drbaba (u/drbaba) - Readit News

drbaba commented on ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/... · Posted by u/aa_is_op

drbaba · 2 years ago

> Why would you continue to subscribe to a bullshit company that does this?

They said they subscribed which could mean that they have since unsubscribed. I think they’re texting them because they want them back as a customer - it makes no sense to pester your currently paying customers.

drbaba commented on A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015) fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-... · Posted by u/mgd

softirq · 2 years ago

Semantics. Some of the packages are included, all of them have to be turned on and configured, and hopefully the user already knows about use package and understands the syntax for customizations and keybindings. Of course, if they try to Google how to use these packages they'll realize that Eglot doesn't work with DAP, so if you want to debug anything you'll need to go download the third party lsp-mode and dap-mode, configure them, then realize everyone uses swiper, consul, etc. which you'll need to download and configure as well.

> but really the defaults are fine -- just old.

I assume this is just Stockholm syndrome. Every Emacs config starts by turning on the same minor modes hooked to prog major modes for simple stuff like bracket matching and line numbers. Every config sets the same early-init.el params to stop emacs from being slow. If the defaults were sane, everyone wouldn't be disabling and enabling the same stuff in their config. The defaults are not sane precisely because people complain that changing any of the defaults for a 30 year old editor in 2024 is tantamount to open source treason.

drbaba · 2 years ago

> Some of the packages are included, all of them have to be turned on and configured

I see where you're coming from, but I think this is a bit exaggerated as well.

For some concrete examples:

- Git: Emacs does have a built-in `vc-mode`, which can be used without any prior configuration by pressing `C-x v`. Or you can go to `Tools > Version Control` in the menu bar (if you haven't disabled it). Many people prefer to install Magit, but the built-in package is actually quite decent (the UX is a bit similar).

- You brought up LSP. Emacs now has a built-in `eglot` mode which connects to LSP servers, and is pre-configured to work with many of the open-source ones. You can turn it on by pressing `M-x eglot`, or go to `Tools > Language Server Support (Eglot)` in the menu bar. Many people prefer to install LSP-mode, but I think many people have also migrated to Eglot after it landed officially in Emacs.

> Every Emacs config starts by turning on the same minor modes hooked to prog major modes for simple stuff like bracket matching and line numbers. Every config sets the same early-init.el params to stop emacs from being slow.

I agree with you that the defaults should be modernized. For example, I think most people would appreciate if the defaults were updated to e.g. use one of the `modus` themes, automatically switch to a dark theme if the OS has it enabled, and enable a fuzzy-finder like fido-vertical-mode without configuration. All of these capabilities are already bundled with Emacs, just not turned on by default. I'd also advocate for disabling the blinking cursor and the bell - who wants that?

Just as a counter-example though, I don't have any of the specific settings you mentioned enabled:

- I dislike line numbers (they look weird if you work with soft-wrapped prose and they take up space)

- I don't like bracket matching (they don't work well with modal editing).

- I don't use the early-init garbage collector optimizations (Emacs anyway starts in a second as I use few packages, and leave it open all day so it doesn't matter).

drbaba commented on A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015) fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-... · Posted by u/mgd

softirq · 2 years ago

GUIs and proprietary protocols have killed Emacs.

Emacs isn't an editor, as the post implies, it's an environment. "You can do anything from Emacs" made sense back when everything was open and text based. Nowadays everyone is using Slack, or using an IMAP web client for mail that requires bespoke authentication, or organizer apps that automatically sync across all your devices via the cloud. All of the verticals have been slurped up by corporations who did it better in GUI, have better syncing, and have locked down the protocols needed to bridge, and now the brave Emacs user of 2024 is forced to spend lots of time not in Emacs, thus defeating the point of using Emacs.

As an editor alone I don't think Emacs is worth it. There's the old adage "They added everything to Emacs but a good editor" and I think that makes sense. If you're not going to live in Emacs for the above reasons then Vim/Neovim is a better editor with a larger community, and VSCode/Jetbrains are better IDEs that are already adopting AI, which will essentially kill off Emacs.

Emacs still has a lot of important lessons, but I feel bad for new programmers today who will never get the full experience of a text based digital life. Everything has been dumbed down for our own good, and Emacs is now nothing more than a glorified Org editor that forces you to find your own cloud syncing.

drbaba · 2 years ago

> Emacs is now nothing more than a glorified Org editor

I must admit that if it wasn’t for Org, I as a long-time Vim user wouldn’t be using Emacs :)

drbaba commented on A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015) fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-... · Posted by u/mgd

shrimp_emoji · 2 years ago

It's not better for anyone except delusional people. It was created for ADM terminals whose keyboards lacked the keys vim users use to navigate in modal editing, and there's no reason for it anymore.

drbaba · 2 years ago

> terminals whose keyboards lacked the keys vim users use to navigate in modal editing, and there's no reason for it anymore.

