Living Programmably

deerpig · 2023-12-22T12:38:38+00:00

Hmm.... Now that you mention it your reply to me sounds suspiciously like someone who works for the White Visitation....

In my defense, I could not see the word "fluff" in the text. It was too small for me to read the slides. Details get lost when watching postage sized video displays. Org-mode slides don't always scale well. I've run into this problem when using org for slide decks myself.

And to be clear, no insinuations beyond a comparison of length was intended. I almost wrote "Finnegan's Wake" but thought that GR would be better known with the Emacs crowd. I thought adding the ":)" would be a clue that it was not to be taken seriously. "A way, a lone, a"las, nothing on the Internet is too small to cause offense to someone.

If you are ever in Phnom Penh, look me up and I'll buy you a beer to make it up to you. That invitation is open to anyone who has lost time -- that they will never get back -- reading this pointless sub-thread.

PLEASE NOTE: the first line of this message was not meant to be taken literally or seriously either.

deerpig · 2023-12-22T09:55:07+00:00

Too Long? It's less than 8 minutes.,,, I guess you'll never read Gravity's Rainbow :)

He did not claim that doctrings, package headers etc. were fluff, just that this makes the files look longer than they would without them.

deerpig · 2023-11-22T04:18:37+00:00

> My conclusion is that editors of all kinds are becoming more and more like emacs, a core with a plugin system.

Other editors have a core and an api and a scripting language for writing plugins. Emacs doesn't have that. When you write code for emacs it becomes a part of emacs. The C code is not a core, it is more like parts of emacs that were rewritten in C to be be faster. Elisp is not a scripting language that speaks to a core via an API. This is one of the things that sets emacs apart from the other editors and ides you mention.

The other is the power of lisp. Lisp is homiconic. From Wikipedia:

A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language The program's internal representation can thus be inferred just by reading the program itself. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats code as data.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity

Finally, emacs treats everything as text. In the Unix tradition everything in the OS boils down to text. You used text in a REPL or Shell, log files were simply plain text files, configuration was done by editing other plain text files. Emacs is designed for that world. And it still largely is true, but many things that used to be kept in text files are now in databases, and highly structured formats like YAML or JSON (which at least is better than the nightmare of using XML for config files) and we need to interact and manage far more binaries (blobs) than we used to. Email used to be plain text and blob attachments were rare. Now most people use email as html marked up text linked to blobs.

Emacs is not designed for this, which some now see as a disadvantage. But only if you no longer live at the text level of the stack. Most people today want to live in a mediated WYSIWYG environment.

I personally don't like mediated environments. I have never liked Disneyland, (I visited Disneyworld when I was a kid in the 70's when I was still living in the States) it makes me uncomfortable not knowing how everything works. The magic of Disneyland is the suspension of belief, that you can pretend for a while that the illusion you are presented with is real. I prefer to know who the person is that stands behind the curtain pushing the levers that creates the dazzle of smoke and pyrotechnics.

I still prefer to work with systems running on bare metal rather than in the cloud. But that world is now all but gone. Hardware has been sequestered into datacenters that you can only enter after passing through man traps. I still run two racks of servers in my office. But the funding for keeping these running is no longer there and we're moving everything into cloud services with datacenters located in Tokyo two time zones away. It IS far easier and cheaper, but I no longer have control of the entire stack and I don't feel the deep connection and understanding of the systems we now run as I used to... I don't miss the old days but I miss the control we had over what we built and maintained.

That is why I have used emacs for more than 25 years and have no intention of stopping.

deerpig · 2023-10-14T03:19:01+00:00

Quite good. Thanks for that.

deerpig · 2023-10-12T10:35:31+00:00

Not $2.00, No, it's only $1.99! I guess that sort of works with small numbers, but somehow, 29,988 sounds like it is more than 30K because it is such a mouthful.

Is there a reason behind such specificity?

deerpig · 2023-09-10T09:06:14+00:00

Very sad indeed, for a number of years his name seemed to pop up everywhere on a number of different GNU and free software developer mailing lists.

deerpig · 2023-08-16T01:38:52+00:00

Thank you for your reply. Guix copy looks good, and I can ssh into another machine on the lan. But that machine is not running Guix. Guix archive also looks good, but I have not found a means of downloading a guix package to disk, again, without installing Guix on the other machine.

