You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.
As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.
I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.
But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim.
Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.
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.
Ironically, some of the AI 'trustism'[1] is very much driven by anxiety the fear of being left behind if one does not jump on the train.
I agree that it shifts the notion of what is expertise, but for the worst. It's very hard to tell who is actually an expert, and who is mimicking the expert.
The consequences vary from annoyance to downright catastrophe.
e.g.: a confidently wrong medical advice
On the other side, sometimes the expertise is not a requirement for the user: "If it works and does what it says on the box, that's all I care".
I like the fact that you use the word "some", awesome to see some nuance. It's a tricky situation.
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[1] I am being an idiot on purpose, I think the word skepticism was completely derailed from its origin and meaning.
A minimum amount of skepticism is very healthy, especially for software engineering.
Most software engineers, and science-based professions for that matter, are skeptics at heart. And it's a good thing.
Skepticism is the base of science; science thrived when we admitted ignorance and became skeptic towards our own knowledge.
Hm, Andros I do have my doubts - I know that you are a proponent of generative AI. We had a discussion over your outspoken opposition to https://human-emacs.org/.
I also know that you are an excellent writer/thinker, even prior to the advent of generative AI.
I'm in two minds here, and don't want to insinuate that you are outright lying, but I do believe your workflow relies on generative AI.
> NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.
If you do use generative AI, it feels hypocritical to use this licence while using a technology that essentially tries to circumvent the copyright issue by remixing, transforming and building upon the material it has ingested.
> This kind of comment loses a lot of its weight by being posted here on HN instead of sent privately. If this were really a good-faith question, a DM would have done it.
I'm sorry if it came across as a personal attack, it wasn't the intention.
It felt like the right place to comment. The article is public, the accusations are public, the licence is public and you made your position on generative AI public on the human-emacs project.
You expressed your position on the human-emacs publicly and we had a good discussion over it, in public. To me, this was on the same level.
I don't think that half of a conversation should be done via DM, while the other is made public.
> This is the real damage this kind of thing does. It breaks the quiet deal that used to exist between a writer and a reader: you put out content, and got at least some minimal credit for the work behind it. Now there's none of that left. No credit, no gratitude, not even the confidence that a human read it. That's exactly why there's less and less original content being written.
I agree, but you have to blame the right entity here. It's not the readers' fault that a deluge of AI generated content flooded the internet.
Generative AI broke that "quiet deal", not the readers. The readers are as much a victim as is the author who writes the content.
Generative AI came with a ton of negative side effects for the entire population. This is one of them.
Interestingly enough I read your article in elfeed, and came here for the comments as I was getting suspicious of the use of generative AI, which I refuse to read.
blog now disclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
I'm the author of Datastar and I find this response hilarious given you didn't reach out to me about correctness in public or private. Your content is full of incorrect statements. I even posted in the comments of the video to try to correct the FUD. You didn't do real effort and it shows
You'd see a lot more Emacs users (comparatively) in academic jobs than, let's say, web development.
As an anecdote, I worked for a network monitoring company, 90%+ of the devs were on vim. Later, I worked in a run-of-the-mill SaaS, 90%+ of the devs were on VSCode.
I'd think that (neo)vim is quite popular. Emacs, less so, that's true.
But according to the Lindy's effect, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode disappears before Emacs and Vim. Especially as heavy LLM users are opening their text editor less and less.
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