uludag (u/uludag) - Readit News

uludag commented on I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead miguelconner.substack.com... · Posted by u/dothereading

uludag · 4 days ago

Alas, the mote around LLM integration is practically non-existent so I'd think that productization around this would be next to impossible.

Anki is already extremely extendable so I would think that with a not too much work deep LLM integration could be implemented in Anki. Like, instead of showing static content for a card, have Anki call an LLM to create the daily iteration of a given prompt.

uludag commented on Emacs as your video-trimming tool xenodium.com/emacs-as-you... · Posted by u/xenodium

Zobat · 6 days ago

This is impressive, but (and probably because I'm not the intended audience for this post) I don't get it, I kind of want to get it though. With "it" I mean making Emacs do X, where X is something far from editing text files. It always seems to me like playing Doom on a pregnancy test. Sure you can do it, sure it's impressive, but should you?

n.b. I'm a C# developer that has accepted my fate and use Visual Studio to earn a living, though I've made sure I know my tool, flaws and merits, better than most developers I've met/worked with. My first job as a programmer was writing C++ code in Emacs and can't remember anything negative about that experience (other than getting used to ctrl+x, ctrl+s for saving and, by reflex, doing the same in Excel, and losing a big part of the document that I had just selected to move, because Excel couldn't undo past last save).

Reading the (at the time I'm writing this) 13 comments on this post I see mentions of at least three lightweight programs that does this. What other than "the mountain is there" makes someone think Emacs would be the tool for this? As a Resolve user I know what tool I'd reach for even if using a multi GB, Hollywood grade, non linear editor, compositor and color grader for trimming a short video clip is about as ridiculously overpowered as using a sledge hammer to press a key (and I did exactly that just a few days ago).

Like I said, I'm most likely not "getting it", on multiple levels. Please educate me, why would I use Emacs for this or any of the page upon page of "strange" use cases you find if you search for "Emacs" here on HN. I know Emacs is a powerful editor but I can't for the life of me understand why I would use it to trim video clips.

uludag · 6 days ago

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.

uludag commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki

mikewarot · 9 days ago

The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use.

Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)

The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.

Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.

All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.

Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)

uludag · 9 days ago

I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.

Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.

uludag commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki

uludag · 9 days ago

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work.

Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.

uludag commented on DoubleAgents: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Covert Malicious Tool Calls pub.aimind.so/doubleagent... · Posted by u/grumblemumble

uludag · 13 days ago

I wonder if it would be feasible for an entity to eject certain nonsense into the internet to such an extend that, at least for certain cases degrades the performance or injects certain vulnerabilities during pre-training.

Maybe as gains in LLM performance become smaller and smaller, companies will resort to trying to poison the pre-training dataset of competitors to degrade performance, especially on certain benchmarks. This would be a pretty fascinating arms race to observe.

uludag commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez

uludag · 15 days ago

I've came to a very similar conclusion. Productivity SaaS apps feel exciting to get started but eventually I've abandoned them all. I feel that many others have similar experiences but I'm not exactly sure why. Like the author, I too ended up with a plain text format (org-mode) and I've happily been on it for 7 years. Some questions that came to mind:

- Is it the artificial hype and promises around certain productivity apps (e.g. youtube notion promoters) that ultimately leave one disappointed?

- Does the productization of these apps make the companies feel compelled to change too much, thus alienating users? Is this why Apple notes has such a following, since it's not a monetized product of apple?

- Is the allure of plain text the fact that it doesn't change, analogous to something written on paper?

uludag commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez

hiq · 15 days ago

Can you expand on which org-mode features you like for this use case?

On the top of my head, among the useful features I'm familiar with, you can:

* nest tasks

* set deadlines

* set priorities

* filter ~arbitrarily

* have as much content as you want per item (in comparison with todotxt with is one line per item), including non-text like images

* have statuses other than todo and done (like waiting)

What else do you use that makes you particularly like this setup?

Org-mode is this thing I've been trying to use for a while, but it never sticks because I'm just too used to vim and plain text. Once in a while I look for a killer use-case, hoping it'd make me stick to it, to no avail so far.

uludag · 15 days ago

I too have used org-mode for a while and here are some additional features which may pique your interest:

- agenda views let me create custom pages of tasks with certain states or tags - a robust time tracking system. I use this for my freelancing work - very nice text tables that are programmable - a very customizable capturing system - a huge ecosystem of plugins - a programmable API: I'm currently working on an importer for the DayOne app as well as a fitness tracking package - PDF export with LaTeX. I can use this for printing out my weekly plan for example - in addition to deadlines, a scheduled property for when you intend to start a task - extensive linking system (https://orgmode.org/guide/Hyperlinks.html#External-Links-1) I often have todos linking to places in code

I think that org-mode could use better learning resources. There's pretty much the manual and blog posts by experienced users, neither are especially aimed towards new users.

uludag commented on Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs github.com/manzaltu/claud... · Posted by u/kgwgk

cml123 · 20 days ago

Lately I've been seeing a lot of derision from the Emacs community of the consideration for integrating these kinds of tools with Emacs, but I truly think that's much more hurtful than helpful. Although the current development and usage of AI in software development may not closely resemble the techniques used at the time, it seems to me that Emacs' history is inextricably linked to the MIT AI Lab. It feels weird then that people today would shun the inclusion of AI integration into a tool that was produced from such a working group.

uludag · 20 days ago

The beauty of Emacs though is that it puts the user in full control. There is nothing in the world stopping anyone from modifying anything in Emacs (at least on the Elisp layer), hence packages like this.

VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of vscode forks. Even if you had the most motivated, excited group of people wanting to work on the latest and greatest LLM interactions with VS code, they would most likely be forced to fork. On the other hand, it just takes one motivated Elisp dev to implement whatever they want and make any external package they want integrate with it.

Also, I think the derision from the Emacs community may be a bit overblown. I'm constantly seeing AI/LLM related plugins appearing for Emacs and they tend to get decent traction (e.g. https://github.com/karthink/gptel).

[1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

uludag commented on I'm Archiving Picocrypt github.com/Picocrypt/Pico... · Posted by u/jaden

uludag · 20 days ago

I've felt similar to the author, a sort of despair that the only point of writing software now is to prop up the valuation of AI companies, that quality no longer matters, etc.

Then I realized that nothings stopping me from writing software how I want and feel is best. I've stopped using LLMs completely and couldn't be happier. I'm not even struggling at work or feeling like I'm behind. I work on a number of personal projects too, all without LLMs, and I couldn't feel better.

uludag commented on AI promised efficiency. Instead, it's making us work harder afterburnout.co/p/ai-prom... · Posted by u/mooreds

Bukhmanizer · 22 days ago

I think a lot of people would disagree with this article on HN, but I’ve yet to see too many people say it’s made their coworkers more productive. That is, do people feel like they’re getting better, more reviewable PRs?

Personally, I’ve been seeing the number of changes for a PR starting to reach into the mid-hundreds now. And fundamentally the developers who make them don’t understand how they work. They often think they do, but then I’ll ask them something about the design and they’ll reply: “IDK Claude did that.”

By no means am I down on AI, but I think proper procedures need to be put into place unless we want a giant bomb in our code base.

uludag · 22 days ago

I've been at the same company both before and after the AI revolution. I've felt something similar. People seem to be more detached, more aloof in their work. I feel like we're discussing our code less and are less able to have coherent big-picture plans concerning the code at-large.