salutis

Check out Luanti. My son pulled off his own multiplayer game, by mixing some existing mods and writing a pinch of Lua. He is not into programming, and he did not even use LLM, do it was probably not all that hard. And the result was impressive, and I say that as a professional programmer.

This is incorrect. An undecidable problem is one for which no algorithm can compute the correct result for every given instance. Probabilistic classical computation is irrelevant here.

Thank you! That was a (bad) typo. You are right, of course.

That is not how averages work. By definition of mean, perhaps.

Please do not spread lies.

"obsolete dinosaur who hasn't written a line of code in decades"

The most recent code change in Emacs by RMS was on 2026-04-22 (0fb9d096e38), so ~3 months ago. He can write complex code (without AI), such as the `cond*` macro (707 LOC, all macro code), authored and pushed to Emacs on 2024-08-02 (18491f48d97).

I left Apple Music over this. My albums would keep quietly disappearing. I spent hours on the phone with their support, and despite their promises, nothing ever changed. I left Apple Music, and then all of their cloud services as well. Today, I'm 100% Apple-free, happily playing MP3s from Bandcamp in my Emacs. :)

But there is no dichotomy, is there? Good code is code that solves the problem well. Today and sustainably into the future. What else would "good code" even mean in general context?

The "other side" of the AI craze.

This is incorrect reasoning. Science is advancing. It is like saying we should not listen to physicists because "Didn't those physicists gave us the original heliocentric system?"

No, that is plain old recursion. Dynamic programming is recursive programming with a twist. The twist is that identical sub-problems are short-circuited with memoization.

Coding isn’t creative, it isn’t sexy, [...]

Nonsense. Coding is creative the same way mathematics is.

Beautiful architecture, perfect tests, elegant abstractions those things feel deeply rewarding to the person who wrote them [...]

Nonsense. Best practices exist to make the code perform well. As a result, every user cares about them, albeit indirectly.

That’s brutal to hear if you’ve spent years telling yourself that your intellectual passion is inherently admirable or sexy. It’s not.

Nonsense. Intellectual passion is admirable and sexy for many. This is subjective.

For me, Emacs on Mac OS is not all that stable. I see a freeze about twice a month, which is not "very rarely" in my book. It also leaks memory, albeit now (in the upcoming version) less so. (Disclaimer: I am a heavy user and contributor.)

Fennel (Lisp):

    (table.concat [:highlighted :primary (if discount :on-sale)] " ")

Psychology is stuck in pre-Galilean era. Even if it studies "properties of thought", as you put it, it does so without formal basis, let alone understanding from first principles. As Chomsky said, about psychology and the like, "You want to move from behavioral science to authentic science." [1]

[1] Chomsky & Krauss (2015) An Origins Project Dialogue at https://youtu.be/Ml1G919Bts0

Also Fennel, both implicitly and explicitly with `tail!`.

Source: https://fennel-lang.org/reference#tail

Yes. An artificial neuron, as a mathematical function f, is defined by f(x) = g(wx + b) where x is the input, w is the weight, b is the bias, and g is some non-linear activation function. Is that "good old linear regression followed by an activation function to make it non linear"? Yes, it is exactly that.

Also PDF Tools for Emacs, where PDF can match your theme.

Abstraction is the opposite of specialization, not precision. Multiplication, for example, is an abstraction that can be defined in terms of repeated addition of the same term, which is less general, and so more special, than addition of two arbitrary terms, but it not less precise.

Thank you for the clarification. I certainly could have worded my comment better. I agree with you on that we should never trust open-source software blindly. That said, we can at least audit it, along with every new patch, which is impossible with binary blobs. That is why, I personally think, open-source should be preferred, for free and non-free software alike.

Why do you think my stance is internally inconsistent?

For example, I completely trust Emacs maintainers, as I have yet to see any malice or dark patterns coming from them. The same applies to other free and open source software I use on a daily basis. These projects respect my privacy, have nothing to hide, and I have no problem trusting them.

On the other hand, I see more and more dark patterns coming from Apple, say when signed out of their cloud services. They pour millions into their privacy ads, but I do not trust them to act ethically, especially when money is on the table.

Does this not make sense?

Yes, I think all devices packed with sensors that live in our homes should be transparent in what they do, that is their code should be available for everyone to see. And yes, it is extremist take, given where we ended up today.

Yes, ultimately, I want everything to be open. This is not a bag of rice. These are devices packed with sensors, in our homes. As for inspection, I do not have a problem trusting others. I just do not trust big corporations with remotely controlled binary blobs, no matter how much money they put into the safety and security ads. This is a personal opinion, of course.

Myself, I stopped trusting Apple. There are now too many dark patterns in their software, especially once one stops using their services. And, DRM was re-instantiated, when iTunes started streaming as Apple Music. On top of that, their lies, such as those about the Butterfly keyboards being fixed, cost me a fortune. They fuck up the keyboard design, and then they buy the computer back for 40% of its original price, due to a microscopic scratch nobody else could see. And that happened twice to me. They put a lot of money into advertising themselves as being ethical, but that is only marketing. These, of course, are my personal opinions.

macOS is a proprietary binary blob, remotely controlled by Apple. So, the light in the menu bar is not a reliable indicator of anything. There is no privacy on macOS, nor any other proprietary system. You can never be 100% sure what the system is doing right now, as can be anything it is capable of. Apple is putting a lot of money to "teach people" otherwise, but that is marketing, not truth.

Meanwhile, in Lua:

  $ lua
  Lua 5.4.7  Copyright (C) 1994-2024 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
  > 0/0
  nan
  > 1/0
  inf

Lua too. 30 years and counting!

Everything you said applies to Kotlin as well. Outside of IntelliJ, it is horrible to use. (Ditto Swift outside of Xcode.)

In Slovak, it means "destination". :)

You miscapitalized "s" and "i". :)

Compared to Lua, Fennel brings to the table:

- Lisp syntax, so structural reading, navigation, and editing,

- above-average Lisp macro system, so fundamental extensibility,

- pattern matching, so a bit more expressiveness, and

- some compile-time safety checks.