🏡

to read (pdf)

generated: June 01, 2026 at 21:58:45

June 02, 2026
1. 🔗 Ampcode News The End of Public Threads rss
  
  We’ve removed public, internet-wide, discoverable thread sharing from Amp. You can still share threads within a workspace, or as Unlisted to share them with anyone by unguessable URL.
  
  Why? It’s getting too hard to review a thread to ensure it doesn’t contain any snippets of sensitive files. Each model release means the agents get better, and as they get better they read more files into context. Public discoverable thread sharing is just too risky now. This decision is proactive and isn’t prompted by any incident.
  
  Public discoverable threads have served their purpose well. Last year, Mitchell’s Ghostty threads and other publicly shared Amp threads helped spread the word that coding agents were actually good—and taught people how to use them.
  
  Public user profiles (like ampcode.com/@sqs) still show your activity but no longer show any threads. Any existing Public (Discoverable) threads are now Unlisted, so your blog posts with thread links won’t break.
June 01, 2026
1. 🔗 benji.dog IndieWeb Book Club: June 2026 - Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans rss
  I am hosting this month's IndieWeb Book Club and I have chosen Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans.
  
  It's been a few years since I have read this book and I remember enjoying learning not only about the people involved but also some of their specific motivations behind their ideas, companies, and projects. I don't think this book is meant to be in any way a fully comprehensive on all the people involved which is why I'd also love to hear about any other people or stories that could work alongside this book as further reading material.
  
  To participate in the IndieWeb Book Club, write about this book and post it on your site. You can then let me know about your post either through email, webmention, or any other way to contact me you prefer.
  
  I will add all entries below as they come in.
  
  Additional Book Info
2. 🔗 r/reverseengineering running custom firmware / patching the stock firmware of the soundcore headphones and running DOOM on it! rss
  
  submitted by /u/NNonick
  [link] [comments]
3. 🔗 @HexRaysSA@infosec.exchange By popular demand, we are extending our Spring Sale for our new on-demand mastodon
  
  By popular demand, we are extending our Spring Sale for our new on-demand starter training.
  
  This new training lets you go at your own pace and includes a handful of new practical exercises to sharpen your reversing skills.
  
  Get 20% off with code STR20.
  Offer expires 12 June 2026.
  
  https://hex-rays.com/training/ida-pro-starter-training
4. 🔗 modem-dev/hunk v0.14.1 release
  What's Changed
  - Fix fresh npm installs by pinning @pierre/diffs to the tested version, avoiding the broken @pierre/diffs@1.2.6 package by @benvinegar in #388
  - Add local performance benchmarks for startup, loading, rendering, highlighting, navigation, memory, and competitor comparisons by @benvinegar in #385
  - Preserve Git log colors in plain-text pager fallback by @benvinegar in #381
  - Improve large diff windowing lookup performance by @benvinegar in #387
  Full Changelog : v0.14.0...v0.14.1
5. 🔗 Hex-Rays Blog What's new in the IDA Domain API? rss
  
  What's new in the IDA Domain API?
  
  It has been a while since our first post about the IDA Domain API, our *open- source* Python API designed to make scripting in IDA simpler, more consistent, and more approachable.
6. 🔗 @binaryninja@infosec.exchange In Sidekick 26.0, Indexes give you a persistent work queue for reverse mastodon
  
  In Sidekick 26.0, Indexes give you a persistent work queue for reverse engineering! Create one from a BNQL query, then keep adding as you find more. Sidekick can also write to indexes during analysis. Later, use the index to filter down, pin what matters, and jump straight to each location. https://docs.sidekick.binary.ninja/guide/indexes.html
7. 🔗 sacha chua :: living an awesome life Emacs Carnival May 2026 wrap-up: "May I recommend..." rss
  [2026-06-01 Mon]: Thanks to everyone who participated! I've included the links below.
  
  It's May and I like puns, so I'm going to suggest "May I recommend…" as our Emacs Carnival theme this month, building on lively conversations about people's favourite packages on lobste.rs, Reddit, and Hacker News. Let's go beyond packages and talk workflows, tips, practices, perspectives… whatever you'd recommend!
  
  It was pretty nice having a wiki page that people could edit without needing to wait for me, so if you write about this topic, feel free to edit the wiki page and add your link. If you run into problems doing that, please e-mail me and I can add the link for you.
  
  People have already started sharing their recommendations:
  - May Emacs Carnival, Carlos Pajuelo
  - May I Recommend EWM, Dilip
  - What we talk about when we talk about recommending Emacs packages, David Dimagid
  - May I recommend… escaping the minibuffer, Alessio Vanni
  - May I recommend… vibemacsing?, by Giampaolo Guiducci
  - May I recommend… to only add items to your init files you understand and document?, by MartinStemplinger
  - May I recommend… Stop messing around and get work done., by Curtis McHale
  - May I recommend declaring bankruptcy from time to time, by Case Duckworth
  - May I recommend eww for Emacs's innovative UI?, by Omar Antolín Camarena
  - May I recommend… understanding Emacs's patterns, by Charlie Holland
  - May I recommend using your thumbs on Meanwhiling
  - May I recommend thinking of Emacs as your Fortress of Solitude, by Martin Sosic
  - Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: May I Recommend…
  - May I recommend… Treating Emacs as Emacs, by SouthFox
  - May I recommend: lesser known org-modes, by tusharhero
  - May I Recommend: org2blog, journaling & reading hacks, by Wenshan Ren
  - May I recommend… less stretching for your common commands, by Neil M
  (Still got ideas, just a bit late? Let me know and I can add it here as well as to Emacs News!)
  
  View Org source for this post
  
  You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
8. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Entire world: We need more GPUs. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang: rss
  
  | submitted by /u/Nunki08
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
9. 🔗 r/reverseengineering /r/ReverseEngineering's Weekly Questions Thread rss
  
  To reduce the amount of noise from questions, we have disabled self-posts in favor of a unified questions thread every week. Feel free to ask any question about reverse engineering here. If your question is about how to use a specific tool, or is specific to some particular target, you will have better luck on the Reverse Engineering StackExchange. See also /r/AskReverseEngineering.
  
  submitted by /u/AutoModerator
  [link] [comments]
10. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA NVIDIA announces Nemotron 3 Ultra rss
  
  | submitted by /u/themixtergames
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
11. 🔗 HexRaysSA/plugin-repository commits sync repo: +2 releases rss
```
sync repo: +2 releases

## New releases
- [haruspex](https://github.com/0xdea/haruspex): 0.9.2
- [rhabdomancer](https://github.com/0xdea/rhabdomancer): 0.9.2
```
12. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA MiniMax M3 - Coding & Agentic Frontier, 1M Context, Multimodal rss
  
  | submitted by /u/dryadofelysium
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
13. 🔗 jank blog Tracing rays with jank rss
  
  I've continued my optimization work through May and today I'll be reporting the status of the next benchmark: a little Clojure ray tracer. Before jumping into the details, I want to say thank you to my Github sponsors and to Clojurists Together for sponsoring me this whole year. Thank you!
May 31, 2026
1. 🔗 IDA Plugin Updates IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-31 rss
  IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-31
  
  New Releases:
  - haruspex v0.9.2
  - rhabdomancer v0.9.2
  Activity:
  - augur
    
    fb2ddf00: refactor: extract decompile_function and sanitize_name
    
    1d06e540: fix: refactor traverse_xrefs to make it iterative
    
    f923a726: chore: update dependencies
  - haruspex
    
    8d527e37: test: improve the output of last tests added
    
    3b63d7fa: feat: prepare for release
    
    9bf6edab: doc: commit CLAUDE.md
    
    df25e2bb: chore: update dependencies
    
    a86d9da1: test: add some integration tests
    
    d234101a: refactor: extract output_path_for_function and prepare_output_dir
  - ida-fusion-mcp
    
    c7ad6477: chore: fusion launch
    
    ee57d797: Initial commit
  - idawilli
    
    25f7cb9d: Update global_struct_dissector.py
  - rhabdomancer
    
    9be1c3ed: refactor: improve verbose loops
    
    bda4531f: feat: prepare for release
2. 🔗 sacha chua :: living an awesome life La semaine du 18 au 24 mai rss
  
  lundi 18
  
  Je me suis réveillée très tôt pour interroger ma sœur qui est très malade d'un cancer. Nous voulons enregistrer des vidéos pour ses jeunes filles et son mari. Sa fille aînée a commencé à l'interviewer, mais bien sûr, il y a des sujets dont elles ne peuvent peut-être pas parler pour le moment. Je l'ai appelée sur Facebook Messenger et j'ai utilisé OBS pour enregistrer l'appel. J'ai un flux de travail pour corriger et formater la transcription, et je suis ravie de l'utiliser pour ma famille.
  
  Il faisait très chaud. C'était notre première vague de chaleur intense cette année. J'ai emmené ma fille au parc Amos Waites pour jouer à la pataugeoire là-bas. Elle a vraiment aimé la robe-maillot que nous avons cousue. Elle adorait tourner dans le siège pivotant que notre parc à proximité n'a pas. Elle a tellement joué qu'elle s'est endormie sur le chemin du retour.
  
  Après le dîner, ma fille et moi sommes allées à un autre parc pour regarder des feux d'artifice pour la fête de la Reine. Il y avait beaucoup de gens, donc je pense que c'était un rassemblement habituel pour les jours de fête où les feux d'artifice sont autorisés.
  
  J'ai terminé la révision de la transcription de ma conversation avec Prot et Philip. Je pense que l'audio de Philip est parfois trop faible, mais je ne suis pas sûre de pouvoir normaliser juste ces segments. Si j'ai une conversation avec un autre locuteur, je peux enregistrer les flux audio séparément, mais dans une conversation entre trois locuteurs (Prot, Philip et moi), je ne peux pas complètement les séparer. En plus, je pense que je ne peux pas remplacer juste l'audio d'une vidéo en diffusion sur YouTube. Peut-être que je peux mettre en ligne une nouvelle vidéo et changer l'ancienne vidéo en une vidéo non répertoriée.
  
  À l'heure du coucher, ma fille et moi avons parlé de la neurodivergence, des mathématiques, et des facteurs humains comme les limitations de la boucle auditive comparée à la visualisation. J'adore lui parler de son cerveau.
  
  mardi 19
  
  J'ai essayé de virer de l'argent aux Philippines via Wise. C'était réussi.
  
  Je me suis entraînée aux virelangues. Oups, j'ai oublié de confirmer l'audio sur OBS, donc je ne peux pas l'analyser.
  
  J'ai réécrit deux transcriptions pour les entretiens de ma sœur.
  
  J'ai emmené ma fille au parc pour jouer avec ses amies. J'ai oublié les glaces à l'eau, donc je suis revenue à la maison pour les retrouver.
  
  Nous avons pratiqué les permutations et la division posée.
  
  mercredi 20
  
  J'ai réécrit encore des transcriptions pour les entretiens de mes nièces avec ma sœur. J'ai configuré un serveur dans notre réseau pour les héberger avec l'authentification basique.
  
  L'école avait un remplaçant aujourd'hui. Il a accidentellement éjecté tous les élèves de la salle de réunion virtuelle et tous ont dû attendre que l'enseignant corrige les permissions.
  
