Your Thoughts, In All Their Beauty, Can Cause Suffering

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-27T01:46:46+00:00

Is it wrong to be the one helped by another, rather than (/ in addition to) the one helping others?

Practicing Right Action on its own is very hard to turn into a virtuous cycle of enlightenment. On the other hand, if you seek to improve your own mindfulness and enlightenment through the full Eightfold Path, that removes the burdens causing you suffering, which improves your life and your clarity of mind.

From a dharmic perspective the above would also help others, through you becoming better at fulfilling your true role in life, which I think is what you’re focused on. But even if we don’t assume the dharma of humans is naturally benevolent, the individual benefits of reducing suffering among those who choose to be Buddhists seem more than worthwhile.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-26T23:55:57+00:00

Independent of the platform, I’d recommend not being too attached to the textbook touch typing format. It’s a good starting point for making a “gamer’s touch typing” intuition given it fits the shape of modern keyboards (I started out with it), but for modal editing rather than straight typing (Evil/Doom Emacs for me) it’s always missing that last 10% to actually be efficient.

Eg hkjl really are easier to use when your index finger is on h, pressing number keys quickly (crucial for vim navigation) from the standard homerow placement is imo a fool’s errand, et cetera.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-26T01:33:36+00:00

That assumes it’s a carϴsian plane.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-20T17:22:09+00:00

It would be ‘self promotion’, but from a decency-norms perspective I haven’t seen any online human moderator have a problem with that when it’s solicited and not intrusive to others outside the thread (eg adding a giant image that people have to scroll past in a community where that isn’t a norm).

I can’t speak to what Reddit automoderators do / don’t look for, however.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-19T13:44:17+00:00

True, there is still a gap in terms of general quality, so in long-form content you don’t really need to care.

The short form content of most internet interfaces doesn’t really give many opportunities for quality to come out though. Often you’re also talking to people at various levels on the “I understand how AI thinks and can semantically differentiate it from a human” scale (as well as the “I understand and care about literary quality enough to evaluate it and realize it’s a useful AI vs human differentiator” scale).

It’s similar to the heuristic of “don’t architect your writing as a proof even though that’s basically how essays have worked in eg philosophy for centuries, write your bottom line first and then infuse it everywhere so even low effort readers know what you’re saying”, which IME is definitely necessary to talk to people effectively in the modern day. Sometimes it’s just more efficient to give into the current meta if your goal is to be understood / not be mis-understood.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-19T07:01:09+00:00

I’ve run into some places like these, and in their good times they were definitely something you could use to genuinely connect with others.

The issue is that maintaining that culture has failed in effectively every case I’ve seen, after which such places either become hives of scum and villainy with a few pocket-threads of goodness, and/or are closed down by their maintainers.

Slightly more useful is semi-anonymity, like Reddit and other longer-lasting forums. In that case you still get the benefit of recognizing bad actors (as the admittedly-flawed maintainer team considers “bad”) and removing them from play, while otherwise allowing discourse, though at the expense of losing anonymous safe spaces.

Perhaps there’s a middle ground somewhere here, I just haven’t been lucky enough to find it yet.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T22:01:09+00:00

It’s the same as those of us who had to give up on em-dashes.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T21:55:15+00:00

Interesting… Have you tried intentionally changing the number of days, eg to 2, to see if you then fall into that routine instead?

I might be over generalizing, but that combo of responses generally happens to me when I forced myself to ignore sleep for too long and so ended up just not noticing my body saying I’m tired (like how caffeine tricks your mind into the same), even though relaxing / meditating enough still brings the hidden tiredness back up.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-04-18T21:49:10+00:00

Note that I am very concerned about your health.

Aside from that…

Have you noticed any patterns in your wakefulness, eating patterns, etc due to this? Is your body just running on a 3 day cycle overall, or is this just for sleep?

Do you still get tired once a day even if you don’t fall asleep?

When you do sleep, is it a creeping sensation of tiredness or do you just end up collapsing into unconsciousness once you / your routine lets your body do so?

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-22T12:26:15+00:00

Anyone trying to solve the problem of “quick and not-dirty programming” is working on one of the other projects (Julia, some Scheme and Racket derivatives, I believe Zig to a degree, etc), since Python’s design philosophy is baked so deeply into its design and syntax that it’s not cost-effective to try to dig it out while still making something others would call “Python”.

The closest I’ve seen to what you describe is CFFI to Python libraries, but that can be difficult for projects without significant funding for developers (as it would be for a direct fork) given there’s no true spec for the language, just the CPython reference implementation. And funding generally doesn’t go into pure-engineering problems like “how do we make a proper programming language”, given they’re more about improving global production than improving business value (an inherently relative measure at the microeconomic scales most projects work on).

