Handicap Go by Nagahara Yoshiaki helped me tremendously.
I started playing I believe in March of 2025. I had the very good luck that one of my high school best friends is a 4 dan EGF player, and was in the French team 20 years ago. We played constantly against each other with 9 stones handicap and him teaching me a lot.
But when I read that book, in a few weeks/months we went from 9 stones to only 3 stones by August 2025. and we have stayed at 3 stones since, playing very even games, with only a handful or couple of points differences. Only very recently did I win by 9.5 points. Which made me hope I had made new progress, but I had to resign in the very next game.
I loved the staging area in git. That was the biggest thing that held me back from adopting jj for a long time, thinking it was a huge step backwards.
It wasn’t. I was wrong.
The staging area is just a commit like any other, only due to git’s design it has to be special-cased everywhere. In jj it’s just a commit.
I do all my work on an unnamed commit on the tip of a branch. As I complete bits, I extract out cohesive sets of changes into new commits (split) or as patches of earlier commits (squash).
And even then, the "rare" qualifier is not needed here. What Amazon/LLM companies are doing is amoral. This is intellectual piracy (not in the "copyright infringement" sense) at the highest level. Stealing and centralizing the accumulation of human knowledge to eventually rob us all and put all power into the hands in the hands of a handful of people, who are not benevolent.
Athena/PTSD-girl being the only Trojan with a face doesn't dismiss that affirmation, only reinforces it. And she writes about her in another paragraph.
It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_.
*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations
>It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world.
I haven't read her version but I believe that's why I heard it criticised? That the culture war speeps into it.
In fact she keeps at it here "The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist."
The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it.
What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by powerful people with a lot of following.
The "she keeps at it" is weird considering this a review where commentary fully belongs and culture war thing was not started by Willson or even Nolan. They just made their things. Then other people made it into culture war. Then Willson responded to existing culture war claims in her review of the movie. Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? And that if others respond then it retroactively invalidate their previous work?
>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions?
No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does not deny and that i found mentioned in any praise of the translation.
One can't be claiming and praising progressive influences and then claim the detractors are imaginging them the next moment.
>What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war.
What she wrote is a response to the actual movie. We can assume it to be her opinions regardless.
And yes it does show a perspective that some would count as woke.
Things such as saying that filming in the western sahara is a normalisation of violence against the Sahrawi which 99% of viewers will not have heard of.
Saying that the perspective of the victims must be shown and incur horror in a movie portrarying war is not something that falls in line with those ancient retellings, it's her own progressive take regarding media in general.
The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.
I read Whitaker article. And I completely stand by what I said. He was offended over the world "slave" to be used, by using contemporary language and so on.
That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only. And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.
> The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.
By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women. I know, because I read old books. The need to not have them in stories is specific to just some patriarchal societies. The need to write them out of history and out of old books is also specific to certain patriarchal wanna be branches.
>That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only
I was referencing the text as a whole with more varied examples there including the bit about making the main character black.
>And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.
Honestly I think an movie on asian mythology or medieval china or japan with american demographic inserts would draw criticism as well. And there's a reason we don't see it in the woman king or the like (which twists extremely in other ways some may deem progressive or woke)
>By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women.
Yes they do. It's right there in the odessey.
What was written out of the movie for example? Most of the maidservants being killed on oddyseus's return because of their disloyalty because Nolan said it was misogynistic.
And in that bit about the backwards archaic values Emily points it out herself how to make it less 'backwards' nolan distorts the story without mending it in a sensible way.
Beyond that he condenses in a way that doesn't favour focusing on these individual women (and various other characters which she cares less about) in a way that Emily would like according to her sensibilities.
Same with not ommiting other bits so he can lay bare and focus on the victims of war rather makign them just opponents to the protagonist.
People increasingly do not understand that there can be nuanced criticism of things they liked.
It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.
But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.
"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.
For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.
Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more.
Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle with a little tool they won't find anywhere else.
I still leave a lot of escape hatches, but I try to design the internal tools in such way as to make the users fall into a pit of success.
Edit: also, error messages, error messages, error messages and auto suggestions for common errors
Edit 2: also the number of people only addressing the examples in the post rather than the spirit of the post is... disappointing.