  J'ai ajouté un gousset aux shorts de bain de ma fille.
  
  J'ai emmené ma fille et son amie au parc pour jouer. Elles se sont amusées à me donner des décharges avec l'électricité statique. Après que les autres amies de ma fille sont arrivées, ma fille semblait un peu surstimulée. Elle est partie seule et elle était grincheuse pour le reste de la journée, pauvre chérie.
  
  jeudi 21
  
  J'ai discuté d'Emacs avec Raymond Zeitler sur une diffusion en direct. C'était la première fois que je lui parlais en vidéo même si nous correspondons depuis 18 ans via les commentaires sur mon blog.
  
  Le dentiste a fait deux plombages. Il a proposé un plan de traitement, mais c'est cher, donc je veux bien y réfléchir avant de procéder. Je pense que je veux gagner en confiance avec ce dentiste d'abord. On dirait que la restauration précoce est mieux que d'attendre pour les dents cariées selon les recherches, donc c'est bon, mais on dirait aussi que d'autres dentistes recommandent d'autres niveaux de traitement. J'aime les précautions COVID que ce dentiste prend. Il y a d'autres dentistes (un peu loin) qui prennent aussi ce niveau de précautions, mais ils disent probablement la même recommandation (c'est la même recherche), donc je ne cherche pas particulièrement d'autre conseil. Je ne veux pas passer pour une vache à lait, tu sais?
  
  vendredi 22
  
  Je me suis réveillée tôt pour une conversation sur la communauté Emacs et l'IA avec Matei Candea, un anthropologue. Il pense à faire une étude ethnographique, et je pense que c'est potentiellement intéressant.
  
  J'ai terminé la transcription de ma conversation avec Raymond Zeitler sur Emacs. J'ai remarqué que j'utilisais le mauvais horodatage pour publier les chapitres à partir de la transcription, donc j'ai corrigé l'erreur.
  
  Ma fille n'a pas voulu participer à l'école parce qu'il y a eu un remplaçant, donc elle a fait une pause.
  
  J'étais fatiguée, donc j'ai fait une sieste.
  
  J'ai emmené ma fille au cours de rattrapage de gymnastique. Elle a pris plaisir à apprendre la gymnastique aérienne. Après le cours, ma fille a voulu aller au parc asperge (St. James Park) parce qu'il y a un grand toboggan. Elle s'est entraînée à descendre le toboggan à de nombreuses reprises. Après avoir fait ça, nous avons acheté du sushi. Elle a essayé la tempura de crevettes et elle l'a aimée.
  
  samedi 23
  
  Il a beaucoup plu et c'était très venteux, donc nous sommes restées à la maison au lieu d'aller à la célébration de printemps à la ferme Riverdale.
  
  Ma fille et moi avons joué à Stardew Valley avec le mod Tileman Reworked, qui me demande d'acheter les tuiles auxquelles je veux accéder. J'aime parfois jouer à des jeux avec des limites comme Minecraft Skyblock parce que les limites focalisent l'attention et la progression est très différente. Ma fille préfère notre jeu précédent avec le mod Stardew Valley Expanded.
  
  Pour le dîner, nous avons mangé du sotanghon, qui est une soupe aux nouilles et au poulet. Nous avons aussi essayé le taiyaki congelé. C'était pratique et acceptable, mais bien sûr le taiyaki chez Pat Mart est meilleur.
  
  À l'heure du coucher, ma fille et moi avons discuté de la neurodivergence, de la double exceptionnalité, de l'apprentissage des élèves doués, de la différence entre la récupération d'information et de la synthèse. Nous avons aussi discuté de la faune, des maladies, des vaccins, et d'autres sujets.
  
  dimanche 24
  
  J'ai parlé avec mon mari du TDAH. Il pense que je suis juste préoccupée, et ce n'est pas grave. C'est bon. Je ne veux pas laisser ma vie être perturbée au point d'avoir des problèmes dans deux zones ou plus dans ma vie pour obtenir possiblement un diagnostic, ce qui ne m'aiderait probablement pas beaucoup plus. Quand même, je peux continuer d'explorer comment je peux m'adapter à mon cerveau et ma situation.
  
  Ma fille et moi avons préparé du lait au sucre brun et aux perles boba faites à la main.
  
  Mon mari, ma fille et moi sommes allés aux Stockyards pour faire des courses. Nous avons acheté une boîte de mangues, des perles boba, des haricots azuki, et d'autres aliments. Nous avons préparé une fournée de mochis aux haricots azuki.
  
  J'ai recherché quelques dessins pour les transcriptions. Je pense que je veux inclure les noms des interlocuteurs dans la marge gauche et les horodatages dans la marge droite. Je veux aussi réécrire la transcription pour supprimer les mots de remplissage.
  
  Pour le dîner, nous avons mangé du curry japonais.
  
  Je me suis couchée tard parce que sur Stardew, j'ai finalement accédé à la caisse chez Pierre pour acheter des graines dans la troisième année. La progression est très lente. Heureusement, le mod HibernationRedux me permet de sauter le temps pendant que j'attendais la croissance des arbres.
  
  View Org source for this post
  
  You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
3. 🔗 sacha chua :: living an awesome life Karthik's notes on Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena rss
  Here's a guest post from Karthik Chikmagalur in response to Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena.
  - 16:00 - Omar's embark-on-last-message is gold! I implemented it and have already used it a dozen times in an hour.
  - 17:00 - Omar mentions his tmp package for creating throwaway buffers. I use the scratch package for this. M-x scratch will open up a scratch buffer. If you had a region selected, that will be copied to the scratch buffer. By default, it will use the same major mode as the buffer you calling it from. Calling M-x scratch with a prefix arg will let you pick the major mode you want.
    
    I have some additional customizations to try to automagically pick a major mode based on what I have selected: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/utilities.el#L36
    
    Also related is the edit-indirect package, which I'm sure you're aware of. I think of it as scratch's dual: scratch is for when I want to edit something without regard to its provenance, edit-indirect is for editing the source (exactly like org-edit-special).
    
    I also try to automagically guess which major mode a piece of text should be edited in. edit-indirect edits something that looks like a lisp form in lisp-interaction-mode, even if the origin is (say) this email composition buffer: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/utilities.el#L67
  - 21:20 - You mention that you sometimes want to insert something into the minibuffer when you're in the minibuffer, but you end up inserting into the main buffer instead. Omar agreed that there is no easy fix for this.
    
    Omar, Daniel Mendler and I actually discussed this years ago and came up with a separate command to do this:
    
    (defun minibuffer-replace-input (&optional arg) "Replace original minibuffer input. When a recursive minibuffer is active, insert the current string into the original minibuffer input. With prefix ARG, replace it instead." (interactive "P") (when (and (minibufferp) (> (minibuffer-depth) 1)) (let* ((replacement (minibuffer-contents))) (unwind-protect (minibuffer-quit-recursive-edit) (run-at-time 0 nil (lambda (rep) (when arg (delete-minibuffer-contents)) (insert rep) (pulse-momentary-highlight-one-line)) replacement)))))
    
    I don't need it every day, but when I do it's very handy.
  - 29:40 - Omar mentions that he prefers to have lots of commands to mark specific text objects instead of hammering expand-region (or expreg-expand). There is a (now) old package called easy-kill which does this, allowing you to define marking commands for different objects at point (e.g. s for sexp, w for word, l for line, d for defun etc). It's easy to add support for more objects because I think it integrates with thing-at-point. The marking command provided by this package is actually called easy-mark.
    
    But easy-kill / easy-mark is actually the best of both marking styles, because you can use SPC to cycle between marking all the different text objects at point. I've further integrated this with expand-region so that at any point in the easy-kill mark process I can expand the region as well: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/setup-editing-extra.el#L250
  - 36:00 - Didn't know Omar is the reason vertico-grid-mode exists. That's fortunate, I use it all the time!
  - 44:00 - Omar's point about improving ffap to improve Embark's default action on files is great, really speaks to my sensibilities about composing features in Emacs in a way that provides multiplicative benefits.
  - 48:00 - NOPE! I use CANCELLED as a TODO kwd in Org, but the fact that it's not 4 letters long has bothered me forever. NOPE is much better.
  - 58:30 - Re: Omar's toggle map: this is something I think many users end up writing? Mine is a transient map: that grows extra columns in specific major-modes:
    
    But I appreciate that Omar uses a regular keymap instead of a visual menu, that's the Embark way. Transient menus are frustratingly non-composable with other Emacs features.
  - 1:00:00 - isearch-delete-wrong is actually built-into ISearch? Pressing C-g once should delete the non-matching part. It's possible he's customized C-g to quit Isearch right away.
  - 1:07:30 - I didn't understand Omar's practice of using embark-dwim to preview the result of any minibuffer command, like org-ql-find. Is this something you were able to reproduce?
    
    I've been using dot-mode for almost as long as Emacs, to the point where I've often made the mistake of assuming it was an included feature. It uses simple heuristics, but works surprisingly well at capturing your intent on what the "bounds of an edit" should be in Emacs.
    
    Omar mentioned that he stopped using multiple-cursors because the immediate feedback from all cursors inspired false confidence, as off-screen cursors could do something unexpected. I use a personal fork of a package called macrursors that's somewhere in between multiple-cursors and keyboard macros:
    
    https://github.com/corytertel/macrursors Fork: https://github.com/karthink/macrursors
    
    It's inspired by both multiple-cursors and meow's beacon-mode. It places cursors at the locations where the keyboard macro will be executed, but executes the full keyboard macro at each location at once, without immediate updates. This addresses the "false confidence" issue, but it does three other things that are very handy:
    
    You can bound the region inside which cursors should be placed. The scope can be the paragraph, like in Omar's example, but also any other text object (defun, line etc), and you can cycle between the scopes or expand it with expand-region.
    
    You can place cursors from most common actions, like at ISearch or Avy candidates (selectively or all at once), or at all text objects of a certain type inside the bounds.
    
    You can "narrow" the buffer to only the cursor locations, fitting and verifying more of them on screen. When the macro runs, the selective display in the buffer persists for a second so you can scan the results:
    
    https://share.karthinks.com/macrursors-isearch-hideshow-demo.mp4
    
    Steps:
    
    Start ISearch and search for cl-defmethod
    
    Create cursors from all ISearch matches
    
    Selectively display only the cursors
    
    Show more context around the cursors
    
    Make a change (involving a kmacro counter)
    
    Finish. (The selective display persists for a second.)
    
    Examine the changes.
    
    It uses undo amalgamation by default so you can undo all the cursor changes except the original one in one step. Of course, your changes are stored in the kmacro ring so you can now apply them as regular keyboard macros too.
    
    Most of these features are probably present in multiple-cursors at this point, although I'm not sure about bounding cursor ranges with macrursors-select. But this has replaced the usual keyboard macro workflow for me, and not many people are aware of macrursors so I thought I'd mention it.
  Thanks to Karthik for his notes! If you have any comments, please feel free to email him.
  
