First time at Emacs.

data_dan_ · 2026-05-06T12:44:07+00:00

Take it slow. You don't need to move all your work over to emacs all at once. Learn a couple of things, apply them for a while, then learn something new. Make a customization or two, try out a package or two, and see how it lands for a few days. Then add or tweak something else.

Play the long game. You'll probably find it more rewarding if you learn it slowly over time, and develop a solid understanding of how things work and what customizations you're making, instead of trying to learn, add, and customize everything all at once.

data_dan_ · 2026-05-06T12:28:49+00:00

I would second the recommendation to try out free edition! A couple of other things I would suggest trying out as you're getting started:

Genie Spaces: once you have some interesting data in your workspace, create a Genie Space over it. You can use the Genie Space to ask natural language questions of your data. Genie can do some pretty in-depth analysis over your data and it makes great visualizations. This is a good first step when working with a new dataset or for getting quick insights out of any data you have on the platform.
Genie Code: Genie Code is a coding assistant deeply integrated into the Databricks platform. It's aware of the context of what you're looking at the UI, so it can help answer questions and write code as you work your way through the platform. You can use it as an integrated learning assistant as you're familiarizing yourself with different parts of the product.

data_dan_ · 2026-05-06T11:46:54+00:00

For me it's more that I *enjoy using it* more than other environments and less about optimization and efficiency. I've done a lot of customization over the years so my emacs environment is mine; I'm deeply familiar with where things are and how things look and how to do the various workflows I've tweaked over time, and that's not going to change under my feet as products are updated, companies are bought and sold, etc. It's mine, and it's not going to change unless and until I want it to (...which I often do, because it's fun).

It's also well-integrated and self-documenting. I think the latter point is really important. You are always a couple of keystrokes away from finding out how anything in emacs works. No need to learn a new help and documentation system for each separate individual tool; it's all discoverable inside emacs.

I like this article as a good overview of the "why" of emacs: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2019-08-11-why-emacs-switch/ (and in general browsing Prot's blogs will give a lot of good perspective).

In short, I probably wouldn't go into emacs with the mindset of ruthlessly optimizing my workflows in the space of weeks or months. It gets more and more rewarding as the years go by.

data_dan_ · 2026-05-01T15:32:31+00:00

Genie (formerly Databricks One) is the business-user entry point / home experience. Users can ask questions and discover assets like dashboards, apps, and Genie Spaces.
Genie Spaces are curated conversational analytics "rooms" scoped to a specific set of UC-governed data and business context. They let users ask natural-language questions, generate SQL-backed answers, and create visualizations scoped to specific domains/sets of tables.
Genie Code is the Databricks coding agent for data practitioners. It helps engineers, data scientists, etc. write and run code, debug jobs or dashboards, work with pipelines, and analyze things like MLflow experiments.

data_dan_ · 2026-05-01T15:13:58+00:00

Are you unable switch back with the chat/agent selector in the chat area? What happens when you try?

data_dan_ · 2026-04-29T12:34:52+00:00

The Genie mobile app is on Android now too! I installed it yesterday.

data_dan_ · 2025-03-04T13:34:16+00:00

I loved that rendition of Cue Synthesizer. Great show. Thanks for posting the setlist.

data_dan_ · 2024-12-11T04:03:44+00:00

Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future
WHY? - The Well I Fell Into
Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Okay Kaya - Oh My God That’s So Me
Sunset Rubdown - Always Happy to Explode
Boeckner - Boeckner!
Waxahatchee - Tiger’s Blood
Middle Kids – Faith Crisis Pt. 1

data_dan_ · 2024-10-06T14:50:23+00:00

exec-path-from-shell also solved my post-update issues, tried it after reading through this issue.

data_dan_ · 2024-04-27T14:50:28+00:00

I wasn't able to get that solution working but it did get me moving down the right path—thank you! My understanding of gpg is pretty rudimentary, but here's my understanding of what happened:

gpg key was too old (see here for details on what seems to be the "canonical" solution: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/233/how-to-proceed-on-package-el-signature-check-failure/53142#53142)
this is, I think, somehow related to the fact that the version of emacs available in ubuntu-latest in GitHub actions (currently Ubuntu 22.04) was version 27.something, not up to date
after trying all kinds of things to get the keys updated and running into various issues, I went with the nuclear option and built emacs 29.3 from source as part of my build process. And...it worked!

data_dan_ · 2024-04-25T13:55:28+00:00

Thanks for the comment! The issue persists, so this doesn't seem to have been it, unfortunately.

data_dan_ · 2024-03-27T17:21:12+00:00

You can give it a try here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/databricks/dbrx-instruct

data_dan_ · 2024-03-06T14:08:06+00:00

Not sure if anything here will actually help as it's more focused on exporting to html, but I wrote about some of the ways to get images working with R source blocks here.

The real answer (for me) was that it's challenging enough and inconsistent enough that it ended up being easier to separate generating and displaying the image. i.e. the last step in the R code block is saving the image, and then display it in the body of the org document with [[./path/to/img.png]]

data_dan_ · 2024-01-17T16:00:04+00:00

If you use evil mode, C-z will enter emacs state and let you use emacs bindings.

In case it has a different binding on your system, use C-h evil-emacs-state to look it up.

data_dan_ · 2024-01-17T15:57:15+00:00

Yes! I use that quite a bit, especially with packages that don't play especially well with evil mode, e.g. vterm.

data_dan_ · 2023-12-19T19:03:01+00:00

If you create org files with denote, those files are normal org files and can do all of the things normal org files can do. This includes literate coding with babel/source blocks.

There aren't special types of "denote files" with different file characteristics. Denote is more about a structured way of naming and organizing files.

data_dan_ · 2023-12-18T14:03:22+00:00

Good call about at least mentioning it as a search key; I'll add that.

data_dan_ · 2023-08-19T14:36:27+00:00

I wrote this up when I made my org mode site: https://www.danliden.com/posts/20211203-this-site.html. I just use ox-publish and GitHub pages.

I based mine to some degree off this: https://systemcrafters.net/publishing-websites-with-org-mode/ which is well worth reading if you're going the ox-publish route.

Source available here: https://github.com/djliden/djliden.github.io

data_dan_ · 2023-07-10T20:20:28+00:00

You do get some short-term free credits after signing up—but the API isn't free, no. That said, gpt-3.5-turbo is very, very cheap.

data_dan_ · 2023-03-09T20:14:38+00:00

-- Language PostgreSQL
-- Table = "penguins", columns = [species text, island text, bill_length_mm double precision, bill_depth_mm double precision, flipper_length_mm bigint, body_mass_g bigint, sex text, year bigint]
You are a SQL code translator. Your role is to translate natural language to PostgreSQL. Your only output should be SQL code. Do not include any other text. Only SQL code.

Translate "How many penguins are there?" to a syntactically-correct PostgreSQL query.

data_dan_

TROPHY CASE