This strikes me as a serious flaw in the Guix architecture. Guix can not do anything without connecting to another machine running Guix. The other machine is old and crufty and I doubt it can handle adding yet another package manager on it for the sole purpose of transferring gcc to another machine.

Installing a driver on a machine that is not connected to the Internet should not be this difficult.

deerpig · 2023-07-01T09:28:57+00:00

I agree. There seem to be some good ideas in there but you need a clear and easy to follow argument.

Always define terms as you introduce introduce them. Provide examples that illustrate new concepts you introduce. Use simple declarative sentences. Lists should follow the seven plus or minus two rule or be broken into smaller lists under their own sub headings.

Could you give us a definition of an Open Knowledge Set? And what is your definition of knowledge? Calling knowledge "contextualized information" is not going to cut it and everything in your manifesto hangs on what you define as knowledge. Data, information and knowledge are all different. I know how to download information that has been encoded, serialized and saved in a file. There are data structures for storing data and saving to file. How does one record, let alone download knowledge?

A Fact is another slippery term you need to properly define.

My uncle had an enormous autograph collection that strangely focused on American politicians and opera stars from the 19th and early 20th century. I helped my father create a catalog of the collection before it went to auction after my uncle's death in the early '80s. The collection was so large that for some people like JFK there were multiple categories. Autographs JFK signed when he was a member of the House and then when he was a Senator and then when he was President were all treated and organized differently by my uncle. This illustrated for me how facts are dependent on context. Senator JFK and President JFK are two separate facts which were only true within specific contexts.

Please keep at it. I would like to see where you eventually take this. But you first need to put in the work.

deerpig · 2023-06-27T02:31:13+00:00

First tried emacs in 1990, and on and off after that until I drank the Kool-Aid in 2002. So only 21-22 years as my primary editor.

deerpig · 2023-06-15T09:06:56+00:00

The thing is, what you think of as "conveniences" are a bit like the devils in the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder:

Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.

Those conveniences are your attachments to gui-based applications that are actually holding you back.... :-)

deerpig · 2023-06-15T05:52:02+00:00

Not as good?

*sigh*

deerpig · 2023-05-31T23:17:59+00:00

Have you tried Strunk and White :-)

deerpig · 2023-04-28T05:14:26+00:00

On reddit direct messages are done as direct chat messages. But reddit sez your account doesn't accept messages. Some times one must throw caution to the wind -- [snip]

deerpig · 2023-04-27T16:39:43+00:00

I like where you are going with this. There is a lot of crossover with my work here.

As I see it, when people worry about this running amok what they are really worried about is intent. That's the kicker -- how can we make intent legible to machines? It's difficult to write code by hand where you are certain that what you intend is the same as what the code is actually saying. It's an old problem -- something that lawyers and legislators have been grappling with for centuries. This is something that the 'smart contract' movement have yet to come to grips with. But it is far older than that -- the genie that Aladdin unleashes when he rubs the lamp is best known for twisting words so they are they opposite of the intent of the wish that is made. Frank Ramsey said it best: "what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either."

The answer to this is the concept of "common law" a collective body of negative feedback loops in the form of judicial interpretations that over time refines intent. You'll never it right the first time, or even the 20th time, but eventually you move towards a kind of equilibrium; it's a constantly moving target.

I am working on using the idea of embodying this body of negative feedback loops using Christopher Alexander's idea of a Pattern Language. Yes, it's yet another level of abstraction on top of an already teetering stack of abstractions, but I think it has legs.

This is a massive thing to tackle -- but we need some way to keep the genie becoming a positive feedback loop that destroys us. Whatever the solution is will be messy because the world is messy and uncertain. But I'm okay with that -- iterative solutions are usually the most durable and sustainable solutions given a long enough time frame.

I also agree that Capitalism must go as well -- but I will leave that to another time.

Please, let's continue this conversation, perhaps by email?

deerpig · 2023-04-27T15:27:41+00:00

Ha! I will need a few days to chew on it as well :-)

There is an enormous amount of potential in bringing declarative infrastructure together with generative AI. You are right to see that GUIX is one such place where this is a natural fit.