  View Org source for this post
  
  You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
4. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA (YT) PewDiePie released his harness/webui rss
  
  | At the very least it's interesting to have a non-programmer's take on this (though he did study mechanical engineering and did some web development iirc) https://pewdiepie-archdaemon.github.io/odysseus/ submitted by /u/Dany0
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
5. 🔗 MetaBrainz Picard 3 beta 4 fixes startup issues on macOS rss
  We have released Picard 3 beta 4. The recently released beta 3 did crash on macOS and when running the picard-plugins command line tool, both has been fixed in this. In addition beta 4 fixes display issues in the new log view.
  
  Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 3 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.
  
  While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.
  
  Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.
  
  What’s new?
  
  Bugfixes
  - PICARD-3300 - Fails to launch on macOS: "Expected an instance of Tagger"
  - PICARD-3301 - Visual glitch in log viewer for multi line output
  - PICARD-3304 - picard-plugins fails to launch with "Expected an instance of Tagger"
  Improvements
  - PICARD-3303 - Add syntax highlighting to Log Detail dialog
  Download
  
  We appreciate your interest in trying this new version. Use with care, backup your files and please use theMetaBrainz community forums and the ticket system to give feedback and report bugs.
  
  For Windows and macOS you can download the beta version from the Picard download page. Linux users can run from source or try the beta channel of the Picard snap package.
  
  Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub.
  
  For anyone wondering if they missed beta 2: We had the version updated for beta 2, but we never released it and instead had further changes that got now released as beta 3.
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  Code contributions by Laurent Monin and Philipp Wolfer. Translations were updated by Nebulain (Chinese (Simplified Han script)).
6. 🔗 r/reverseengineering ThinkPad firmware reverse-engineering toolchain: archived Lenovo BIOS → named SoC pads, EC analysis, CVE diffs, coreboot/OpenCore port scaffolding rss
  
  submitted by /u/Intelligent_Bet_4413
  [link] [comments]
7. 🔗 Register Spill Joy & Curiosity #88 rss
  It's been a fantastic week. The Amp team met in San Francisco and together we hung out in a beautiful house, drank coffee and diet coke, ate way too many snacks, and hacked on Amp.
  
  A single timezone, many overlapping hours, synchronous communication with even the option to tap someone on the shoulder. You could feel the clock rate of the team go up. Our #shipped channel was busy. What a team!
  
  But I didn't get a lot of reading in. And now the sun is up, the coffee's finished, and I'm going for a run.
  - Amp Neo is now Amp. It's out, for everyone. Generally available, fully released; the infrastructure scaled, the clients resilient. It's been tested on three cross Pacific flights already. Go and try it. Try the plugins, try the remote control. I'm very proud of this architecture and this team and that we made this work -- infinitely scalable agents, running everywhere. And it's only the start.
  - Fantastic little post by Patrick: Fast is better than slow. There's between ten and fifteen things I want to quote here, so go read the whole thing instead.
  - Then go and read the section about being fast on nat.org and and Patrick Collison's Fast page.
  - Benedict Evans on Predicting AI job exposure: "The counter-argument to all of this would be to say that, yes, well done, there are important exceptions, as there always are, but directionally and in aggregate, it is 'surely' correct to say that jobs that involve a lot of repetitive clerical work are most exposed, and this is how many jobs that is, and by how much. That sounds good, but you don't know if the exceptions are bigger than the rule. Suppose we'd looked at the internet in 1995 and said that this would destroy the value of physical distribution for media - this was 'directionally correct', but in practice that meant totally different things for record companies, newspapers, TV companies and movie studios. Are you trying to say something that has some predictive value, or just observing a truism? On average, we're all dead. Half of the jobs you've analysed might be entirely unaffected, and there might be other big pools of jobs to be transformed that you miss entirely. You don't know."
  - The new Ferrari Luce has been revealed. It's the Ferrari designed by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. I'm not a big car guy, so I don't have a strong opinion on whether it looks good or not, but after everybody else had a strong opinion I went through the list of Ferrari models and remembered that I don't like the look of most Ferraris.
  - "If you're the kind of person who is skeptical that AI coding is good for anything, then I doubt this post will persuade you. But if you're the kind of developer who uses agents to write multi-hundred-line PRs that you barely understand yourself, I'd invite you to slow down a bit and try this other, slower style of 'vibe coding.'"
  - I honestly don't know what to think of this, one for the Curiosity column: I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline.
  - This post by Jeff Geerling made me want to go buy a MacBook Neo. But I don't need one. Maybe my kids do?
  - "Have you ever read that Hacker News comment by the early FedEx employee about how they chose Memphis as the location for their headquarters?" "No. It's a Hacker News comment?" "Yes, it is, let me find that for you." Here it is.
  - This is art.
  - I've used the term "thundering herd" approximately three hundred times in the last few weeks and realized that I kinda assumed everyone knows what it is. So if you don't, click that link. Another piece of terminology that I assumed everyone knows: pets vs. cattle. But: why would they? So, if you don't know what someone could mean when they use the terms pets and cattle when talking about infrastructure: go and read this.
  - I really, really need to understand jj revsets more. I learned that jjui lets me hit shift-l and change the revset very easily, but I never know exactly what I'm looking for. So I'm linking to this excellent post here hoping that it'll get me to learn revsets. (Send me your favorite revset aliases, please.)
  - Simon Willison: I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit.
  - Lovely idea: apartment birds, heard recently. Built by Teddy.
  - Insignificant Bullets, Evil Poachers, and L.A. Culture. Always fun to read Herzog.
  - My Name Is David Chang, and I Hate Fancy Beer. If I could, I'd print this out and shove it into everyone's face whenever they ask me why I don't like IPAs. Actually, you know what, I just might and put it in my wallet, just in case. The whole point of beer is that it's simple. Four ingredients and that's it. My stance: if you think a normal beer is boring, you might just not like beer then. Go and do your own thing then, but don't call it beer. Why? Imagine you're really into bread. Say you love a really good sourdough bread. You not only love the taste, but also how it's made, how traditional it is, how simple. But then someone comes along and goes "sourdough bread? boring!" and puts fucking raisins in it and sells it as Craft Bread and when you decline the dumb raisin bread people ask you "wait, I thought you liked bread?"
  Did you also grab Bud Light in the supermarket and said "When in Rome…"? You should subscribe:
8. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Stepfun 3.7 Flash is very good rss
  
  | If you can fit Stepfun 3.7 Flash into RAM, try it! It's feeling close to GLM 5.1 quality in terms of aesthetics, and around 80% in terms of 3D world understanding. However since it's only 25% of the params of GLM 5.1, and it has built in vision, it's feeling like nothing else comes close for the RAM just now. This was the official Q4_X_S quant. Prompt: "Task: create a beautiful, relaxing flight simulator in a single html page" submitted by /u/-dysangel-
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
9. 🔗 @brandur The Minimum Viable Unit of Saleable Software rss
  Last week I wrote about leaving Stainless and my intention to work on building my side project River into a small, sustainable business. When I sent that letter, a few people asked about my thought process in trying to run a software company in the age of AI: "Are you crazy?! Anything you ship can be instantly displaced by an internal package built by an LLM!" Having become as much of an LLM convert as anyone at this point, I acknowledge that it's a very fair question. Indeed I might be crazy, but I'll talk through my thought process, and you can decide.
  
  Let me start with an anecdote. This morning I was browsing the internet's most wretched hive of engagement farmers and master solicitors of fake information and fictional anecdotes, LinkedIn. One user there posted about how his company had been spending $400/mo on Atlassian's Jira. He'd felt personally slighted by this outrageous bill, so he'd had his team build a new internal task tracker using Claude. Gone was Jira and the $400/mo spend, replaced by a custom package that could be tooled out in any way they needed via continued refinement by an LLM.
  
  We've been talking about buy vs. build in software circles for years, but last year the calculus changed. It used to be that build was a very expensive proposition, especially given the state of engineering salaries and scarcity of great people. One could expect huge upfront cost, schedule overruns, and an infinitely deep rabbit hole to slide down. The general wisdom had always been to build only inside your core domain and avoid getting sidetracked by peripheral projects. Once your company reached enormous size, and the cost of those distractions disappeared comfortably into its margins, then maybe they'd be worth doing.
  
  But LLMs changed all of that. Suddenly it was quite possible to produce substantial pieces of software by getting models to do the work.
  
  Cheap != zero
  
  While LLMs have made software considerably cheaper to build, they haven't brought it to zero. Good LLM-built systems still involve a feedback loop, where an operator has the model work for a while, makes adjustments based on results, asks for another pass, refines further, and so on, taking dozens of loops to get to a satisfactory result that's an optimal compromise between time spent and quality.
  
  And like before, maintenance will be an ongoing cost. Especially for more complex packages, there's always going to be a feature to add or bug to fix. LLMs will make those changes easier to make, but don't make them free, with the most expensive element being the part-time labor of the human in the equation who oversees and verifies results.
  
  Back to our $400/mo Atlassian anecdote above: after considering the initial build effort, including refinement passes, and the ongoing LLM-driven maintenance, does it pass the smell test, like at all? A task tracker's still a complex piece of software, and even with gratuitous use of LLMs, you'd expect to spend at a minimum a few weeks on the initial push (charitably). From there, its internal owner will switch to bug fixes and feature development.
  
  Let's try to come up with some rough numbers to quantify the situation. Let's say we have an engineer making $200k/year and working 40 hours a week (pretend for a second 9/9/6 was blessedly never conceived). That's $16.7k/mo, $3,850/week, or $96/hour:
```
salary = 200_000.0

{
  month: salary / 12,
  week:  salary / 52,
  hour:  salary / 52 / 40,
}.each { |k, v| puts "%-6s $%0.2f" % ["#{k}:", v] }



month: $16666.67
week:  $3846.15
hour:  $96.15
```
  To counterbalance the $400/mo that would've been paid to Atlassian, the engineer can spend no more than 4 hours a month (400 / 96) prompting features/fixes on their homegrown Jira clone, or looking after its database, or whatever, not including context switching overhead. Even with LLM help, that's completely unrealistic already, but let's be charitable and say they can get it down to 2 hours a month. It'd still take 37 months to break even after those initial 2 weeks of effort (number of months to make back Atlassian's $400/mo minus 2 hours/mo maintenance effort = 2 * 3846.15 / (400 - 2 * 96.15)).
  
  Don't get me wrong, I hate Jira just as much as anyone who's ever used it and have a nearly uncontrollable urge to want to rebuild it too, but the math here doesn't pencil out 1.
  
  The build threshold
  
  But does that always hold true? Let's take the other side for a second by examining a much higher-priced SaaS product. Gemini reports that the price of a fully loaded Salesforce seat is ~$500/mo. Say you need 50 seats, that's $25k/mo!
  
  For that price you could have 1.5x engineering resources (25 / 16.7) working on your clone full time. Once again, a CRM's a reasonably complex piece of software and a rebuild wouldn't be trivial, but no matter how you construe it, this is closer to a "build" decision, even for a smaller company. (And with Salesforce down 30% YTD, the markets seem to believe it too.)
  