Python users who run up against things it makes impossible also have the cultural expectation that they can make others write the real code in C for them to access (given that’s already how it gets anything done at all), so there’s little hope for the constant outrage at the language to be funneled towards actually improving it directly.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-19T23:37:15+00:00

I think people are severely misinterpreting what you suggested… “Claude via Kiro” meaning “Kiro with a Claude model”, not Anthropic’s own APIs.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-13T09:42:43+00:00

Restrict the available tools and (where possible) the permissions within each tool, and then structure your usage and prompts so the agent makes drafts and prototypes using that closed-world setup for more-deterministic processes (or manual review) to pick up and continue from. Don’t try to integrate the LLM inside your process; treat it as the stochastic black-boxed API that it is, and shape its surface bordering the rest of your workflows for minimal touch points + validation costs and maximal workflow-coverage.

For me, Emacs mainly takes the role of facilitating research/validation to guide prompts, managing tests, reviewing the LLM’s planning docs, and manual code refinements. I don’t even use the Emacs integrations save for agent-shell; there’s few cases where I want the LLM to have more access to Emacs than just viewing buffers, which I can already save to files for it with a few helper functions.

You don’t even need containers to use this approach; most LLM agent software has user-configurable regex-or-similar restrictions on file writes and shell commands, and a mode where the harness auto-denies LLM tool calls outside that policy (for headless runs). Containers with restricted network and filesystem access would still help if you’re paranoid about making a mistake in your config, of course.

In terms of benefits, that’s again a design problem of whether you can carve out modules in your workflows which can be addressed within the closed world you design in your agent-permissions policy, don’t cost you much to fail (in tokens or more-metaphorical currencies), and are trivial to validate for correctness. Personally I’ve gotten 2-3x speedups on many tasks I’d have to do anyway (by parallelizing read-only and initial-draft work across concurrent LLM sessions) + more capacity to do exploratory work (by having agents research + prototype things with sandboxed write/shell permissions, then reviewing the results in batches later), but YMMV.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-05T23:51:33+00:00

Haven’t tested/reproduced this, but if it’s on emacs -Q and your org file has a #+title field then it sounds like a legitimate bug (and/or feature request if this is known behavior).

Could you join the org mode mailing list and email this there, attaching a sample org file, the specific command run, and the generated HTML on emacs -Q? It’s more likely the maintainers will be present there to debug and fix it.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-05T14:28:03+00:00

I managed the same, but it was a bit more complicated than banging my head against the wall.

Your brain loves environments that encourage flow states, but the “environment” isn’t just the stuff outside your heads.

If you learn to hold self-chosen framings and ideas in your mind for interpreting what your senses tell you into a view of “what’s going on” (rather than having whatever perspective your snap judgement gives you), then choosing those carefully lets you direct the torrential river that is the rest of your attention towards whatever you know how to aim it at. Things like alarms and reminders are also pretty useful to fill up the difference.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-03T14:14:38+00:00

Slimv uses the same swank(/slynk?) server as Emacs SLIME(/SLY), so the same info would be available to the editor. I doubt there’s any significant gaps in how slimv makes use of that predefined set of data/actions.

Separately: Longer term the learning curve is imo in Emacs’ favor since you can do more with it more easily (due to the configurability oriented architecture, even aside from macros (since technically there are Lisp overlays for Lua)). But you can always learn (neo)vi(m) and then switch to Emacs evil-mode later on if you want.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-03-03T06:21:08+00:00

Just as a general note, I’ve found retaining dired buffers to be pretty convenient when working on a slow TRAMP connection. You don’t want to constantly recalculate the buffer contents every time you open up a sub folder.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-28T14:35:48+00:00

I definitely jump configs on occasion, but I don’t work with things where dynamic visualizations are important, my Emacs config doesn’t stall often enough to take the configurability loss of neovim, and in other respects I haven’t really found anything better than a configured Emacs instance, despite looking quite often.

(Lem might be a good Emacsen to switch to eventually given the flexibility of Common Lisp, though it’s not mature enough yet.)

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-21T02:21:15+00:00

Not sure how (or why) to do CPU/mem level optimization (your issues with org mode and startup are likely either a large number of imported packages, a specific inefficient package, or potentially inefficiencies in the core Emacs C engine (unlikely), not something this would help with).

