There was a "community" about a decade or two ago. On Freenode IRC, there were regulars who hung around in #emacs and it was quite nice. There were no corporate sponsors or random startups trying to hire from there so it was genuinely just a bunch of people who enjoyed using Emacs and were chatting about it. It's a part of the reason I got really hooked into it. I still use Org heavily for meeting minutes etc.

Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

I somehow fell out of the habit but I really need to get back to it.

https://github.com/nibrahim/glocker

As an example, the kid who can solve Math problems has less of an edge over AI than the kid who automatically becomes the captain of the neighbourhood football team but older human beings often assume that the former is smarter.

Many of the fields that were traditionally considered for "smart" people (STEM etc.) are the ones that are being really hammered by AI. Whereas, things which people considered lightweight often involving social relationships and interpersonal skills are still beyond the scope of AI (much of it even theoretically beyond the scope although perhaps robots might have an effect there).

There used to be a sysad T-shirt from the BOFH days "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script" which pushed the idea that whatever could be replaced by a computer was something trivial. Now we find that the things which we thought were only for "smart people" are the very things being replaced by computer programs which is telling. Perhaps what we considered tough and smart really wasn't.

I wrote a decoder for the CPS file format they use for sprites and it worked file for all images except one. It rendered half the image properly and then scrambled the rest. I could see that the sprite information was there but there was some offset problem. I had claude dig into it in detail along and gave it the ScummVM source for reference. I also gave it Ghidra so that it could debug the actual EOB.EXE file but nothing we tried got it to render properly. Even SSI's own code which got from a modding wiki failed to render this image. My final conclusion was that it was a half done asset that somehow found its way into the asset archive and is never used in the game but that's a flaky conclusion given that its name is referenced in the EXE.

I've been having a lot of fun upscaling the sprites used for the cutscenes and remixing the music using AI. It's a game I played a lot as a kid so being able to tinker with it at a low level is a nice distraction.

It's purely a "fun" side project without deadlines or anything so I get to do what I want with it without any hassles about "being productive".

My own last project before I left was to ingest records from crawl dumps from the defunct cuil.com website. About 200 TB of stuff that brought back 60 billion URLs.

The nature of the internet has changed and it's become an ephemeral place for many people where you just through things in and others mine it as "data".