Some time ago I made an abstraction "hey, most people in our company who use CloudFront don't care about all the implementation details, they just want some paths to be somewhat cached". I explained this idea to a coworker. It took a while, but he understood it. Two months later someone merged a PR that replaced my interface "I want this and this path cached" with a simple passthrough that exposes raw AWS interface. Same thing happened to S3 buckets where I noticed that most people just want "auto-delete files after X days either on or off".
I spent entire year trying to explain to my manager "most devs who create services want a simple deploy button". Instead, we tried to teach devs how our "infrastructure as a code" works so that they'd contribute. The effect was that only one guy engaged with us this way, and he always sent us AI-generated PRs, and every time he saw an error, he just copy-pasted it to ChatGPT without reading and then the answer back to me.
The project eventually shifted towards my original idea, but in an extremely painful way without any design at all. It's just a toolbox of completely random features glued together because one day manager says "no we don't need to support X" and two months later a Jira ticket "add support of X".
I think I have the same perspective. I see it as a flavor of progressive disclosure. Sane defaults and a way to customize if needed. Start with the 80% case and let people customize if they want to. It needs to be optional.
Especially with developer tools I think there's a hesitancy to be opinionated. If you don't know for sure an option is "always correct" it seems safer to ask the user. Developers can be very pedantic. "95% of people probably want it this way, but I should make people pick because that 5% has a valid point". But now you've made it worse for most users.
It's also so much more complicated to support customization, more than I think people realize. It's not just about bugs, every option makes polishing your UX much more difficult. Both because of the testing surface and also because more flexible abstractions are harder to design.
And before any major change, add a `--v2` for early adopters and `--v1` as default. Nobody should notice anything on `--v1`, any regression must be fixed imediately. Flip `--v2` as default, leaving `--v1` for the unforseen. Until you can finally get rid of them.
I think configurability depends on how important your tool is to the core job function or role being performed, where it becomes very valuable for helping them directly perform the tasks they and their employer value, vs how much it allows you make problems they don’t value as much get out of the way of the ones they do.
For example, I am a HUGE fan of the way Gusto handles payroll and all the different taxes and form filing for me, because I basically do not even have to think about the problem or fiddle with it at all. But to someone whose job is doing payroll/accounting/taxes or working within giant enterprise HR/legal/finance departments that does more harm than good, because it’s something they have to fight (or less charitably it makes their job too simple).
The other big problem is who is actually making the decision to pay or spend money on a thing, and whether it serves more of a defensive (eg auditability, security, constraints against undesirable behavior) or creative purpose. The creative stuff is sexier but hard to quantify, and end-users won’t actually be willing to pay that much for it relative to how much it helps them or how critical it is to their role.
Good read, and I think a sort of living mindset, or “process, not product”, though seems to be follow-on/reaction to Perl’s TMTOWTDI (Tim Toadie)[0], and Python’s response(“There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it”)[1].
it really depends on the framing, some work, especially fun work that develops skills is more valuable than people realize.
From an org perspective the goal is to create the highest curve of performance over the lifetime engagement of the employee or from the employee perspective their career.
And a lot of that depends on teh relationship of the people involved. From my perspective its a net negative when if my movers worked out the day before, their muscles will be sore and they'll do a worse or slower job. From the moving companies perspective its good, they'll be stronger for more jobs. Unless they quit or are fired that day, in which case we're back to bad.
The real evaluation isn't the macro vs the sublime edit.
its does the thought process of making them macro improve them in other things, and what were they doing before that. In my experience no one is going use the time they spent writing a macro or a learning vim to do real meaningful work, they're doing that because they're bored or burned out and want to think about something else they find fun at the time.
your problem isn't your employees choose to write random scripts, its that they dont have a sense of urgency or care about their current task.
Some work is also less valuable than people - especially hackers - realise.
Hackers have an addiction to tractable problems that require effort and some skill, but have a well-defined solution.
They don't require true originality or cleverness. Barrelling through them with adequate but not outstanding skills is more than enough.
Hacker systems like Linux, Vim, and Emacs, offer exactly this. You can tinker with them to solve consecutive microproblems in a satisfying way. Likewise other standard projects like working with vintage hardware or repurposing a consumer product to do something interesting.
This kind of work generates dopamine, where spending four days trying to track down an incredibly subtle bug in a giant stack owned by a few tens of people generates frustration.
So it's not that employees don't care, it's because some work really is hard and frustrating, and solving tractable problems is far easier and more satisfying.
