I do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve.

Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek guidance from you and committed suicide was because a chatbot convinced her of so must be gut wrenching. So far I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle. And it has made me support banning general AI usage at times.

Nowadays I’m not sure if it should or even could be banned, but we DO have to invest significant resources to improve alignment, otherwise we risk that in the future AI does more harm than good.

>In my defense though, I was REALLY young.

No need to apologize, needing an excuse to lack knowledge is how we end up with people afraid to ask.

I try to make it visible when I’m among juniors and there’s something I don’t know. I think showing the process of “I realize I miss some knowledge => here’s how I bridge the gap” might help against the current trend of going through the motions in the dark.

It used to be that learning was almost a hazing ritual of being belittled and told to RTFM. That doesn’t really work when people have a big bold shortcut on their phones at any given time.

We might need to make the old way more attractive if we don’t want to end up alone.

Spot on. Thank you for saying this. It boggles my mind with a bunch of former Red Hat types now work for companies like Microsoft and perpetuate a zealot mindset that might have made sense in the 90s but now it's completely divorced from what the next generation of software companies need.

All you have to do is look at the name of the company on the building ...it still says Microsoft folks

Okay, I can see that maybe this could be a funny story in the local paper, but it's quite strange that it ended up as _international news_.

As an Emacs users who often tries to do as many things as possible in Emacs, I would say that the more stuff you can do in Emacs, the more the various features in Emacs compound with each other, giving you more utility.

For example, I use the Verb package for making HTTP requests. So with Emacs as my HTTP client, I can do bulk HTTP request calls with keyboard macros. The HTTP requests can be stored in org-mode. I can write custom Elisp for special authentication scenarios. I can create new commands if I need them.

For this example, I can imagine (haven't used this myself) scenarios like creating a keyboard macro to shave off the first X seconds of a video usable with dired.

Some non-text-editing things in Emacs that are actually extremely useful:

  - Git via Magit
  - Managing files with Dired
  - Media player with Emms
  - RSS feeds with elfeed
  and the list goes on and on...

Using a well thought-out Emacs interface for anything is one of the biggest sources of joy in my technical life.

Emacs is weird. I think it changed something in my brain. Before Emacs, I never thought I would ever try controlling video playback from my editor. "Just why?" I probably would've said. I never thought I'd be trying to get the text from the active tab in my browser. Or search through my browser history. Or OCR the content of my clipboard, or control my WM. Dang, before Emacs, it didn't even occur to me to try to type just about any text in my text editor - which now makes absolute sense - why would I ever bother typing in my browser window, Slack, Zoom, or email client?

In Emacs, I have all the tools I need for dealing with text - thesaurus, spell-checking, definition and etymology lookup, search engines, translation, LLMs, etc. Why, oh why, wouldn't I ever try typing anything longer than two words in anything else?

Like, for example, while typing this very comment, I may come across a thought: "I think I already made a similar comment some time ago, let me find it..." What would a regular user do? They'd switch to the browser, navigate to HN, scroll to the bottom, type search query, lookup on the page, jump to the next, keep paging until they find it, copy, switch back, paste... What would an experienced Emacs user do? They'd search for it without ever leaving their editor, grab the stuff from the buffer and paste it - all within just a few keystrokes. Or if I need to find a url in my browser history - I'd just search for it and insert in-place - two keystrokes+search query.

It's not just faster - it is profoundly satisfying and liberating. It gives you the feeling of being in control. You don't have to deal with the quirks of specialized apps; you don't need to memorize tons of their specific keybindings; it gives you a straight path to extracting or injecting plain text.

That's why those who never made a wholehearted attempt to use Emacs just never get it. And those who have, never can understand why others don't even try to recognize the value.