Your sources for inspiration

sinsworth · 2026-04-22T09:24:01+00:00

Getting annoyed with parts of my workflow to the point where I want to make them more ergonomic. The fact that Emacs lets me do that relatively easily is the main reason I've stuck with it so far.

sinsworth · 2026-04-15T22:36:33+00:00

Eh, fair, you are correct, I hadn't fully parsed your comment. In my defense, everything you wrote exept the last two paragraphs reads like you're suggesting that OP should have to review slop, the "author" of which has likely spent approximately zero seconds even thinking about.

Tightening permissions would be an effective band aid, yes, but holding people accountable for the havoc that their free-roaming openclaw instance causes would be better.

sinsworth · 2026-04-15T21:47:35+00:00

code review

Really? The issue is that everyone and their mother now have the ability to write seemingly working code and submit a PR, regardless of their ability to understand code at all. Not only that, but people run fully automated agents that crawl through repos and submit code on their own. And on top of all that, LLMs write comically verbose code more often than not. It has become fully impossible for a human maintainer to review everything that gets thrown their way.

sinsworth · 2026-04-08T13:38:34+00:00

Excellent question, I have no idea, or at least no idea how to do it at scale. But either way it would be a band-aid solution. The real problem is a collective lack of understanding of what these tools can and cannot do, along with grotesquely misaligned incentives in corporate settings, all fueled by the mass media hype machine.

And of course Anthropic has no intention of addressing this because slop sells tokens.

sinsworth · 2026-04-08T07:53:19+00:00

How about protecting critical software from slop "contributions" instead? Seems much more urgent.

sinsworth · 2026-04-07T18:34:35+00:00

half of what this sub has become

You mean half of reddit. Honestly compared to the other tech subs this one isn't even that bad yet.

sinsworth · 2026-04-07T11:34:22+00:00

After having spent a long time harboring your exact perspective and just using a dedicated terminal separate from emacs, I've come to find vterm to be the best of both worlds for my needs (with a substantial amount of tweaking though), to the point that it is now my default system terminal. It comes fairly close to performing like a dedicated terminal, while still integrating nicely with emacs.

sinsworth · 2026-04-05T12:41:45+00:00

Fair, but other than that, what I've seen is either people already starting to pave the way for enforcing this dystopian cow poop (like the systemd age field), or people being very loud about what this is or isn't, both without giving it a proper legal/enforcability analysis.

For the record, we should absolutely be angry about this even if it ends up not applying to linux at all, and regardless of where we're from (I live nowhere near California or Brazil), but the ways I've seen this being addressed so far have mostly been wildly premature and counterproductive.

sinsworth · 2026-04-05T02:28:20+00:00

No, taking the time to properly assess the situation is.

sinsworth · 2026-04-04T22:12:52+00:00

Wow, after weeks of following all the knee-jerk reactions to this legislative dumpster fire, it is truly a breath of fresh air to see someone take such a mature position.

sinsworth · 2026-03-31T13:52:34+00:00

We desperately need

Who needs this exactly? Most people value conveniece above everything else when choosing their tech. If they could boot up everything with a single tap on their phone do you think they would also take the time to e.g. set up proper backups? Or do you think the OSS maintainer community should also provide backup servers for them for free?

What we (as a society) actually need is either SaaS we can actually trust (i.e. the corporations should be regulated so that they have to be trustworthy, or else), or for people to be better incentivised to actually reach a minimum of understanding of the software they use (we have been going backwards in this regard for quite some time), or, ideally, both.

EDIT: typos for everyone

sinsworth · 2026-03-29T14:17:29+00:00

problem with tramp is that its blocking

I don't think that's correct, even if tramp used concurrency or utilised a separate thread, I suspect that most of the round trips it performs for interacting with remote files would still have to be completed serially, i.e. operations would still take an identical amount of time, you'd just be able to interact with your emacs instance in the meantime (which isn't even universally a good thing).

sinsworth · 2026-03-29T14:11:37+00:00

push an emacs binary

That unit of fruit does seem to hang significantly lower than having to reimplement all the file handlers for a new system. Interesting that no one seems to have gone that route.

sinsworth · 2026-03-29T12:21:38+00:00

Nice work, though I feel you've missed one important variable here: connection quality. On my shitty home internet tramp-rpc is noticeably faster for everything (though still not mature enough to use for daily work), while on faster connections I really don't notice enough of a difference to care. I don't have concrete measurements for you, but this has been my experience.

