my notes around to read them on the commute; I do not have to worry about losing them; I can rewrite them to my heart’s content without messing up the layout; and I feel that I type faster than I can write.

I do partly agree, though. When I am studying a new concept or reviewing old ones, I tend to scribble my thoughts down. I have not been able to replicate brainstorming while scribbling and doodling on an electronic device. The friction of my pen on paper seems to actually wire the pathways in my brain.

I share your wish. Emacs, as wonderful as it is, has accumulated a lot of cruft over the decades and would benefit immensely from a rewrite. A "Neo-Emacs" could be multithreaded from the ground up and drop support for archaic platforms. The rewrite could even be in Rust to attract younger developers.

I've been seeing this pattern of text crop up in many places. On LinkedIn, much of my feed is filled with posts of short sentences that follow this exact pattern. What's more, even the replies are obviously AI-generated.

One thing LLMs are surprisingly bad at is producing correct LaTeX diagram code. Very often I've tried to describe in detail an electric circuit, a graph (the data structure), or an automaton so I can quickly visualize something I'm studying, but they fail. They mix up labels, draw without any sense of direction or ordering, and make other errors. I find this surprising because LaTeX/TiKZ have been around for decades and there are plenty of examples they could have learned from.

Kinda similar—Raku is on my radar. I won't have time to take a look at it this year. Maybe it can become my next year's resolution. :)

I’m in the same boat. I’ve internalized Vim keybindings so much that there’s no friction between thinking and doing on the screen. If I want to place the cursor on the next line, move to the end and add a semicolon, then jump to the end of the file, I just do it. My pet theory is that because Vim keybindings are unintuitive, developing proficiency required building muscle memory, which offloads cognitive load from my brain to my fingers so text editing becomes mechanical rather than cognitive.

That's impressive! Would you mind sharing how you used Anki for your studies?

I’m sorry, but any non-trivial Zig code gives me PTSD flashbacks of C. I don’t understand who Zig is targeting: with pervasive mutability, manual allocation, and a lack of proper sum types, it feels like a step back from languages such as Rust. If it is indeed a different way to write code, one that embraces default memory unsafety, why would I choose it over C, which has decades of work behind it?

Am I missing some context? I’d love to hear it.

There is something remarkably beautiful about minimal websites that use primarily text, perhaps with one or two images, and only styles that enhance readability. This is unbeatable UX. Whenever I encounter sites like these, I envision an alternative universe where the internet remained as it was in the beginning: no commercial strings attached, lightweight pages on affordable hosting, and easily accessible information so that search engines actually work. The internet was one of our greatest creations, but we’ve since ruined it with our greed...