ashton314

Overruled!

I love how Jeordi just goes with it and tries to be play his mandolin

I commend you to the stars

Das denke ich auch.

I found it strange (merkwürdig) that they didn’t mention this in the article.

I'm just excited the Apple logo glows again

If you're feeling curious at trying Emacs out for the first time (or just want to see what's new in the past decade or so), may I humbly suggest you take a look at my starter config: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

When I first started using Emacs, my dad gave me his config. (Yes, I actually experienced https://xkcd.com/297/ irl.) A few years ago a friend of mine asked for some help getting a simpler Emacs setup—they wanted to move off of Doom Emacs. I made Bedrock as a bare-bones starting point that focuses on built-in customization and understandability. Even if you're comfortable in your own setup, you might find something useful in the files there. :)

Peewee Pebblestone

I really dislike how narrow it is. Fortunately that is customizable! This is my version that I’ve modeled off of Input Mono: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/iosevka-output

Also: is this actually a choreography? Or are you doing runtime monitoring to ensure deadlock freedom?

If one of the humans involved shows up here, I have a few questions:

How are you doing endpoint projection?

What is your KoC strategy?

What existing research systems (Choral, MultiChor, Chorex, etc.) did you take as inspiration?

What benefits does your system have over ChorRus?

Nice to see some Butterick fonts employed on a blog. ;) Mine’s the same, but I went with Valkyrie and Hermes Maia.

Cost can be much greater than either foldl or foldr

I am really sorry—it seems that you’ve only had teachers you feel would be better replaced with AI. That’s unfortunate. I consider myself lucky, and I can only think of one or two duds who little better than screen readers for their slides. I think the average experience of students across junior, high school, and college is a mixed bag, but almost all have at least one or two teachers who care. You seem to be unlucky, and I’m sorry.

> If you ask a professor what qualifies them do they say their research or their pedagogical skills?

The majority will say “both”, unless they’re teaching faculty in which case they’ll say pedagogy. Source: I spend a lot of time around professors.

I don’t know any students personally who think they’d be better off with an AI professor. I know a lot of current college students.

> I’ve probably thought about this much longer than you have.

All I can say is that that is a strange argument to attempt.

What an incredibly cynical take. Might as well have people date AI boyfriends and be governed by AI politicians.

> Students can and will learn better with ai “professors” than they do now.

No, that’s not true. You have no evidence to suggest that.

> The problem is that higher education is not about learning ultimately.

It is, actually, and many institutions do a good job of this. Some don’t, but they’re not all just degree mills.

This is absolutely not the case in my experience. I am building a very large embedded domain specific language for describing distributed systems. It looks like a small subset of Elixir, but with object-oriented syntax in a lot of places. (It’s called a choreography; there exist many other choreographic programming languages.)

Even though this programming language is absolutely nowhere in any large language model’s training set, they have so far done extremely well at extrapolating from the small set of examples I’ve given it when I need an agent to generate some tests or whatever for me.

Also of interest: Herbie analyzes your math expressions and helps you figure out where FP error accumulates. https://herbie.uwplse.org/demo/

We use floats as a trade-off between speed and accuracy. IEEE 754 is a very reasonable trade-off for a wide range of applications, but if you can figure out where you need to trade speed to get more accuracy with e.g. one of the methods mentioned here, Herbie's gotcha covered.

I remember seeing some research about switching between formats, but I don't have anything to cite right now.

Step one: open up the LLM

Step two: close the LLM

Step three: pick up a pen and write

Writing with LLMs is a great way to make yourself stupid: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2026-08-07-ai-writing-stupid/

I'm glad the OP acknowledges that you have to have to do the writing yourself—though they say this more as a means to avoid getting pegged as having used an LLM, whereas I see the problem as being cognitive surrender.

I am a deep enjoyer of Typst. I love it and I use it absolutely everywhere that I can.

CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.

Ah, fellow Butterick fonts enjoyer—Butterick's fonts have spoiled me: compared to pretty much every other professional font I've seen, they're the cheapest and most conveniently licensed fonts out there.

Someone has already mentioned Matthew Butterick's fonts and his online "book" Practical Typography [1]—absolutely fantastic material there.

Some concrete suggestions from me:

- Fira Sans [2] is a lovely, legible sans-serif font that's free and incredibly easy-to-read. This would make a fine body font.

- Source Sans [3] is another good sans-serif that might be closer to your current font. It's about as readable as Fira, but it's a little less warm imo.

- Make your line length a little narrower and your line spacing (i.e. leading) just a hair wider—that will do wonders for readability.

Definitely check out Practical Typography for more tips from a real professional.

Thanks for the blog post!

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/

[2]: https://carrois.com/fira/

[3]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans

Exhaustion very understandable. Elpaca is nice and stable now, and the integration with use-package is fabulous.

But if the built-in is working for you, no need to change it. Now that use-package supports the :vc keyword, there’s imo much less of a compelling reason to use Elpaca and the like.

Hey! I'm doing great, thanks. Kimball's class was a lot of fun. Nice you "see" you again. (Can't tell who you are by your username—feel free to email me at the address on my blog if you want.)

:) Yay!

No shade on wgrep, mind you—I used that for a long time and it's been one of my favorite tools. But now I just… don't need it. It's so nice being able to do consult-ripgrep -> export results to a buffer -> change to edit mode -> search-and-replace project-wide.

I love Elpaca! The built-in package management story has gotten so much better in the past 10 years, but Elpaca is so, so good. My personal config is kinda the antithesis of Bedrock—it's bloated, slow, and uses over 100 packages. Elpaca handles installing/updating/managing those like a charm, however.

I kept Elpaca out of Bedrock because I wanted a strictly built-ins-first experience, but if anyone asks what I use when they outgrow package.el, Elpaca is my first and only recommendation.

Here’s a link to the repo directly: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

I hope Bedrock is useful to some people. :)

Julia is my go-to when I need a fast language that I can reason about in a functional way. The type system is fine, the pattern matching is pretty darn good, the metaprogramming story could be significantly better but it’s not bad and boy howdy it’s fast. So stinking fast.

The article is about “end” as in “purpose” not as in “conclusion”.

Glyphs is like the only game in town for font editing. I’m an Omnigraffle enjoyer too.

What are you trying to do to halt that atrophy, then?