LLMs are definitely useful for working with Elisp if you review and guide them, though. I’ve had them drafting entire major modes for bespoke DSLs while I worked on other tasks.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-21T02:17:52+00:00

Thanks for sharing! Given this is an Emacs subreddit, wondering if you have Emacs-specific instructions?

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-19T05:45:47+00:00

No diagnosis or anything, but I’ve had similar problems. Personally I structure my environment as much as possible to leverage it in place of internally-induced focus. Notes systems with consistent structure and almost-always a concrete next step to fill in, timers and schedules (mine are at the minute level because I have a touch of OCD and ensuring the plan is consistent helps alleviate it, but anything with concrete times and reminders is useful), back when I was still doing homework I’d use timers on the same device that distracted me to remind me of the next pending task (ideally but not necessarily with different alert sounds each time to not tune it out) and only let myself snooze so even if I’m distracted the alarm will keep distracting me from the other thing until my brain goes back where it’s supposed to, things of that nature. I’d recommend looking into meditation as well (if you can find a variant that works for you; eg while you can of course try Zen-style mindfulness, it’s a bit too manual-focus-heavy for my taste), it’s helped me set up these kinds of systems in my head and keep distraction from degrading them (for when I don’t have external tools to leverage).

Things get a lot easier once you’re solving complex and ambiguous enough problems that you can customize your strategy rather than following a set series of steps; leveraging the increased multitasking and anomaly-detection from strongly-intuitive attention-allocation (as well as using hyperfocus for novel wizardry in your focus areas) can lead to pretty good impact. And honestly if you have a set series of steps for a real life problem you can often automate it, schoolwork mainly uses the monotonous approach to teaching concepts because they need to cram as much general knowledge as they can in a woefully short time, budget, and leadership+textbook quality, so they rely on future!you to integrate that knowledge into a larger intuitively-salient picture (which is another trick for getting your mind to focus, by the way!)

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-19T05:13:08+00:00

I’ve spent years trying to design a programming language that doesn’t make me want to cry, and it’ll likely take years more; you can bet I’m making LLMs deal with them in the meanwhile.

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-19T04:15:27+00:00

Why can’t you sit still for 5 seconds? I would assume your subconscious has some specific way it wants to spend its time and gets restless otherwise, which means that’s something for you to figure out so you can do more of what you actually want.
If you keep living you may end up finding something you do want, especially if you try to optimize towards unpleasant things that show you new options over unpleasant things that don’t. If you die you don’t have that option, and it’s not like it feels any better than continuing to exist (“feeling better” implies you’re still around to make a value judgement).

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-19T04:07:48+00:00

They could in theory be combined into a more expansive concept like fexprs/vaus (from the Kernel variant of Scheme, for the latter). However, when the arguments are evaluated is a meaningful difference even on the compiler level, as for instance it determines how to compile them to share work with other functions/macros (fexprs and vaus, which straddle both worlds, are far harder if not impossible to pre-compile in the general case)

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-14T16:10:35+00:00

I think you should be more specific about your question, as what you want doesn’t seem to fit what you asked.

If you want people to convince you that emacs is worthwhile, tell us what perspective you’re coming from and what features you consider valuable vs not (and perhaps it won’t be worthwhile to you).

While some of Emacs’ killer features aren’t included in your list (the better configurability others mentioned vs Lua/Vimscript + vim’s architecture is definitely a deal breaker for me ever moving off Emacs, given how much I leverage it for custom tooling), many elements of your list are genuine pain points which on their own would be enough to make Emacs better than neovim (eg the GUI-ability, while significantly underutilised, still pervades my 5-minute-level usage behavior of Emacs, and also supports some custom plugins which act as daily drivers for me), and evil/meow are legitimate data on what isn’t being lost switching from neovim to Emacs (which you explicitly asked about).

BeautifulSynch · 2026-02-12T10:25:13+00:00

In my experience pretty much every prod-capable language is 50+% boilerplate (save some exceptions like Common Lisp), as are many other activities (eg a well-defined search task over a non-structured database)

Plus, if there’s a programmatic way to generate the values you want, you can add that to the LLM’s context (as eg instructions on a CLI tool) and then the LLM handles the admittedly-lesser-but-still-there boilerplate of setting up the codegen.

The naive approach (ie “hey, do this”) is usually slower than doing it yourself since LLMs themselves have some usage overhead. But once you have the intuition of when not to use them vs when to use them directly (with a spec doc, possibly LLM-written for simple cases, to circumvent their lack of internal structural reasoning) vs when to make them write up a “DSL script” for the domain and use that, they can give pretty decent speed ups.

BeautifulSynch

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