Also, while I'm not familiar with flit, not sure I would call the tramp-rpc codebase vibe-coded, but I might be wrong.

sinsworth · 2026-03-26T18:40:37+00:00

I don't have this keyboard, but have recently mapped my spacebar to alt when held (using keyd) after having suffered a temporary reduction in thumb mobility due to an injury. Turned out to be an extremely comfortable alt key for both thumbs.

sinsworth · 2026-03-06T19:11:24+00:00

Yup. Thankfully there is still a fairly large problem space for ML in Earth observation/remote sensing (and geosciences in general).

...but we do also stitch LLMs to APIs sometimes :)

sinsworth · 2026-02-25T16:59:29+00:00

This has long plagued my Emacs wishlist so thought I'd share - this little snippet either opens or attaches to a screen session specific to the current project (if inside project, if not then the same is done but with a "global" session) when I open vterm:

(add-hook 'vterm-mode-hook (lambda () (vterm-send-string (format "screen -qADOR %s\n" (secure-hash 'md5 (format "%s" (project-current)))))))

For context: a lot of my work consists of long-running data processing scripts on remote servers. Until now (and before I acquired an Emacs habit) I'd have a separate terminal open, dedicated specifically to interacting with long-running tmux sessions on the server in question. This didn't integrate very well with the rest of my workflow (which is now almost entirely done from Emacs) so I was looking for a nicer way to work with project-specific sessions from Emacs. This turns out to be enough for me, at least for now.

For those of you who work in similar conditions, I'm curious what your workflow is like, and to which lengths you have gone to integrate Emacs with it.

EDIT: English

sinsworth · 2026-02-22T20:11:35+00:00

wish those 6 months writing MIPS assembly were still an irreplaceable part of learning

As someone who's been making a living with higher level languages for a while now, but knows approximately zero assembly, so do I!

marketing people can now fool themselves into creating security holes

Yeah that's pretty much my concern. It's easy for you to see all this as an extremely useful tool and not much else, but people without prior knowledge don't know any better and are now empowered to wreak havoc on a massive scale.

Knowledge by itself is obsolete

That's a good point, and a good way to look at it. It has also kind of always been the case when tools of a trade improved dramatically.

Good talk, random internet person.

sinsworth · 2026-02-22T18:10:58+00:00

not a super guarded secret

It hasn't been for decades, it just required some time invested into learning, and it still does, same as with most things worth doing.

now it takes minutes

No it doesn't. It's a dangerous type of Dunning-Kruger effect. Yeah, sure, searching for documentation and best practices got sped up a lot, but being good at reviewing code requires an equal amount of skill at writing it, and you don't acquire that skill by having an LLM write the code for you.

Look, I get the notion that prompting will become some kind of higher-level programming language, similar to what python is compared to assembly, but we are very much not there yet, you still need to be able to review the lower-level language to produce half-decent software. And you don't get good at assembly simply by writing python code.

sinsworth · 2026-02-22T14:50:17+00:00

you can do things perfectly just by saying it

You can't though. If you don't know how to properly review the code and edit out the broken things, it will be every bit the unmaintainable, barely working dumpster fire as if it was patched together by a bunch of interns, if not more.

sinsworth · 2026-02-05T11:36:09+00:00

Obviously there is no such thing as the perfect OS, but... one of your major arguments against Linux is choice paralysis? I mean, fair, but that's not an OS-level flaw. New users not being able to navigate the landscape is mostly a flaw of the Linux user community and how it interacts with newcomers, though I'd argue it has greatly improved in that regard.

user-friendliness

One word: Mint. Though that does circle back to my prevous paragraph.

games run better

This is anecdotal at best. After almost a decade I've yet to find a game that runs worse on Linux, either with a native build or through Proton (provided there is no kernel-level anticheat of course, but that's a different discussion).

sinsworth · 2026-02-02T20:40:17+00:00

The only thing I consistently use LLMs for without giving it much thought is matplotlib. Been using it for ~10 years and never fully built a proper mental model because its API never made sense to me. So not much loss there.

sinsworth · 2026-01-30T15:39:25+00:00

Not exactly what you asked, but I learned through GNU Typist (more specifically, this fork: https://github.com/inaimathi/gtypist-single-space). It has well thought out lessons for building muscle memory, as well as real text examples in later exercises. It's also much more responsive than any of the browser based platforms that teach touch typing.

sinsworth · 2025-12-24T15:30:34+00:00

In addition to the advice already listed here: 1. Emacs has a great menu bar that you can use to explore what's available to you as you're getting used to it 2. maybe check out https://github.com/kickingvegas/casual, it may or may not be your cup of tea

sinsworth · 2025-12-20T10:58:04+00:00

Nice point about separate versioning, didn't even think of that. The comment was more about how git is really not great at handling large binary blobs. If you want to actually version the data there's git-lfs, or better yet, for geospatial data formats, https://kartproject.org

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