Emacs

Just as I wrote before, GNU Emacs shall be considered as a Word Heritage Site, since it is an embodiment of a distinct, major culture. There are lots of guys who are self-proclaimed Emacs experts or even Emacs gurus (sorry, Greek philosophers), yet I find their writings either too narcissistic or too overly-verbose. There are some reasons about using modern GNU Emacs in a “just right” way, and why this is so. Notice that not everything is just a matter of an opinion or a personal preference. Some principles are just stand prior anything subjective. ...

Oh, look DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC (codeforces.com) So, a model memorized a lot more of a convoluted stuff and been able to spit out a coherent code. While this is absolutely amazing considering that it works at the level of syntax, and that its “representation” captures only “possible relations among tokens” and posses no “understanding”, thinking leave alone reasoning capacities whatsoever. It just picks up one of the few next most probable tokens, given the previous “context” (a sequence of tokens “so far”). ...

Maybe it is time to settle this discurse once and for all, and move on. Recently I asked Deepseek (otherwise amazing), Grok (a meme) and Gemini about idiomatic way of enabling syntax highlighting in blocks of code, which may appear in an eww or nov modes. What they all give me is some stylized pasta from StackOverflow and Github about polymode and mmm-mode and how to use regexps to find particular blocks and to apply some low-level function on a range. ...

Psychology is a very serious “thing”. Some unfortunate people spend most of their “energy” struggling with their own (unwanted. overwhelming) emotional states, like tension, /anxiety stress and so on. We cannot change ourselves. but we can accept what we are and try to develop (Know Thyself, you know) and apply some hacks, just like that “Emotional Intelligence” meme. Acknowledging and accepting ourselves as we are is the first necessary (but not sufficient) step. ...

There are already several websites which publish a “roadmap” of how to teach yourself programming (University keve) using freely available courses and textbooks. Here is my 2 cents. First of all, SICP is an advanced textbook. It is by no means suited for teaching freshmans, unless you are a MIT student, who is math-lover and a “slow thinker”. Brian Harvey, the great, managed to teach the CS61A at Berkeley – a SICP-based course which goes at a slow pace. He gave exceptional, state-of-the-art lectures, along with printed lecture notes. This is the only good start. ...

Google deprecated external access to its IMAP due to “security reasons” Karpathy posted a classy coding video lecture in which programming has been done entirely from the default Mac OS browser (doing everything in a web-interface to a Jupiter notebook). Corporations want us to stay in their (and only their) browsers all the time (in many different tabs) and never leave, so they can collect all the data they want. ...

What could even be in common between Haskell and Rust? Well, they are the most advanced languages of its time, the most controversial and the most discussed. Most importantly - both languages are have a proper type-classes/traits based standard libraries, where the type-classes/traits define major modern mathematical notions, which can be traced to the modern set-theoretic math and related notions. This is what makes the actual difference with other crap like PHP. ...

There are a few ancient sayings about going around the world, looking for the Truth (which us Out There, you know) and then returning back home only to find It right there. Other ancient thinkers have suggested to look no further than onto your own self (to find all the answers). And, of course, the ultimate resit is I Am That from the Upanishads. There are some manifestations Truths I found going around the world. ...

It takes time to get more-or-less familiar with the major branches of human knowledge, which is traditionally called a classic education. This gives one, among other things, the ability to see what other people call “connections” between seemingly unrelated “things”. This ability, in turn, helps to see things as they really are, which is the most important part of life, and goes back to the Upanishads and the Buddha. The most difficult and subtle “thing” to see (as it really is), is, of course, your own self, and the habit of doing so, which is called introspection, which ultimately leads to self-knowledge and self-control, is the most sought after ability since beginning of time (at least in the Orient). ...

The true, actual, measurable productivity comes not from utilizing some advanced tools, but, like everything else in life, from seeing things as they really are and therefore doing the right thing at each level (of abstraction). Tools give some additional 20%, perhaps, but the main productivity gains are from not wasting time and efforts and just doing the right thing (which is what distinguishes experts and masters). For CS it means understanding all the deep, underlying principles behind the concepts and abstractions. ...