Vim keybindings really are more comfortable if you struggle with RSI. I’ve had such issues despite having used Caps Lock as Ctrl for years, and despite pressing it with my ring finger instead of pinkie. In my case, I have big hands and often have to work from small laptop keyboards for my job, which likely makes it worse.

The 3 times I’ve tried to go all-in on Emacs keybindings, I’ve after 1-2 months developed pain in my left forearm that then took months to heal. I developed some similar pains when I tried to use Sublime Text keybindings as well, but it was worse with Emacs. I blame this on excessive chording.

Except these excursions into other keybinding sets, I’ve used mainly Vim keybindings for nearly two decades now. I never had arm pains using Vim or Evil.

All this is to say: “There is no reason for it anymore” is too dismissive. The original reason Bill Joy wrote Vi the way he did was those constraints, but it has benefits today for other reasons.

drbaba commented on I quit my job to work full time on my open source project ellie.wtf/posts/i-quit-my... · Posted by u/cwaffles

extheat · 2 years ago

I don't think it's that unusual. What comes to mind immediately is it's not unusual for me to clone something from a private git repo, where a username+password would be needed for permissions. In which case it's possible to put in `git clone http://username:password@example.com` or another git command that interacts with remotes. (To be clear the "password" is typically a token and not human generated string, but still functions like a password).

drbaba · 2 years ago

For that example: Any reason the server doesn’t just have an SSH server? Then you can use `git clone` in the “usual way”, using SSH certificate authentication.

drbaba commented on I quit my job to work full time on my open source project ellie.wtf/posts/i-quit-my... · Posted by u/cwaffles

the_arun · 2 years ago

What is the security of this?

1. If someone steals my laptop & breaks in, can they get access to all my history

2. After breaking, if they run `atuin key` will get them the key for my history which they can use from any device (if they know the userid)

3. If you are running servers passing passwords as command line arguments in that device, they have all that.

drbaba · 2 years ago

> If you are running servers passing passwords as command line arguments in that device, they have all that.

I make a point out of never doing that. It’s way too easy to accidentally expose things. For instance, doing a live demo with an audience, and using Ctrl-R out of muscle memory? Suddenly you flashed your password in front of everyone.

Generally, I’d recommend using a tool like Unix `pass` or your default OS keyring to store your secrets, then you can run `command1 --password=$(command2)` to feed a password from one command to another. If I really have to type something sensitive, I prefix the whole shell command with a space, which in many shells can be configured to mean that it doesn’t enter history. If you do so by accident, the shell history file can be edited in vim.

drbaba commented on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT tonybaloney.github.io/pos... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

adonese · 2 years ago

is it any different or comparable to numba or pyjion? Not following python closely in recent years but I recount those two projects with huge potential

drbaba · 2 years ago

I don’t know Pyjion, but I have used Numba for real work. It’s a great package and can lead to massive speed-ups.

However, last time I used it, it (1) didn’t work with many third-party libraries (e.g. SciPy was important for me), and (2) didn’t work with object-oriented code (all your @njit code had to be wrapped in functions without classes). Those two has limited for which projects I could adopt Numba in practice, despite loving it in the cases it worked.

I don’t know what limitations the built-in Python JIT has, but hopefully it might be a more general JIT that works for all Python code.

drbaba commented on Polars pola.rs/... · Posted by u/tosh

davedx · 2 years ago

I don't use dataframes in my day job but have dabbled in them enough that I found this website pretty easy to digest.

You'd really have to be a complete data engineering newbie to not understand it I think?

I mean, where do you draw the line? You wouldn't expect a software tool like this to explain what it is in language my grandma would understand, I don't think?

drbaba · 2 years ago

> You'd really have to be a complete data engineering newbie to not understand it I think?

I do occasionally use Pandas in my day job, but I honestly think very few programmers that could have use for a data frame library would describe themselves as a “data engineer” at all.

In my case, for example, I’m just a physicist - I don’t work with machine learning, big data, or in the software industry at all. I just use Pandas + Seaborn to process the results of numerical simulations and physical experiments similarly to how someone else might use Excel. Works great.

drbaba commented on First beta release of Tcl/Tk 9.0 now available tcl-lang.org/software/tcl... · Posted by u/cmacleod4

drbaba · 2 years ago

Congratulations on a major release!

Genuine question: Would you recommend learning Tcl/Tk from scratch in 2024, and in that case for what use cases?

drbaba commented on Polars pola.rs/... · Posted by u/tosh

ayhanfuat · 2 years ago

Not *original* but probably most commonly used.

drbaba · 2 years ago

Yeah, I believe Pandas was inspired by similar functionality in R.