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TBH I think the word is often used without much consideration. So where people should say ethnicity or ancestry e.g., they say race instead, because it is just simpler, not because they carry much meaning with it. This is true in German and English..

Also I think given the context you know how people mean these words. But all I see is wild jumping on some words without much context all the time.

For me it was mostly that these distros overwhelmed me and I could not get into their code. I had to "start small" if you want. Also I encountered troubles regularly because some things did not feed my needs.

I am not saying they are bad, just not for me.

And I think they make it somehow harder to discover the true power of emacs: bending it to your will & basically forging your own custom environment, not only for editing but so much more (git, mails, pdfs,...).

I understand that. It's very slow pace. I did it bit by bit over several days. But I was also often skipping ahead.

There are some good tutorials on youtube to start from zero. E.g. "Emacs from scratch" by System Crafters.

I only started using an AI to help fix issues or understand configuration problems when my config was already >1000 lines.

But yea there are several ways to approach this :)

Yep. I also forgot one important point. If you come from vim, like myself, you should probably use evil-mode right from the start and then just get used to a few important Emacs shortcuts over time and use them additionally to your evil keymaps.

No one will ever convince me that there is something better than vim mode for editing text (or comparable modal editors).

A bit of advice to people that have the urge to try Emacs.

Do not use a distribution. Yes I know.. you have read that before and then you used Doom or Spacemacs anyways. That's me in the past. And it never worked out for me. I always ended up trying to configure things and the whole setup was too complex for me, so I failed.

Over the last 10 years I have been a heavy (n)vim user but I tried Emacs multiple times. Always a distro. It never worked out. Now over the last year I was trying Emacs with a vanilla setup and configured everything from scratch. With the AIs this is super simple because they can help you get out of config trouble.

The experience was way better than before. After my one year experience I have switched back to neovim but I still have become a fan of Emacs and I have adapted my nvim config. Stuff like dired, magit, compile-mode I have found equivalent nvim plugins and use them now.

First of all I never said these things you claim. I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.

However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.

Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.

Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.

It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..

At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.

Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.

I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.

Don't you read while your agents are doing all the work for you? /s

You are better than me. Back when you could mine BTC with the CPU, i had about 2 coins. I found it useless and silly and deleted my wallet at some point :)

There is a shift to software mass production over the last decade(s). AI is now speeding up this process extremely. There will be most software produced with AI and "cog coders", similar to a production line in manufacturing.

Some few (good ones) will find niches and "hand craft" software, similar to today when you still can buy hand forged axes etc. Obviously the market for these products will be much smaller but it will exist.

I you love programming you should try to get into the second category. Be a master craftsman.

You are assuming that the AGI service is very cheap..

All this praise for AI.. I honestly don't get it. I have used Opus 4.5 for work and private projects. My experience is that all of the AIs struggle when the project grows. They always find some kind of local minimum where they cannot get out of but tell you this time their solution will work.. but it doesn't. They waste my time with this behaviour enormously. In the end I always have to do it myself.

Maybe when AIs are able to say: "I don't know how this works" or "This doesn't work like that at all." they will be more helpful.

What I use AIs for is searching for stuff in large codebases. Sometimes I don't know the name or the file name and describe to them what I am looking for. Or I let them generate some random task python/bash script. Or use them to find specific things in a file that a regex cannot find. Simple small tasks.

It might well be I am doing it totally wrong.. but I have yet to see a medium to large sized project with maintainable code that was generated by AI.

So why not just merge into one and be 16 times as effective? Sorry for the sarcasm but your calculation is just a wild assumption.

How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?

Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question).

People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.

That could end in an ugly stalemate pretty fast, considering ASML is Dutch.

So true! I was well into my thirties until I learned that people actually can "see" images. I was totally perplexed by this revelation. After some research I realized that this also applies to taste, smell, sounds.. and none of them I can "imagine".

In hindsight this explained a lot of things. One example would be that I always was bad at blindfold chess even though I was a decent chess player. Before, I never understood how people can do this.

Still I am absolutely fine. I can recognize all these things. I can describe them. I just can "imagine" them.

After the first shock you understand that everything has pros and cons. E.g. I never have trouble sleeping. I close my eyes and turn the world around me off. My wife can see images very vividly and always has trouble going to sleep.

In the end we just need to accept that the brain is very complex and each of us has developed / adapted the best way, allowed by our biology.

Day 2 starts with a Neovim config in vimscript. Just a heads up for people like me who switched away from Vim primarily because of vimscript in the first place.

edit: grammar

I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable.

I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do.

You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)

While a general "crashing down" probably will not happen I could imagine some differences to other mass produced goods.

Most of our private data lives in clouds now and there are already regular security nightmares of stolen passwords, photos etc. I fear that these incidents will accumulate with more and more AI generated code that is most likely not reviewed or reviewed by another AI.

Also regardless of AI I am more and more skipping cheap products in general and instead buying higher quality things. This way I buy less but what I buy doesn't (hopefully) break after a few years (or months) of use.

I see the same for software. Already before AI we were flooded with trash. I bet we could all delete at least half of the apps on our phones and nothing would be worse than before.

I am not convinced by the rosy future of instant AI-generated software but future will reveal what is to come.

The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.

The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.

edit: sentence fixed.

I don't know.. maybe if you cannot control your impulses..

For me Steam sales are great. I have things in the wish list and when the sale is good I might buy it. I always check if it's a good sale on SteamDB.

I usually play these games but most of the time not for long. That's why I don't want to put in the full price.

Where is the win? Life is a mixture of pain, joy, success, failure and so on. Ups and down. How would you know the value of something if you never experienced (some of) the opposite?

And yes we are over connected and over sharing but everyone can change his own fate here.. just get rid of all the social networks and meet people in real life. It is possible.

I truly think that social media is one of the worst things that happened to mankind and we still have not fully grasped all the damage it does. (And here I do not refer to occasional posting in web forums or HN or such.. but the mindless, addictive participation in Facebook, Tiktok etc. where the only gain is a dopamine hit.)

I have bought the book months back and I think I recently received an email that the final version was released.

Anyways I can recommend it even though I am not finished with it yet.

Schröder is long gone and especially the current SPD seems a good distance from Schröder's politics.

I'd say the coalition is just "center" with the CDU being center-right and the SPD being center-left that seems like a good conclusion..

How did the SPD move to the right? By forming a coalition with the CDU? That claim sounds very dubious to me..

I think that's the intention of a panic.. however there is still recover if you need to "catch" it.

Just keep doing it as a statement brother!

No need to instantly start growing hairs again just because it is possible ;)

Hmm.. I was referring to rich Germans not to innovative Germans. That aside the Schwarz Group is building their own Cloud business.. and they were one of the very few large companies that dared to NOT use SAP but build their own stuff. Not sure this counts as innovation but it's worth mentioning.

edit: I just re-read the GP comment and I get it now.. it was only doubting that there are people who recently accumulated riches.. then of course Schwarz would be a bad example :)

Or Dieter Schwarz, founder of Lidl

I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database.

Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296

He addresses exactly this phenomenon.

EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.