I'm the same.

In all honesty, when you start up emacs for the first time with a blank config, it looks terrible. But then you start building it up with plugins and adding code to support your own quirky workflows and slowly it becomes too powerful in your life to ignore. I have not been able to drop it for 13 straight years. With AI taking over the development experience, emacs and neovim have only become even better, because now you can get AI to bake your custom workflows into the config for you.

Emacs/neovim should be the gold standard for all workflow tools.

I'm with you on purpose-built disposable tools, but who wants to read a disposable book, or watch a disposable movie?

Setting aside the fact that good content is more enjoyable than bad content, experiences are meant to be shared. Humans are a social species, and a very large part of media consumption goes beyond the actual consumption and into sharing that experience with other people. People build communities around the media they like, and even integrate their favorites as part of their identity, wearing branded clothes or cosplay, decorating their rooms with merch, setting wallpapers, and so many other ways to signal what they enjoy to others. "Content creation for one" rather misses how humans work. Heck, not only media but even tools are subject to this -- people legitimately make emacs or vi part of their personality.

> The entire economic model of content creation and distribution is going to explode in the next 3 or 4 years

I think this is also inherently self-contradictory. What's the point of distributing content made for one? This gets into the same fallacy that people engage in w.r.t. "applications for one" displacing software developers. Yes, LLMs can pump out buggy software that suits one person's needs, and it doesn't need to be reliable enough to deploy at scale. It serves real utility here, because there was a gap between "the value of such software" and "what software developers are willing to work for", which meant that this software wasn't being created because there wasn't economic value in it. But then, how does one suppose software that has no economic value is going to replace all the professional software developers who were being paid to produce software that has economic value? LLMs filled a gap software developers weren't being paid to do, but given that they were not paid to do it, their jobs are not contingent on the existence of this niche. It simply doesn't follow that being able to produce content with zero economic value, whether that's applications or content for one, will cause an 'explosion' in the existing economic models.

Org natively supports embedded LaTeX, so not sure why this combo would be unholy. You just write Org-formatted markup, reach for LaTeX when you need it, and export it via org-export-dispatch. It also just does what you'd expect if you org-publish to HTML (if you setup a publish project). I pretty much never write anything in plain .tex files anymore as a result of how convenient this is, and have long since forgotten a lot of LaTeX syntax for things Org covers (which is usually all of the prose in a paper). The preview feature also saves a lot of cycles.

For sharing an init.el file across OSes, just have your OS-specific expressions conditionally check the system-type variable. For most setups, there should only be a few of these.

It’s exactly what I use LLMs for as a non-computer professional.

LLMs are great for problem exploration. Especially with the decline of Google I think we're at a point where it's less difficult to get an LLM to spit out something that'll accomplish a task sorta compared to actually finding that on the internet. But if the task is going to be repeated or modified then I think LLMs are at a permanent disadvantage to prebuilt software. Even if that prebuilt software is just someone else running an LLM and then passing the output through acceptance testing most people just don't want the headache of debugging weird edge cases and the novelty of "I'm a developer too!" wears off pretty quickly.

I'm excited that the weird grey-zone of excel sheets with business critical logic is likely going to disappear as LLMs slowly make the logic driving those too complex to be comprehended and managed and those get foisted off onto actual engineering resources. It'll be painful but probably for the best... but for actual tools people need to use day-to-day I think the assurance that the tool will work has a lot more value than the AI hype has comprehended.

The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes...

That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.

Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.

But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?

I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.

There is a real use case for a viewer if you have a lot of formulas. Yes you can read the raw latex but you go cross-eyed after a while. Maybe I am a softie though.

There's a reason we're not reading monospaced here, and a reason we do read monospaced code.

But the beauty of this moment is that if you want a really good SwiftUI monospaced Markdown reader, you can have it before dinner. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have an idiosyncratic personal preference, and it's now reasonable to expect software to shrink-wrap around that preference.

Turn of syntax highlighting for your code, convert it to COBOL, and pass it through a formatter that converts it to continuous word-wrapped text. Then we’ll talk again.

The post talks about this.

What were the three?

Emacs is an editor! God help you if you do something to my computer where when I click on a Markdown file something changes in my Emacs window setup.