  The zone of viability
  
  I'm contending (and/or hoping) that for a software package of arbitrary complexity, there's a zone of viability in which when priced within reason, it'll make sense to buy over build, even given the existence of the powerful LLMs that've become our daily companions:
  
  Software in the zone of viability satisfies two conditions:
  - There's sufficient novelty as to make a rebuild-by-LLM non-trivial, and with some ongoing maintenance burden.
  - Pricing is not so exorbitant as to strongly encourage rebuild-by-LLM.
  As long as continued pricing within reason keeps software within the zone of viability, the total paid in licensing is less than the cumulative expense of prompting its initial push and sustaining its continued existence.
  
  Somewhere along the zone of viability is the minimum viable unit of saleable software , below which a rebuild is the same or less effort compared to going through the purchasing process for a third party and not cost-effective over the long run.
  
  | Ongoing price | Ongoing spend | Engineer equivalent hours/mo | Equivalent engineering resources | Buy | Build
  ---|---|---|---|---|---|---
  Jira | $400/mo | $400/mo | 4.2 hours | 0.02 engineers | ✔ |
  Salesforce | $500/seat/mo | $25k/mo | 260 hours | 1.5 engineers | | ✔
  
  River as a plausible business
  
  For the last few years Blake's worked on a small business based on our open- source project River, a job queue for Go and Postgres, and for at least the next few months, I'll be taking over full-time. This self-serving blog post is a long way of saying that I hope that despite the world having crossed the LLM horizon, River comes in over the minimum viable unit of saleable software and is still a plausible company in the modern age.
  
  In terms of novelty, River's an open-source project that makes almost all job- related features (periodic jobs, scheduled jobs, unique jobs, web UI, …) available for free, but reserves some advanced features (workflows, sequential jobs, concurrently-limited jobs, …) and billing capability (billing by invoice) for a Pro version that we charge for. An LLM could reproduce the latter features, but we've put enough thought into their API design and performance properties that it'd take some work to get back to something of similar fidelity.
  
  In terms of price, we used a sublinearly scaling pricing model based on team size rather than headcount, starting at $125/mo for up to 20 developers, and scaling up to a multiple of that for an unlimited site license. So for a small-to-medium development team, $125/mo is the all-in cost across everyone.
  
  So back to the question at the top: did I get this right? Who knows. For now I'm betting my livelihood on it, and the coming months will tell.
  
  A note on the photo at the top: This is a natural feature called "Zlatnite Mostove" ("The Golden Bridges") in the Vitosha mountains near Sofia, Bulgaria where I hiked recently after attending Balkan Ruby. The field of rocks is called a "bridge" because it covers an active river underneath it. This post is partly about River and that's a river, so I'm banking on enough of a connection to be justifiable.
10. 🔗 r/reverseengineering TinyLoad v7 - what i added :D (in memory protection using VEH and alot more) rss
  
  submitted by /u/GuiltyAd2976
  [link] [comments]
11. 🔗 r/reverseengineering Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled rss
  
  submitted by /u/swe129
  [link] [comments]
12. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA It's funny how everything changes, yet somehow stays the same. rss
  
  | submitted by /u/bigattichouse
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
13. 🔗 r/reverseengineering usbsnoop — sniff and decode USB device traffic system-wide with eBPF, for reversing proprietary protocols (control/SCSI/HID, no bus analyzer) rss
  
  submitted by /u/R_E_T_R_O
  [link] [comments]
14. 🔗 Servo Blog April in Servo: new Android UI, focus, forms, security fixes, and more! rss
  Servo 0.2.0 contains all of the changes we landed in April, which came out to yet another record 534 commits (March: 530). For security fixes, see § Security.
  
  Note: the GitHub release is available now, but the crates.io release is not yet complete. We expect to publish it some time next week.
  
  We’ve shipped several new web platform features:
  - < select multiple> (@lukewarlow, @mrobinson, #43189)
  - < template shadowrootslotassignment> (@simonwuelker, #44246)
  - < video> playback on OpenHarmony (@rayguo17, #43208)
  - ‘minimum-scale’ and ‘maximum-scale’ values in < meta name=viewport> (@shubhamg13, #40098, #43715)
  - ‘color-mix()’ with any number of values (@Loirooriol, #43890)
  - ‘ &::before’ and ‘ &::after’ in ‘::details-content’ (@Loirooriol, #43878)
  - ‘revert-rule’ (@Loirooriol, #43878)
  - ‘tab-size’ (@mrobinson, @SimonSapin, #44480)
  - ‘text-align: match-parent’ (@TG199, #44073)
  - new Worker() with blob URLs (@jdm, #44004)
  - getContext("webgl") on OffscreenCanvas (@niyabits, #44159)
  - the detail property on PerformanceMark and PerformanceMeasure (@shubhamg13, #44289, #44272)
  Plus a bunch of new DOM APIs:
  - ‘selectionchange’ events on <input> and <textarea> (@TimvdLippe, #44461)
  - StorageManager , in experimental mode (@Taym95, #43976)
  - activeElement on Document and ShadowRoot (@mrobinson, #43861)
  - crypto.subtle.supports() (@kkoyung, #43703) – Servo is the first major browser engine to support this!
  - cellPadding , cellSpacing , and align properties on HTMLTableElement (@mrobinson, #43903) – previously supported in HTML only
  - relatedTarget on ‘focus’ and ‘blur’ events (@mrobinson, #43926)
  - transferFromImageBitmap() on ImageBitmapRenderingContext (@Messi002, #43984)
  Servo’s support for text in Chinese , Japanese , and Korean languages has improved, with correct wrapping in the layout engine (@SharanRP, #43744), and CJK fonts now enabled in servoshell’s browser UI on Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD (@yezhizhen, @CynthiaOketch, @nortti0, #44055, #44138, #44514).
  
  Navigating to a JSON file as the top-level document now renders the JSON with an interactive pretty-printer (@webbeef, @TimvdLippe, #43702).
  
  April was a big milestone for Servo, with some automated tests failing because they had hard-coded cookie expiry dates set to April 2016 plus ten years. Surprise! We’re still here. Here’s to the next 100 years of Servo (@jdm, #44341).
  
  This is another big update, so here’s an outline:
  Security __ CryptoKey now zeroes buffers containing key material after use (@kkoyung, #44597). With only a few exceptions, you can only access DOM APIs in another document if that document is in the same origin. But if that document is in the same site with a different port number, Servo currently allows these accesses even though it shouldn’t. We’ve fixed some (but not all) of these incorrect accesses, specifically those that involve binding a Window or Location method in this document with a this from the other document (@yvt, @jdm, #28583). We’ve fixed a bug where localStorage and sessionStorage were usable in sandboxed <iframe> and shared with every other sandboxed <iframe>, rather than throwing SecurityError (@Taym95, #44002). We’ve fixed a bug where localStorage and sessionStorage were shared between all < iframe srcdoc> documents, rather than isolated using the origin of the containing document (@niyabits, #43988, #44038). We’ve fixed a bug where IndexedDB was usable in sandboxed <iframe> and data: URL web workers (@Taym95, #44088). We’ve fixed a bug where pages in some IP address origins can evict cookies from other IP address origins (@officialasishkumar, #44152). Only evicting cookies was possible, not reading or writing them. We’ve fixed an out-of-bounds memory read in texImage3D() on WebGL2RenderingContext (@simartin, #44270), and fixed some undefined behaviour in servoshell’s signal handler (@Narfinger, #43891). Work in progress IndexedDB is now enabled in servoshell’s experimental mode (@arihant2math, #44245). As always, embedders can enable it with Preferences::dom_indexeddb_enabled (@arihant2math, #44245, #44283). IndexedDB now uses Servo’s new “client storage” system, which is based on the Storage Standard and will allow us to have a unified on-disk format and quota management for all web platform features that persistently store data (@gterzian, #44374, #43900). We’ve also made key range queries more efficient (@arihant2math, #39009), landed improvements to IDBDatabase, IDBObjectStore, IDBCursor, IDBKeyRange, IDBRequest, and to the handling of transactions, keys, values, and exceptions (@Taym95, #44128, #43901, #44009, #43914, #44161, #44183, #44059, #44215, #42998, #43805). We’ve made more progress on the IntersectionObserver API , under --pref dom_intersection_observer_enabled (@stevennovaryo, @jdm, #42204). We’re continuing to implement document.execCommand() for rich text editing (@TimvdLippe, #44529), under --pref dom_exec_command_enabled. This release adds support for the ‘bold’ , ‘fontName’ , ‘fontSize’ , ‘italic’ , ‘strikethrough’ , and ‘underline’ commands (@TimvdLippe, @jdm, @mrobinson, #44511, #43287, #44432, #44410, #44194, #44030, #44039, #44041, #44075, #44234, #44250, #44331, #44390, #44137, #44293, #44312, #44347). All of the features above are enabled in servoshell’s experimental mode. Servo can now build a very basic accessibility tree for web contents, under --pref accessibility_enabled (@alice, @delan, @lukewarlow, #42338, #43558, #44437, #44438). This includes text runs, plus nine other non-interactive accessibility roles (@alice, @delan, #44255). We’ve also fixed a crash when reloading pages with accessibility enabled (@alice, #44473), and made accessibility tree updates more efficient (@alice, #44208). We’ve started implementing the Sanitizer API , under --pref dom_sanitizer_enabled (@kkoyung, #44198, #44290, #44335, #44421, #44452, #44481, #44585, #44594). We’ve also started implementing SharedWorker , under --pref dom_sharedworker_enabled (@Taym95, #44375, #44440). We’re working on the WakeLock API too, under --pref dom_wakelock_enabled (@TG199, @rovertrack, #43617, #44343). servoshell
  
  servoshell for Android now has a revamped browser UI , including a new history view (@espy, #43795), the apk is 30% smaller (@jschwe, #44278, #44182), and we’ve fixed the black screen bug when closing settings or switching back from another app (@yezhizhen, #44327). You can now close tabs on OpenHarmony too (@Narfinger, #42713).
  
  As for servoshell on desktop platforms, we’ve fixed some focus- and IME- related bugs (@mrobinson, #43872, #43932), and on Windows, we now install a normal shortcut without the strange behaviour of an “advertised” shortcut (@yezhizhen, #44223).
  
