cenazoic

May I have an invite, if anyone has one to spare?

This is a bachelor's thesis from University of Uppsala submitted in March 2026.

I was having trouble accessing the Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet site (linked in headline) directly, so uploaded it here (link expires in 3 days):

https://temp.sh/CVzcQ/emacs-arch-thesis.pdf

The patch author, while claiming LLM discussions are (implied "hidden") in "internal mailing lists", didn't link to the "constructive and collaborative" conversation that indeed occurred (publicly). That seems a sort of dishonesty itself.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-06/msg00...

In a different thread about a different LLM-generated package, here's RMS himself:

> • As a disclaimer it was generated with LLM. I think ELPA has a > • prudent policy to not allow this for now until there is legal > • clarify, but does this apply to nonGNU-ELPA also?

RMS: It does apply, for the time being. It is not a final decision, it is tentative.

(link: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-05/msg00...)

GNU (and/or the Emacs project in particular) does not seem to be acting in ludditic or reactionary ways, but thoughtful ones.

> Games are doomed by femininity. Across media, genres marketed toward women are deemed lesser than their masculine counterparts: romance novels are trashy, chick flicks are shallow, and pop idols are embarrassing.

I can’t find it now, but I recently read a history of CYOA books. There was a discussion about the fact that although they feature a nameless, race-less, gender-less, age-less, etc, “YOU”, the covers almost universally depict a male protagonist.

This was because market research (in the 1970s, IIRC) showed that while girls will buy books with boys on the cover, boys wouldn’t buy books with girls on the cover.

I wonder how true that remains.

Thank you, looks great!

Have you seen Behind the Parentheses, by Mark Jones Lorenzo? It goes into quite a lot of technical details about how things like eval/apply were implemented for example, and the larger academic and business contexts eg FORTRAN and earlier language development.

I’m a Lisp newbie (and mostly here for the Emacs Lisp) so a fair amount was beyond me, but I still found it quite readable and interesting.

That Gruenberger piece is a fantastic read and still applicable today.

“Overall, 76% of female murders and 56% of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim.”

https://bjs.ojp.gov/female-murder-victims-and-victim-offende...

Archive: https://archive.is/gIquW

Just a morning note (over coffee) of appreciation for the line “… when I stumble through the saloon doors…” and the whole macguffin, really.

See also: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-2/tb140gerrard-holon.pdf for some background.

Title slightly edited for length.

It really is! We were there one afternoon when a high school choral group was practicing (the museum does a lot of outreach through the Stax Music Academy) and visitors were encouraged to sing along. It was truly magical.

If you’re lucky, you can also catch the Rev. Al Green leading his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church service.

The font is IM Fell English:

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English

There’s a copy online at HathiTrust:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b258249&seq=9

I don’t know, I read it as more of a meditation on ‘writing out of range’, both literally as per language constructs, as you mentioned, and metaphorically, as in ‘we’re in the wild blue yonder of weird nowhere now.’

That said, I’m a newbie to Emacs, and I belatedly (after posting the link here) remembered reading something about ‘the point’ in Emacs:

“By default, the cursor in the selected window is drawn as a solid block and appears to be on a character, but you should think of point as between two characters; it is situated before the character under the cursor. ”[^1]

Which made me think maybe things are even weirder than the author thinks. :)

[^1](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Po...)

Yes! I’m a 50+ woman diagnosed as a teenager, and daily magnesium changed my life. I rarely get a migraine these days, and I’m glad to hear it’s effective for others.

I think this speaks to a common misunderstanding of ‘literary’ fiction vs. ‘genre’ fiction - the former is typically more character- or idea-driven, while the latter is story/plot driven.

I’m not making the argument that one is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other; rather that their goals are different.

I do tend to agree with the idea that you shouldn’t be ‘afraid to kill your darlings’ (cite needed). Flannery O’Connor was once asked whether she thought that MFA programs killed too many aspiring authors. Her reply was that she thought they didn’t kill enough of them.