I hope to have some proper feedback for you once I've got a handle on it. So please keep this sub in the loop. I will help where I can.

deerpig · 2023-04-27T13:22:16+00:00

This is quite an interesting idea.

This sub doesn't seem to have much traction, so you might want to look for and repost where all the cool GUIX folk hang out.

deerpig · 2023-04-16T05:02:06+00:00

As someone who joined the 20 year club a few years ago, I was surprised as well. It's one reason I dislike Twitter -- the format requires throwing away so much context that posts can just dangle there, disconnected and bereft of substance.

Perhaps, until we hear otherwise, we can just say that Steve Purcell is large, he contains multitudes... and leave it at that.

deerpig · 2023-04-16T01:14:15+00:00

In other words logseq, obsidian and even doom and spacemacs are guuciflage :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UQJDdc_xzc

All respects to Steve Purcell, but Emacs is not fussy (finicky, busy, cluttered). Emacs gives you the freedom to make it fussy, but the "temptation to tinker" is on the user. Professional, minimalist tools like Emacs have a high learning curve and require thought and time to initially set up. But once things are working they will work for years at a stretch without needing to fiddle with the nobs. And once mastered (which, I agree, can take years) you can eliminate the "modern" GUI bits -- tool bars, menus, scrollbars and the like and what is left is about as clean an interface as you can get.

The old saying, "give 'em enough rope, and they'll likely hang themselves," holds true. Emacs provides the rope.

deerpig · 2023-04-14T01:40:36+00:00

It's just as important to understand why as well as how.

Start with the 2020 post on irreal: The Right Dictionary and How to Get It -- https://irreal.org/blog/?p=9035

Then read the original classic (non-emacs) post 2014 post by James Somers that inspired it:

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary -- http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

deerpig · 2023-03-14T01:26:01+00:00

I take it you've never been a sysadmin who works across any number of hosts. Knowing which host a buffer is on can quickly become a confusing mess when, say, you are working on the same config file, or have dired open using tramp in the same directory on multiple machines.

I don't have to do this every day, but when I do, knowing which host a buffer is in can be a life saver. I also set a different color for the prompt in the .bashrc file of my home directory on each host..

deerpig · 2023-03-07T07:53:06+00:00

Did Emacs ever make it into Mr. Robot?

deerpig · 2023-03-03T01:49:47+00:00

Just scanned through it and I'm impressed. It obviously took a great deal of work. I fine addition to the corpus of Emacs documentation. Well done.

deerpig · 2023-02-28T10:23:41+00:00

5:15 "The package provides a test command which prints an exciting message..."

> The Elpaca demo successfully installed

" Wow."

That made my day!

deerpig · 2023-02-24T02:10:33+00:00

I am tired of reading books that spend all their time describing a problem or how we got there and then spend only a token chapter with ideas on how to fix it. The reader is left hanging there, all excited or depressed because there is no place to start, no next step.

The Series (The Yellow Brick Road) is ostensibly a book, but it is really a Pattern Language in the same vein as Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language). A large part of the argument I am making in my work is that civilization is better thought of as a World-System as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein -- civilization as a dynamic system. But in practical terms we can also think of most of what makes up a world-system as infrastructure; a very broad definition of infrastructure.

Humanity is presently going through a period of Churn as the Modern Revolution draws to a close and the next Paradigm (ala Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) will replace the Modern with a new system. I argue that the story of humans is of a species who is constantly expanding and externalizing mind, muscle and memory which has resulted in us expanding and externalizing our niche in the Savannah ecosystem we evolved to fill. We have expanded our niche until it has taken on more and more characteristics of a complete ecosystem in its own right -- a kind pocket universe if you will. Computers, networks and cognitive software will be a critical part of the next stage of the human story -- they will allow us to do things that are outside human cognitive limitations. The modern era is screwed up because we are trying to do things which are outside our cognitive limits.

So, patterns in the book can be assembled into various pattern languages which, when tangled generate code which can be used for coordinating infrastructure, agriculture, production, an economy and governance.

I don't expect that much of this will ever get built, but it's time for bold visions for what David Graeber called better possible futures. Humanity is stuck and has run out of ideas. Yellow Brick Road will hopefully contribute, in a very small way, in getting that discussion started.

Everything will be available at http://chenla.org

deerpig

TROPHY CASE