  For developers When using the Inspector tab in the Firefox DevTools , the Rules panel now includes declarations in ‘@layer’ rules (@arabson99, #43912). When logging expressions in the Console tab, and when hovering over symbols in the Debugger tab, you can now get more information about the contents of functions, arrays, objects, and other values (@atbrakhi, @eerii, #44172, #44173, #44022, #44233, #44196, #44181, #44064, #44023, #44164, #44369, #44262). When using the Debugger tab, you can now use the Scopes panel to inspect local and global variables (@eerii, @atbrakhi, #43792, #43791), you can now debug web worker scripts (@atbrakhi, #43981), and we’ve started implementing blackboxing , aka the Ignore source button (@freyacodes, #44142). We’ve also landed some initial support for the Style Editor tab (@rovertrack, #44517, #44462). We’re working towards re-enabling our automated DevTools tests in CI, which should make the feature more reliable (@freyacodes, #44577), and we’ve landed a small build reproducibility fix too (@jschwe, #44459). For developers of Servo itself, please note that the Cargo ‘release’ profile is no longer #[cfg(debug_assertions)] (@jschwe, @mrobinson, #44177). If you’ve been using ‘release’ as a “faster ‘debug’ with assertions” build locally, consider switching to ‘checked-release’ or ‘medium’. The pull request template has been updated (@mrobinson, #44135). ‘Testing’ and ‘Fixes’ should go at the bottom of the PR description, and ‘Testing’ is about automated tests, not how you tested the PR locally. We’ve made more progress on the new dev container, which will provide an alternative to our usual procedures for setting up a Servo build environment (@jschwe, @sagudev, #44126, #44111, #44162, #44641, #44109). Keep an eye out for that in the book! In the meantime, did you know that you can use Lix or Nix to build Servo on Linux with a lot less hassle, even if you’re not using NixOS? For now at least, head to the NixOS page in the book to learn more. We’ve also fixed a regression that made --debug-mozjs and MOZJS_FROM_SOURCE builds take much longer to complete on Linux when not using Nix (@jschwe, #44346). We’ve fixed building Servo with the ‘jitspew’ feature in mozjs, allowing you to set IONFLAGS to enable JIT logging (@simonwuelker, #44010). We’ve also fixed build issues on Windows and FreeBSD (@zhangxichang, @mrobinson, #44264, #44591). Embedding API
  
  With this second monthly release of the Servo library, we have some quick notes about API stability and semver compatibility :
  - The‘servo’ package follows Cargo’s rules for semver compatibility. 0.1.1 is compatible with version 0.1.0, but 0.2.0 is a breaking update.
  - Until we integrate semver analysis into our release process, each monthly release will have a breaking version number, while non-breaking version numbers may be used for LTS updates.
  - In general, dependencies of ‘servo’ , like ‘servo-base’ and ‘servo-script’, do not use semver. Any release may include breaking changes.
  We’ve fixed a build failure affecting embedders with a new or updated Cargo.lock (@jschwe, #44093), and landed several other changes to help us with the Servo library release process (@jschwe, @mukilan, #43972, #44642, #43182, #43866, #44086, #43797).
  
  Breaking changes:
  - WebView::animating now takes &self instead of self, so you can call it without cloning the handle (@JavaDerg, #44253)
  - Servo::site_data_manager now returns &SiteDataManager instead of Ref<'_, SiteDataManager> (@sabbCodes, #44116)
  - WebViewDelegate::play_gamepad_haptic_effect and stop_gamepad_haptic_effect have been removed (@mrobinson, #43895), but they have not worked since February 2026 – use GamepadDelegate instead
  You can now load a URL with custom request headers by calling WebView::load_request (@Narfinger, @longvatrong111, @mrobinson, #43338).
  
  You can now retrieve cookies asynchronously by calling SiteDataManager::cookies_for_url_async (@longvatrong111, #43794).
  
  The synchronous version of that method, SiteDataManager::cookies_for_url, was previously not callable because CookieSource was not exposed to the public API, but we’ve fixed that now (@TG199, #44124).
  
  You can now clear session cookies without clearing permanent cookies by calling SiteDataManager::clear_session_cookies (@longvatrong111, #44166).
  
  When intercepting requests with ServoDelegate:: and WebViewDelegate::load_web_resource, we now include a destination and referrer_url in the WebResourceRequest, which can be helpful if you’re implementing ad blocking (@webbeef, #44493).
  
  You can configure Servo to write all of its storage to a unique directory for that session by enabling Opts::temporary_storage (@janvarga, #44433). Note that these unique directories currently persist after Servo exits, so it’s an isolation feature, not a privacy feature.
  
  WindowRenderingContext::new and SoftwareRenderingContext::new now return an error if the given size is less than 1x1 (@freyacodes, @mrobinson, #44011).
  
  We’ve improved our API docs for WebView, WebViewBuilder, WebViewDelegate, ServoDelegate, PromptDialog, WebResourceLoad, WebXrRegistry, Preferences, and servoshell’s EXPERIMENTAL_PREFS (@simonwuelker, @TG199, @sabbCodes, @jdm, @rovertrack, #43892, #43787, #44171, #43947).
  
  We’ve also improved our API docs for Opts, OutputOptions, DiagnosticsLogging, PrefValue, servo::opts, and servo_config (@mukilan, #43802).
  
  More on the web platform Tab navigation now works across < iframe> boundaries (@mrobinson, #44397), and Ctrl +Backspace (or ⌥`` ⌫) now deletes a whole word in input fields (@mrobinson, #43940). Tab characters are now rendered correctly in < pre> (and other elements with ‘white-space: pre’), with proper tab stops (@mrobinson, @SimonSapin, #44480). Spaces are now rendered correctly in 2D <canvas>, instead of twice as wide as they should be (@mrobinson, #43899). < a href> now correctly resolves the URL with the page encoding (@sabbCodes, #43822). We’ve improved the default appearance of < input type=file> (@sabbCodes, #44496) and < textarea placeholder> (@mrobinson, #43770). All keyboard events , mouse events , wheel events , and pointer events , other than ‘pointerenter’ and ‘pointerleave’ , now bubble out of shadow roots (@simonwuelker, @webbeef, #43799, #44094). ‘error’ events on Window now report the correct filename (source in onerror) and lineno (@Gae24, #43632). console.log() and friends now support printf-style formatting directives , although for now %c is ignored (@TG199, #43897). file: URLs are now considered secure contexts , so they can now use features like crypto.subtle and crypto.randomUUID (@simonwuelker, #43989). Exception messages have improved in Location, StaticRange, and the HTMLElement family of types (@arihant2math, @MuhammadMouostafa, @treetmitterglad, #44282, #43260, #43882). We’ve improved the conformance of fetch algorithms (@yezhizhen, #43970, #43798), focus and tab navigation (@mrobinson, #43842, #44029, #44360, #43859, #44535), form submission (@TG199, #43700), JS modules (@elomscansio, @Gae24, #43741, #44179, #44042), page navigation (@TimvdLippe, #43857), < svg viewBox> (@yezhizhen, #44420), ‘attr()’ (@Loirooriol, #43878), ‘:focus’ (@mrobinson, #43873), ‘font’ (@RichardTjokroutomo, #44061), ‘@keyframes’ (@simonwuelker, #43461), ‘@property’ (@Loirooriol, #43878), ‘load’ events (@jdm, @arabson99, #43807, #44046), fetchLater() (@TimvdLippe, #43627), axes and buttons on Gamepad (@log101, @rovertrack, #44411, #44357), copyTexImage2D() on WebGLRenderingContext (@simartin, @mrobinson, #43608), texImage3D() on WebGL2RenderingContext (@simartin, #44367), environmentBlendMode on XRSession (@msub2, #44155), mark() and measure() on Performance (@shubhamg13, @simonwuelker, #44471, #44199, #43990, #43753), and PerformanceResourceTiming (@shubhamg13, #44228). We’ve fixed bugs related to console logging (@sabbCodes, #44243), ‘animation’ (@mrobinson, #44299), ‘box-shadow’ (@yezhizhen, #44474, #44457), ‘display: contents’ (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #44551, #44299), ‘display: inline- flex’ (@SimonSapin, #44281), ‘display: table- cell’ (@Loirooriol, #44550), ‘display: table-row- group’ (@Veercodeprog, #43674), ‘overflow-x: clip’ and ‘overflow-y: clip’ (@Messi002, #43620), ‘position: absolute’ on grid items (@nicoburns, #44324), ‘word-spacing: ’ (@sabbCodes, #44031), removeChild() on Document (@rovertrack, #44133), and URL.revokeObjectURL() (@simonwuelker, @jdm, #43746, #43977, #44035). Performance and stability
  
  We’ve fixed some big inefficiencies in Servo. appendChild() with nested shadow roots is no longer O(2n) (@yezhizhen, @webbeef, #44016), and we’ve halved the time it takes to load the ECMAScript spec by fixing the O(whole DOM tree) processing of ‘id’ and ‘name’ attributes (@simonwuelker, #44120, #44127, #44117).
  
  Servo makes its first TLS connection in each session 30–60 ms faster (@jschwe, #44242), and we’ve instrumented the Servo and servoshell startup processes to find more opportunities for optimisation (@jschwe, #44443, #44456).
  
  Like most browser engines, Servo is a multi-threaded (and sometimes multi- process) system requiring a great deal of IPC messages to keep everything connected. Two key components of this system are the constellation thread, which manages the engine as a whole, and the script threads (or web processes), which render the web pages. Sending these messages can be expensive though, so to reduce unnecessary IPC traffic , we’ve landed an optimisation that allows script threads to selectively receive only the relevant messages from the constellation (@webbeef, #43124).
  
  We’ve reduced the memory usage of each Attr , Text , and CharacterData node in the DOM by 16 bytes (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #44074), and fixed a memory leak when deleting < video controls> or < audio controls> (@Messi002, #43983).
  
  Our about:memory page is more accurate now too, with new tracking of libc memory allocations on macOS, improved tracking of libc memory allocations on Linux (@jschwe, #44037), and more accurate tracking of PathBuf and types in tokio, http, data_url, and urlpattern (@Narfinger, #43858).
  
  Less memory usage isn’t always better in browser engines though, because there are many kinds of caches and other optimisations we can do to make browsing the web faster, at the expense of increased memory usage. For example, we can greatly speed up prototype checks for DOM objects by storing a number in each object that identifies the concrete type, at the expense of making each DOM object 64 bits larger (@webbeef, #44364).
  
  Layout can now reuse fragments in later reflows, in many cases that involve block layout or ‘position: absolute’ (@mrobinson, @lukewarlow, @Loirooriol, #42904, #44231). We’re also working on reusing shaping results in later reflows, and making inline layout more efficient (@mrobinson, #44370, #43974, #44436).
  
  We’ve landed several changes that should reduce the binary size of Servo (@rovertrack, @mrobinson, @nicoburns, @Narfinger, #44227, #44221, #44303, #44338, #44428, #44134).
  
  We’ve also reduced clones, allocations, borrow checks, GC rooting steps, and other operations in many parts of Servo (@rovertrack, @Narfinger, @Loirooriol, @yezhizhen, @simonwuelker, #44008, #44544, #44271, #44279, #43826, #44052, #44139).
  
  Several crashes have been fixed:
  - in compressedTexSubImage2D() on WebGLRenderingContext (@thebabalola, #44050)
  - in console.log() (@thebabalola, #43844)
  - in getData() on DataTransfer (@SimonSapin, #44607)
  - in remove() on Element (@SimonSapin, #44435)
  - in replaceWith() on Element (@yezhizhen, #44503)
  - in --debug-mozjs builds (@jdm, #44386, #44573, #44581)
  - in flex and grid layout (@mrobinson, @nicoburns, #44424, #44203)
  - in layout queries like offsetHeight (@mrobinson, #44560)
  - in the devtools Debugger tab, when stepping and when inspecting nested values (@atbrakhi, @eerii, #44024, #43995)
  - when removing <colgroup> from the DOM (@Loirooriol, #43846)
  - when running garbage collection (@drasticactions, #43933)
  - when running servoshell with a u64 --pref (@yezhizhen, #44079)
  - when shadow roots are deeply nested, or when calling attachShadow() removes elements from the flat tree (@yezhizhen, @mrobinson, #43888, #43930, #44259)
  - when web storage features fail to write to disk or encounter SQLite errors (@arihant2math, @sabbCodes, #43918, #43949)
  We fixed a crash in servoshell when pressing keys like Ctrl+2 or ⌘2 with not enough tabs open (@mrobinson, #44070).
  