But is it productive? Even educationally? Not necessarily.
vi and emacs were designed by legendary computer scientists at two poles of the keystroke latency gradient. Bill Joy was on a model from an apartment in Berkeley, RMS was codifying the collected wisdom of a whole pool of elite typists on TECO and was doing so on the kind of connections at the MIT AI lab. Both of them were more or less stuck with QWERTY.
A keyboard interaction paradigm isn't a given chip or a driver for one. It is closer to UTF-8 than to Win 32. CUA is the Salesforce of such.
Ginger Bill, like many, is asserting that just because he's never encountered a bottleneck, there isn't one.
I'm not sure if that's arrogance or self-doubt puffing it's chest, but it ain't big dick energy.
RMS may be legendary but he's no John Carmack or whomever else. I use emacs every day, and nobody who does the same can honestly say the foundations are good. The performance is atrocious. The UI locks up when you make network calls because the whole thing is single threaded. The whole thing is a mess of spaghetti code and there are multiple instances of core developers like Eli Zarerski admitting on emacs-devel that they don't know how <internal core system> works.
RMS is a visionary but as an actual software developer he's pretty mid.
You’re judging RMS skills based on the current performance of a tool he created 40 years ago using the tools available at the time. That’s wild. You complain about emacs being single threaded but computers in the 80s had a single core. Software at that time was always single threaded. By the time multiple cores became available, emacs wasn’t RMS’s personal project anymore and with lots of users it couldn’t just replace the core to make it multithreaded.
Tell me what Carmack has written that’s still widely used but did not start with the same “problems” as emacs.
Emacs is just old. Its foundations (as in the general design) are truly fantastic. I still don't understand how the heck not a single other editor over so many years has even considered replicating ideas like indirect buffers. That alone is a truly brilliant idea, and there are so many more.
Performance is atrocious today. At some point, a couple of decades ago, it might have been considered superb, but some may still remember "8 megabytes and constantly swapping". Emacs can be slow, yet its keyboard latency is still better compared to some other, more modern tools.
I'm not disagreeing with you, Emacs can be so damn annoying, and yet paradoxically remain enormously useful. Sadly (or otherwise), there's still no meaningful alternative to it, nothing even comes close. Lem has a promising story, but I remain skeptical. I think Emacs gets core C improvements sooner than Lem reaches meaningful, practical parity, although I might be wildly wrong in my prediction simply because I don't understand the scale of entanglement of the C-written core of Emacs, yet surely it's probably easier than porting the gigantic body of Elisp in existence to work in Lem.
I can't really comment on RMS' software developer skills - I have never directly reviewed his code. Perhaps, in modern times he'd be considered a "no hire", because being a software developer today requires a little bit more than just being a brilliant code writer.
> Do you have to use it for work? Do you just consider other editors to be even worse, so Emacs is the best of a bad bunch?
Not who you’re asking but:
- I have a very long legacy of both muscle memory and “just right” coziness in my Emacs environment, that has followed me around from machine to machine since about 2003.
- I have flip-flopped between GUI Emacs and terminal Emacs probably a dozen times, with my most recent flop being due to Codex and Claude Code, which I run side-by-side with Emacs in a split pane tmux window.
- Yes, best of a bad bunch. I am also reasonably comfortable in Vi(m) but dislike how it handles having many open files, which is unfortunately necessary for most of the work I do.
- I have used VSCode off and on over the years as well, most recently with Gemini, but found the GUI experience quite frustrating and the lack of a CLI option ended up being a show stopper (I sometimes need to write code over SSH and the way VSCode handles remote editing is highly unpalatable to me)
Edit: one other nice perk that I discovered the other day: Claude is quite good at elisp. I was having a really weird issue that seemed like it sat at the intersection of a few packages interacting funny. Put Claude on the problem, got a very detailed explanation of how three packages had evolved and how one of them hadn’t caught up with subtle changes the other two had done. Put together a patch and suggested I make a PR to upstream. I haven’t fully reviewed the patch but the bug seems fixed properly.
Emacs is not an editor. It's a Lisp-driven text orchestrator with a built-in editor. You can type your text in whatever IDE and still control everything through Emacs.
> try to design the internal tools in such way as to make the users fall into a pit of success.
Yes. I couldn't agree more. The tools have to make it quick and easy for the users to succeed - as invisible as possible, and transparent to what a user wants to achieve.
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