ylee

>I code in Emacs almost every day. I read and write e-mail in Emacs almost every day. I take notes in Emacs almost every day. I maninpulate data in Emacs almost every day. Yet I don't know LISP (any LISP!) at all

As others have said, it's never too late to learn.

My life has been within Emacs for 31 years. Yet I would say that I only really learned Elisp in the past ten years. Still at a tyro level, but enough to write my own functions for VM (I don't think mu4e existed when I started using it, also 31 years ago).

>Anyway, the most important part is: Despite all of this, Emacs is still fantastic for me! Here's to the next 50!

Amen.

I've been using Emacs continuously for three decades, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)

* does a great of job displaying HTML messages with Emacs's integrated W3M browser engine. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.

* sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser (it doesn't use the add-number method; rather, W3M's built-in navigation keystrokes are available, including Tab and Shift-Tab for moving between links)

* opens images and attachments

* auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient

* archives messages to various folders using various criteria

* searches my archived mail at lightning speed

Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.

VM isn't perfect but, overall, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

> Typically, the latest exercices introduced recursion which is immediately visible as fractals.

I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

I can relate much to the author's experience. I am also a Korean immigrant, with parents who owned a retail business, who grew up in the NYC area with a Commodore 64. I also majored in the liberal arts at an Ivy League school.

I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. But my computer background got me hired into tech investment banking out of college, and has shaped every aspect of my life and career. just today I debugged a bash script that is part of the workflow for my one-person business.

Thank you, Commodore.

> This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots.

Only an idiot would read the piece in that way.

>It should be flagged and taken down.

Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?

Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.

At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.

Nothing has changed since Jerry Pournelle wrote 40 years ago when discussing online forums:

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is what killed Usenet,[1] which 40 years ago offered much of the virtues of Reddit in decentralized form. The network's design has several flaws, most importantly no way for any central authority to completely delete posts (admins in moderated groups can only approve posts), since back in the late 1970s Usenet's designers expected that everyone with the werewithal to participate online would meet a minimum standard of behavior. Usenet has always had a spam problem, but as usage of the network declined as the rest of the Internet grew, spam's relative proportion of the overall traffic grew.

That said, there are server- and client-side anti-spam tools of varying effectiveness. A related but bigger problem for Usenet is people with actual mental illness (kstrauser mentioned one); think "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". Usenet is such a niche network nowadays that there has to be meaningful motivation to participate, and if the motivation is not a sincere interest in the subject it's, in my experience, going to be people with very troubled personal lives which their online behavior reflects. Again, as overall traffic declined, their relative contribution and visibility grew. This, not spam, is what has mostly killed Usenet.

[1] I am talking about traditional non-binary Usenet here

If this is true, it will be a significant change in strategy. The company has always played upmarket. Average iPhone prices have risen since the first iPhone 18 years ago, as opposed to falling. Around that time, I heard Apple's CFO say at a Citigroup-hosted investor conference that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".

When I started at Goldman Sachs, I was told early on of an "Israeli discount" and "Canadian discount"; that is, investors were more skeptical of companies based in those countries.

I was not told of any more details than that at the time, but I now wonder if the VSE contributed to this?

>Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.

I was told right after the bombing, by someone with a large engineering firm (Schlumberger or Bechtel), that the bombers could have brought the building down had they done it right.