  DOM data structures (#[dom_struct]) can refer to one another, with the help of garbage collection. But when DOM objects are being destroyed, those references can become invalid for a brief moment, depending on the order the GC finalizers run in. This can be unsound if those references are accessed, which is a very easy mistake to make if the type has an impl Drop. To help prevent that class of bug, we’re reworking our DOM types so that none of them have #[dom_struct] and impl Drop at the same time (@willypuzzle, #44119, #44501, #44513).
  
  We’ve improved our static analysis for GC rooting (@officialasishkumar, #44489), and we’ve continued our long-running effort to use the Rust type system to make certain kinds of dynamic borrow failures impossible (@sagudev, @TimvdLippe, @Narfinger, @elomscansio, @Gae24, @rovertrack, @yezhizhen, @nodelpit, #43174, #43524, #43928, #43943, #43942, #43944, #43946, #43952, #43975, #44018, #44175, #44241, #44368, #44406, #44441, #44422, #44475, #44478, #44484, #44476, #44490, #44477, #44494, #44497, #44498, #44495, #44505, #44506, #44507, #44508, #44509, #44510, #44512, #44482, #44527, #44528, #44531, #44534, #44542, #44533, #44543, #44553, #44547, #44563, #44562, #44565, #44558, #44583, #44606, #44605, #44608, #44602, #44584, #44620, #44590, #44254, #44628, #44629, #44638, #44626, #44081).
  
  Thanks to a wide range of people, we’ve also landed a bunch of cleanups and refactors (@delan, @alice, @Skgland, @atbrakhi, @eerii, @sabbCodes, @jdm, @thebabalola, @CynthiaOketch, @kkoyung, @TimvdLippe, @rovertrack, @webbeef, @arabson99, @yezhizhen, @simonwuelker, @mrobinson, @nicoburns, @longvatrong111, @niyabits, @treetmitterglad, @foresterre, @mukilan, @elomscansio, @freyacodes, @StaySafe020, @TG199, #43772, #44006, #43860, #44121, #44160, #43884, #44154, #44569, #43939, #44003, #44110, #44122, #43824, #44635, #44103, #43978, #44092, #44114, #44277, #44454, #44274, #44237, #44232, #44167, #44214, #43820, #43825, #43810, #43838, #43841, #43847, #43875, #43876, #43889, #43893, #43896, #43881, #43906, #43913, #43908, #43917, #43910, #43921, #43924, #43925, #43907, #43923, #43916, #43909, #43911, #43957, #43969, #43967, #43915, #43954, #43963, #43959, #43955, #44067, #44068, #44071, #44084, #44265, #44115, #44358, #43848).
  
  Donations
  
  Thanks again for your generous support! We are now receiving 7349 USD/month (+2.5% from March) in recurring donations. This helps us cover the cost of our speedy CI and benchmarking servers, one of our latest Outreachy interns , and funding maintainer work that helps more people contribute to Servo.
  
  Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 33 GitHub users (−4 from March) that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.
  
  We now have sponsorship tiers that allow you or your organisation to donate to the Servo project with public acknowlegement of your support. If you’re interested in this kind of sponsorship, please contact us at join@servo.org.
  
  7349 USD/month
  
  10000
  
  Use of donations is decided transparently via the Technical Steering Committee’s public funding request process , and active proposals are tracked in servo/project#187. For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.
May 30, 2026
1. 🔗 IDA Plugin Updates IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-30 rss
  IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-30
  
  New Releases:
  - PseudoForge Release v0.1.0
  Activity:
  - augur
    
    b016db2e: doc: IDADIR must be set at runtime for non-standard IDA locations
  - haruspex
    
    4b1b9bc0: doc: IDADIR must be set at runtime for non-standard IDA locations
  - ida-sigmaker
    
    e881b66c: docs(ALGORITHM): add TOC, rejected-optimizations section, Phase 5/6 n…
    
    b614aef3: perf: defer seeding for all-wildcard prefixes instead of full scan
    
    daca3a21: test(perf): adversarial refine microbench gating Upgrades 1 & 2
    
    6f7ca890: perf: use seed_offsets kernel for index-backed seeding
    
    db04edf4: feat: add seed_offsets Cython kernel for index-bucket mapping
    
    93711f65: Merge pull request #44 from mahmoudimus/docs/algorithm-reviewer-revis…
    
    e9398b4e: ALGORITHM.md: state the novel application and key use case up front i…
    
    256a597c: ALGORITHM.md: incorporate reviewer critique
  - IDAPluginList
    
    4bc307b3: chore: Auto update IDA plugins (Updated: 19, Cloned: 0, Failed: 0)
  - idasql
    
    0e30c4ac: docs: correct Claude Code plugin install command
  - PseudoForge
    
    770d520f: Add initial PseudoForge project
    
    10701f9c: Initial commit
  - rhabdomancer
    
    31e699c0: chore: add CLAUDE.md
    
    c0bf84b0: doc: IDADIR must be set at runtime for non-standard IDA locations
    
    ab021ae0: test: add integration tests for idempotency and custom configuration
2. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Someone out there likely needs this rss
  
  | submitted by /u/Signal_Ad657
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
3. 🔗 r/Harrogate Looking to make friends rss
  
  I feel somewhat embarrassed writing this but hopefully it's worth it. Immediately off the bat, this isn't a dating thing. Genuinely trying to find some like-minded people to get a pint with maybe the odd hike or hanging jamming to music. Love a good long yap and I'll talk about much everything and anything. I'm a Harrogate local and 24 years old working full time. Shoot me questions in the comments if you'd like or message me asking more on who I am. It'd just be nice to get out of the house a bit more
  
  - bit of nerd
  
  -star wars
  
  -video games
  
  -board games
  
  -pints
  
  -music
  
  -hikes
  
  And much more. :)
  
  (Not a dating or hookup thing, happily taken)
  
  submitted by /u/Bigbrizzlebear
  [link] [comments]
4. 🔗 r/reverseengineering I reverse engineered how Plex gates its Pass features, then wrote a tiny patch that flips them all on (Linux) rss
  
  submitted by /u/Boring-Ad-5924
  [link] [comments]
5. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA nvidia/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 · Hugging Face rss
  
  | The NVIDIA Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 model is the quantized version of Alibaba's Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model, which is an auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture. For more information, please check here. The NVIDIA Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 model is quantized with Model Optimizer.
  
  Post Training Quantization
  
  This model was obtained by quantizing the weights of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B to NVFP4 data type, ready for inference with vLLM. Only the weights and activations of the linear operators within transformer blocks in MoE are quantized. This optimization reduces the number of bits per parameter from 16 to 4, reducing the disk size and GPU memory requirements by approximately 3.06x.
  
  Evaluation
  
  The accuracy benchmark results are presented in the table below: | Precision | MMLU Pro | GPQA Diamond | τ²-Bench Telecom | SciCode | AIME 2025 | AA-LCR | IFBench | MMMU PRO
  ---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
  BF16 | 85.6 | 84.9 | 95.5 | 40.8 | 89.2 | 62.0 | 62.3 | 74.1
  NVFP4 | 85.0 | 84.8 | 94.7 | 40.6 | 88.8 | 62.0 | 62.8 | 74.5
  
  submitted by /u/pmttyji
  [link] [comments]
6. 🔗 r/Harrogate Mobile data signal in Knaresborough is so bad. rss
  
  In town yesterday and it just flat out doesn't work. Not just slow but doesn't work for me a lot of the time.
  
  Is there anyone I can write to?
  
  I'm with Lebara who run off the Vodafone network. But I have friends with EE who said their signal is just as bad.
  
  submitted by /u/Famous_Yorkshire
  [link] [comments]
7. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Is he crazy to say that? rss
  
  | submitted by /u/pmv143
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
8. 🔗 HexRaysSA/plugin-repository commits sync repo: +1 release, ~1 changed rss
```
sync repo: +1 release, ~1 changed

## New releases
- [IDASQL](https://github.com/allthingsida/idasql): 0.0.16

## Changes
- [IDASQL](https://github.com/allthingsida/idasql):
  - 0.0.1: archive contents changed, download URL changed
```
9. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA I compared all specs of the major GPUs/machines that are being used here, because bandwidth is not everything. Some of ya'll need a reality check. rss
  | Clarification: This post was meant to curb the old and new Mac recommendations to new members/buyers, not to insult people with existing machines that are perfectly fine for their usecase. Edit: OKAY GUYS Pro 6k exists too, understood. M3 Ultra is also closer to 30k, not 12k (ouch). Extended table below: | Device | Price used | FP16 TFLOPS | VRAM | Bandwidth | $/TFLOP | $/GB | Power | W/TFLOP
  ---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
  RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell WS | ~$10,000 | ~463 | 96GB | 1792 GB/s | ~$21.6 | ~$104.2 | 600W | ~1.30
  RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q WS | ~$11,000 | ~380 | 96GB | 1792 GB/s | ~$28.9 | ~$114.6 | 300W | ~0.79
  Intel Arc Pro B70 | $949 | ~183.5 | 32GB | 608 GB/s | $5.2 | $29.7 | 290W | 1.58
  Radeon Instinct MI50 32GB | ~$535–560 used eBay | 26.5 | 32GB | 1000 GB/s | ~$20.2–21.1 | ~$16.7–17.5 | 300W | 11.32
  Radeon AI PRO R9700 | $1,299 | 191.0 | 32GB | 640 GB/s | $6.8 | $40.6 | 300W | 1.57
  RTX 4060 Ti 16GB | $400 | ~88.3 | 16GB | 288 GB/s | $4.5 | $25.0 | 165W | 1.87
  RTX 5060 Ti 16GB | ~$550 | ~94.9 | 16GB | 448 GB/s | ~$5.8 | ~$34.4 | 180W | 1.90
  RTX 5070 Ti 16GB* | $1,000 | ~175.8 | 16GB | 896 GB/s | $5.7 | $62.5 | 300W | 1.71
  - again gpu's that support below FP16/BF16 precision and are 2x-4x faster with it
  Hot takes:
  - Mac studio is overpriced Raspberry Pi that is way more inefficient than people think (together with most macs). M5 MBP is better with the "tensor" matrix MMA, but not that much better value wise
  
  - Spark was actually decent when it was just 3-4k. Strix is obviously much better now
  - 3090 are complete overkill for single stream usage, V100s are much better value if you can find them cheap. P40 are very niche, but decent if you want exactly 48GB of vram, run moe and don't have money for Mi50s or V100s.
  - P100s are extremely underrated entry level LLM gpu's that are not talked about enough. 200 bucks (dual gpu) for a combined 32GB of 700GB/s memory and M3 Ultra compute is crazy.
  
