Hacker News: jr_isidore

New comment by jr_isidore in "The Emacsification of Software"

jr_isidore — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:49:18 +0000

Tarver's piece was new to me, and fun, and spot on. Yes, LLMs bring the emacs cruft heap to the masses. A throwaway culture on disk is a lot less worrisome than one on soil.

New comment by jr_isidore in "The Emacsification of Software"

jr_isidore — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:19:05 +0000

Are we reading the same article? OP is saying LLMs let normies tweak their personal workflows in the same way we emacs nerds had been doing for decades. Contrary to the old saw about it being an OS, Emacs is really just a shell but with lisp as its command language instead of unwieldy bash. Once Claude magicked an English to bash translator, raw shell has caught up to emacs in its ease of use.

New comment by jr_isidore in "The Emacsification of Software"

jr_isidore — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:04:30 +0000

OP is trying to say Home Depot let normies do their own small repairs, and you're protesting saying "No, no, that's not how we pros do it."

New comment by jr_isidore in "The Emacsification of Software"

jr_isidore — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:53:32 +0000

Well taken, but for MANY years, I copied and pasted elisp snippets off stackoverflow without understanding any of it. And to this day, there as many xkcd-style "space heaters" as there are emacs users. OP's point stands that LLMs make possible a new generation of quicker, dirtier hacks destined for the cruft heap.

New comment by jr_isidore in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

jr_isidore — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:34:55 +0000

Yes, I agree. Amazing twist of fate.