  I understand that this sub is now filled with gamers who do nothing but ERP, but for people who do something actually productive (read as experimenting without investing high 5 figures into their setups), prefill is still very important and this is completely hidden by the "generate 1000 word story" benchmarks that most posts or big AI youtube channels do. Especially with multimodal models that eat up context like mad.
  
  I'm still collecting data for prefill and generation charts I'd like to do in the future... I also couldn't find much reliable power data, so if you could provide that from your own setups in the comments I'll be glad.
  
  Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
  
  submitted by /u/Ok_Top9254
  [link] [comments]
10. 🔗 Mario Zechner How to build a shitty robot rss
  
  A work in progress post about building a shitty robot.
May 29, 2026
1. 🔗 IDA Plugin Updates IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-29 rss
  IDA Plugin Updates on 2026-05-29
  
  New Releases:
  - idasql IDASQL v0.0.16
  Activity:
  - idasql
    
    d6f50394: idasql v0.0.16: writable type tables, address resolution, pre-9.2 SDK…
    
    cd78ac5c: plugin: restore IDA 9.0 compatibility (#30)
  - plugin-ida
    
    25ee0b29: chore: add uv cooldown (exclude-newer=7 days) (#13)
    
    699c5ca3: chore(deps): Bump step-security/harden-runner from 2.19.0 to 2.19.4 (…
2. 🔗 sacha chua :: living an awesome life Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena rss
  [2026-05-31 Sun]: Updated transcript and added a link to Karthik's notes.
  
  I chatted with Omar Antolín Camarena about Emacs, keyboard macros, temporary buffers, Embark, and other workflow tips.
  
  View in the Internet Archive, read the transcript online, watch or comment on YouTube, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me.
  
  Related links:
  You can add the iCal for upcoming Emacs Chat episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/emacs-chat/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics
  
  Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat
  Chapters
  
  0:00 Ignore this part
  
  0:18 Opening
  
  0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place?
  
  6:01 Repeating edits
  
  7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands
  
  9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk
  
  10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros
  
  12:15 Keycast and Embark
  
  13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph
  
  16:34 embark-on-last-message
  
  18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode
  
  19:26 placeholder
  
  20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers
  
  22:57 Overriding embark-select
  
  23:32 quick-calc
  
  26:30 Multiple cursors
  
  27:40 Block-undo and regular undo
  
  28:53 Cycling through Embark targets
  
  31:39 Imenu for navigation
  
  32:51 Collaboration
  
  38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages
  
  40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions
  
  42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names
  
  43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs
  
  44:56 org-ql and usual files
  
  47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax
  
  47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE
  
  48:26 The inserter macro
  
  50:05 luggage: generative art experiments
  
  53:49 Teaching and Emacs
  
  54:53 The print10 generator
  
  56:23 arXiv
  
  58:29 Toggle keymap
  
  1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong
  
  1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match
  
  1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands
  
  1:06:04 Other things from the config
  Transcript
  
  Expand this to see the transcript and screenshots
  
  0:00 Ignore this part
  Sacha: Cut off at, you know, roughly an hour and seven minutes from now. She's going to come out and have lunch. Okay. All right. Going live. Alright folks, we are here a little bit early.
  0:18 Opening
  Sacha: This is Emacs Chat 24 with Omar Antolin Camarena, whom we know from Embark and Orderless and a lot of other little packages that I personally use on a daily basis. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.
  Omar: Yeah, so am I. Very excited.
  Sacha: Of course, before we dive into all these lovely details, tell us a little bit more about your context. You're a researcher at the Mathematics Institute. I can see why Emacs would be a great fit for that.
  0:46 How did you get into Emacs in the first place?
  Sacha: How did you get into Emacs in the first place?
  Omar: I think it's just by virtue of being old. When I started out looking for a text editor, there were not that many great options. When I was a teenager, 30 years ago, I decided to install Linux because I heard about it. That was the era where you went to a newsstand and you bought a Linux magazine that came with a CD, and I installed Linux from that. I think it was Slackware, maybe. I was already a hobby computer programmer. I've been learning programming languages since I was a child, when my father gave me my first computer. I think that was the main reason I switched to Linux. I noticed that people wrote many more interpreters and compilers for Linux than for Windows. That's why I wanted to use Linux. I needed a text editor that handled all sorts of weird programming languages. I was looking for a general purpose one, not an IDE. I used IDEs, younger ones, like Turbo Pascal. Probably that was the main one. I loved that. It was great. I went through the Linux distro, tried a bunch of editors. I settled on Emacs and Emacs-like editors. I tried Jove, which stands for Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs. And there was also an editor called... Oh, I forget. There was one that had its own extension language called S-Lang. I used that for a while. A little later, I remember using Slava Pestov's jEdit. I really like that, too, although Java is not that fun to write extensions in. I was looking for an editor and I wanted it to be extensible, which is funny because I hardly ever extend it. I just wanted there to be the option. I used Emacs for a long time. But when I got serious at being efficient at text-editing, I actually switched to Vim. I switched back to Emacs many years later because of one very specific problem in Vim. The syntax highlighting for LaTeX files is pretty slow. On a normal computer, you won't notice that it's slow. But I had a little netbook that was like 10 years old when I had it. I took it to class to take notes in math courses. I was writing in LaTeX Live with a bunch of macros to insert things. The syntax highlighting meant that Vim lagged behind my typing. I'm not that fast of a typist, so it was problematic. The Vim manual has an entire section on what to do if text highlighting is slow. You can look for it with Vim :help tex-slow That pops up the right section of the manual. I tried everything that it said there and they all made it slightly faster, but none of them really solved the lag, other than turning off syntax highlighting. I turned off syntax highlighting and took notes for like half a semester, and then I decided to try Emacs on that old netbook. Its syntax highlighting was perfectly snappy. This is just a weird thing in Vim that specifically LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow. I never noticed it being slow in any other... I don't know what Vim calls them, what Emacs would call a major mode. It was only ever slow in LaTeX, but that was enough to get me to try Emacs. But by then in Vim, I had learned that you want very granular motion commands to move by word or by sentence, and you want to be able to be placed at the end of the word or at the beginning of the word. All of these higher-level editing constructs that Vim really pushes you toward. In Emacs, I hadn't done any of that before. I moved around with the arrow keys. But when I came back to Emacs after having been in Vim, then I wanted to get serious about editing efficiently in Emacs. I think I actually like it better than Vim now. But yeah, that's why I switched back to Emacs. It's just this quirk that LaTeX syntax highlighting is slow in Vim.
  Sacha: Well, their loss. So you tried a whole bunch of other editors. You got into Vim because you wanted to be more efficient. Getting deeply into Vim was great, but you ran into that bug. So you switched to Emacs because it was more efficient, more performant. All that experience with Vim has made you a better Emacs user because now you're like, okay, you appreciate all the navigation and movement. And you were telling me over email...
  Omar: Things I missed from Vim.
  Sacha: Yeah, You were telling me over email how the kind of the keyboard macros that you got used to in Vim, you've translated some of that over to Emacs and how you use them. We definitely want to get into that.
  Omar: Keyboard macro-like things. In Emacs, for a while, I used multiple-cursors. I liked it a lot.
  6:01 Repeating edits
  Omar: One thing I really missed from Vim is the dot command that repeats the last edit. But in Vim, edits are composite things. You have a command to change a sentence, for example. That will delete the current sentence, put you into insert mode, let you type a new sentence, and when you press escape, that concludes the edit. The whole edit is the operation of deleting the current sentence and replacing it with the specific thing you typed. That is a thing you can repeat. The repeatable edit commands in Vim are much coarser and more conceptually appropriate units than in Emacs. The repeat command repeats the last Emacs command, but everything runs a command in Emacs. You can repeat inserting the last character. That's not very useful. You want to repeat at least the whole consecutive stretch of characters you inserted. Undo in Emacs does do that. Undo coalesces. If you type a bunch of characters and you undo, it doesn't undo them one by one. It undoes them. It clumps them depending on pauses between your typing. That's fine. I want that sort of coarseness. I don't want to undo every single step at a time. Similarly, when you repeat things, you don't want to repeat every single step. I think Vim has like a pretty good unit of things you can repeat. I was missing that in Emacs.
  7:28 dot-mode: repeating commands
  Omar: There's a package called dot-mode which I used to use and I like a lot. I'm not exactly sure why I stopped using it. So this gives you a more Vim-like experience for repeating commands in Emacs and what it does is that it watches you as you type and it constantly makes a keyboard macro out of the last consecutive stretch of buffer modifying commands. So, for example, in Vim, if you want to change a word, there is a change word command, and you type c w, and then you change the word, and then that thing gets repeated. In Emacs, to change a word, it's not a single unit, right? You delete the word, and then you type in something new, and each character you type is running insert-char. dot-mode will coalesce all of that into a single keyboard macro that you can repeat, right? If you do some motion command that doesn't modify the buffer, and then you delete a word and type a new word, everything from the deletion to the end of the typing would be what dot mode repeats. The experience is actually very similar to using dot in Vim. In my opinion, a little bit better, because in Vim, I often had this problem. It gets you into this competitive video game mentality. How do I do the edit in a single repeatable command? I want to be able to use dot to do this again. So that you have to think ahead. It's kind of distracting. Of course, if a sensible person would not get caught up in that, it would just... do the edit whichever way they can, but I wanted to maximize the repeatability. dot-mode lets you be a little bit more relaxed. It still catches all of the thing that should have been a single edit. So yeah, I like it a lot.
  Sacha: So that's dot-mode.
  9:24 block-undo: undo things as a chunk
  Sacha: You also mentioned block-undo.
  Omar: That is a package of mine I can show you. That's the entire package. It just uses this with-undo-amalgamate command. Whatever you run inside with-undo-amalgamate undoes in a single step. I use it for executions of keyboard macros. A keyboard macro, if you run it all over the place, if you apply it to every line in a region, or you just repeat it a hundred times, that is a lot of tiny individual edits. If you undo that, you do not want to undo them one by one. This just makes them all undo in a single step, which is what Vim does, actually. This is one of the things that I said, no, Vim has this right. I need this in Emacs.
  Sacha: Okay, that makes sense. So dot-mode is more like implicit keyboard macro boundary definitions. This one is like the undo-ness of it.
  10:29 Starting and stopping keyboard macros
  Sacha: I saw in your config, you also have more convenient shortcuts for starting and stopping keyboard macros. It's like a modifier and the keystroke instead of two or like function keys, which are further away. I'm guessing you use keyboard macros a lot.
  Omar: Yeah, I do. When I got rid of dot-mode, it was an experiment to see if I could just remember to record keyboard macros. The thing that the dot-mode or the dot command in Vim solves is that you don't always have the foresight to record a keyboard macro. Sometimes you realize, oh, I need to do the same at some other places, but you didn't record it ahead of time. Then you wind up doing it once, realizing you need to do it a bunch of times, then recording the macro, then doing it again. I wanted to see if I could remember to record macros. I decided that I needed to make it as as frictionless as possible. This is the command that is bound by default to F3. I like it better than the thing that's bound to C-x ( because this kmacro-start-macro-or-insert-counter does both things. It could start a recording, or if you are recording, it will insert the keyboard macro counter.
  Sacha: For folks who are like, what? Macros? Counters? Yes, you can have your keyboard macro automatically add one to a number, for example. There you go.
  Sacha: Hello, hello, hello.
  12:15 Keycast and Embark
  Omar: I also activated keycast. I hope people can follow along. I have some small modifications to make embark transparent to keycast. If I use embark, you see embark-act, but then you also see what command I call.
  Sacha: I just stole that from your config. I wasn't entirely sure if I was using it correctly, but it definitely looked like something interesting and useful.
  Omar: If you don't use that change, then keycast doesn't see through embark and you don't get which actions you called.
  Sacha: Yeah, the opacity of some of these kind of key binding niceties... they hide a lot of stuff from the standard Emacs ways of doing things. That's one of the criticisms of transient and other tools. I'm glad that you're finding these ways to make these packages work well with other packages.
  Omar: I think this was by request. Somebody requested it. Maybe it was Prot. It's definitely a good idea. The code for that is on the Embark Wiki as well.
  13:33 apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph
  Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that you make a convenient keyboard shortcut for in terms of keyboard macros is apply-macro-to-lines-of-paragraph, which I personally had not been using until I saw your config. And I was like, that is a thing.
  Omar: Yeah. Well, that's a command that I wrote. It’s a wrapper around apply-macro-to-region-lines, but it automatically uses the paragraph. That way you don't need to select it. I find that extremely convenient. What would be a good example of that? You want to wrap something. What should I do as an example of this? For some reason, I needed to convert these things to, say, unwrap the parentheses and turn them into an Org Mode table.
  Sacha: Yeah, that makes sense.
  Omar: I just apply it to the rest of the paragraph.
  Sacha: Magic. That's great, because I would normally just start executing the macro and hope I remember to stop at the end, but then I overshoot, and then I have to undo, j and then it's a mess.
  Omar: Or you could select the paragraph and then just use the built-in apply-macro-to-lines-in-region.
  Sacha: Yes, yes, that's a possibility.
  Omar: It just saves you the step of marking the paragraph. I found that I most often when I used apply macro to lines in region, the region was exactly a paragraph. So I figured like there's no point in...
  Sacha: All right, all right.
  Omar: It's undone in a single step. Like the application. The thing I recorded as a macro, that is not coalesced. Yes, of course.
  Sacha: Because that's the actual recording of it. Charlie Baker in the chat says, "Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config. I've been wanting that for a while." These little demos of like, oh, this is what this thing in your config does. It's very helpful for people to be able to see its awesomeness.
  Omar: Where is that?
  Sacha: One of the other interesting things you mentioned was your placeholder package. I can see how the keyword macros help you with text that's already there. Then you've got these placeholders for informal snippets or quick snippets. Show us that. You use it a lot.
  Omar: Yeah, I do. Oh, that tmp-buffer is a command I have for popping up temporary buffers in specific major modes. Maybe I can quickly show that first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's see. Oh, yeah. So let me...
  16:34 embark-on-last-message
  Omar: There I used another little command I have. embark-on-last-message It just calls Embark on the last thing in the messages buffer. Often I want to act on the thing that is the last word in the echo area, so that's what this does.
  Sacha: Okay.
  Omar: The last thing in the echo area was this symbol embark-on-last-message so I can act on it directly.
  Sacha: Which is brilliant because I keep switching to the messages buffer to try to copy something, and by the time I switch, sometimes there are other messages, so it's great to just be able to do something.
  Omar: If there are other messages, then I also switch to the messages buffer, but if I want to act on the very last thing, I have that command for it.
  Sacha: Yeah. I'm saying this is faster, so I get the chance of just hitting the shortcut before another timer goes in and messes around with my messages. So yes, shortcuts. Okay, temp buffer. Tell us about that.
  Omar: You can configure single... Wait, where am I? Transcribing job. I ran Whisper by accident.
  Sacha: Which is another thing I wanted to check. Many things I want to talk to you about…
  Omar: The idea of using Whisper, I stole from you using it to dictate. I thought, oh, this looks convenient if the model is good. I tried it and it is very good.
  18:06 tmp-buffer with a major mode
  Sacha: Temp buffer.
  Omar: Different major modes. It has a customizable list of bindings for specific major modes.
  Omar: It also has an option to just prompt you for a major mode. It pops up a temp buffer in whatever major mode you chose. I use it all the time to make new scratch buffers.
  Sacha: Yeah, I can see that's useful. I switch to a buffer that's got a name that doesn't exist yet, and then I have to press more keys to get to the major mode.
  Omar: But if you're doing certain things, just type random letters to make a new buffer, this is much better. They might as well all be called temp.
  Sacha: Do you reuse the buffers, or it's always just the one buffer?
  Omar: New buffer, then I kill it.
  Sacha: Very temporary. Gotcha.
  Omar: By the way, kill-current-buffer doesn’t have a default key binding. I don't understand why not. OK. I bind it to C-c C-k, which normally, I think, is kill-buffer, but why would you want to kill a buffer that's not the one you're looking at? Wait, what was I going to show you?
  Sacha: You were going to show me placeholders.
  Omar: Right.
  19:26 placeholder
  Omar: I often need to send several similar email messages. I'm going to invite you on some day of some month to give a talk, etc. That's the body of an email. I'll write it once. Here I’m using placeholder-insert to insert this symbol. It appears in green, but it doesn't matter. It's just text. You could type that symbol yourself.
  Omar: Then the placeholder-next and -previous commands will cycle among those and let you fill each one in. You don't have to fill it in right now. If you repeat the command, it restores the placeholder and moves you to the next location.
  Sacha: That's one of the things I liked about the implementation compared to yasnippet, because yasnippet, you’ve got to actually remember to fill in the fields before you move on to something else. If you get out of it, you can't tab to the next field. The placeholders will let you go and come back and look up some information and put that in and so forth.
  20:38 enable-recursive-minibuffers
  Omar: Yeah, there's lots of things I loved about Vim, but one thing I grew to strongly dislike is modal computer programs. Not just modal editing, modal anything. I don't like being forced to finish what I started. I want to be able to get distracted and go off and do something else. For example, in Emacs, I very much dislike the default value of enable-recursive-minibuffers. The default value is nil. They don't let you use the minibuffer if you're already using the minibuffer. Emacs is supposed to be about freedom. Why is that the default value? So I set it to t, which is more sensible. That way you're not stuck in the minibuffer.
  Sacha: Actually, one of the things that I've been trying to figure out is when I'm in a minibuffer, sometimes I want to use Embark to insert something into the minibuffer, but then I end up inserting it into the buffer buffer.
  Omar: Yeah, there's no... Embark doesn't have any solution to that problem. It doesn't always do that. It does that if you're in the minibuffer in a completion session. If you're in the minibuffer in a non-completion session, then it acts as a regular buffer. So if you're in eval and here you had... You can use embark-insert in the usual way to duplicate stuff.
  Sacha: I have a workaround. I just use kill. I copy the text instead of inserting it and that works out fine.
  Omar: Yeah, I do too. The behavior of inserting into the previous buffer is so useful that I don't think I would want to change that. But yeah, it is unfortunate that for that specific instance, you can't use insert.
  Sacha: I appreciate that Embark allows us to have all of these key bindings that we can do stuff with. I noticed in your config, in addition to Embark, you also modify a lot of the standard key maps to add other shortcuts to rebind things that make sense to you. Key bindings are something that a lot of people struggle with, trying to figure out more places to put more shortcuts that make sense. What are the key shortcuts that work really well for you?
  22:57 Overriding embark-select
  Omar: One thing I don't like about the default Embark configuration is that SPC is used for embark-select, which marks a target for later use. I hardly ever use embark-select, so I would rather SPCbe for marking the region, which is something I do pretty often, and have embark-select on C-SPC, which is not a command I use very often. I swapped those. I think most of this is just adding new actions that feel specific to me.
  23:32 quick-calc
  Omar: quick-calc is the thing usually found to C-x *… calc-dispatch is the command. It’s C-x * q. That’s quick-calc. It's useful as an Embark action. If you have an expression and you... Wait, what am I doing wrong? I forgot what my binding to mark what Vim calls a word in capital letters, which means a consecutive stretch of non-space characters... If you mark this, I can act on it with =, get the result.
  Sacha: And specifically this embark-region-map is what you can add in the selected region. Incidentally, I've been playing around with using the Selected package for this because it also gives you the key map.
  Omar: Yeah, yeah. I love the Selected package and recommend it often. I don't use it myself just because the only thing it would save me is calling embark-act, because the commands I would put in the selected key map are exactly the commands I have in the embark-region-map. For me, Selected would only save me one keystroke, which is Embark Act, so I don't feel it's worth it, but it's a great idea. For example, I do use the rectangle keymap. Yes. So they're the only difference. It's equally good an idea as Selected is. The only difference is that the rectangle keymap comes with Emacs and Selected is an external package. I decided it's not worth installing an external package when I could just use Embark Act, which I do have to use because otherwise I won't understand people's bug reports. But the rectangle mode there, that one is built in, so I just found a bunch of useful stuff in it.
  Sacha: Yeah, and I noticed you have also like you have a narrow-to-point so that you can use your rectangle commands to yank something into it, so I get the sense that you use rectangles a fair bit.
  Omar: You've really read my configuration very carefully. This narrow-to-point is subtle. I am very impressed that you figured out the reason for it.
  Sacha: I started digging through narrow-extras because I saw your narrow-or-widen-dwim and I said, yes, I need that in my life.
  Omar: I don't think... I took it from somebody. Endless Parentheses, probably. The issue with narrow-to-point, the reason you need it, is that if you insert a rectangle somewhere, try to insert it in a blank line, and it'll overlap with what was after it. But if you first narrow to the point and then insert the rectangle and then widen again, it gets its own blank lines. That's the reason I have it.
  26:30 Multiple cursors
  Sacha: @zor_org asks, was there a time you wanted multiple cursors? Have you ever been tempted?
  Omar: Multiple cursors. I think it gave me a false sense of security which is why I experimented not using it and then the experiment just never stopped. The thing with multiple cursors... Multiple cursors are more interactive than keyboard macros, because if you can see several cursors on the screen, you can visually make sure that what you're doing does apply correctly at each of those locations. But then I started noticing that that made me feel very confident I was doing things the right way in multiple cursors, but there were some cursors offscreen where I wasn't paying attention to what was happening there, and then I got it wrong and was more confused. Just psychologically, a keyboard macro, since I know I don't see the other places where I'm going to run it, I'm more careful when I record the keyboard macro. It's a psychological trick I'm playing on myself. By using keyboard macros instead of multiple cursors, I force myself to pay more attention to what I'm doing.
  27:40 Block-undo and regular undo
  Sacha: Does the block undo still let you select a region in order to undo just the part that was within it, in case you notice offscreen that it's done something bad in just these entries?
  Omar: Yeah, that's completely independent. That built-in Emacs behavior is not affected by undo boundaries.
  Sacha: Wait, is it?
  Omar: If it overlaps with part of... I don't know. Sorry, sorry. I don't know. So if I have a big change that I amalgamated into a single undo, and then I pick a region that overlaps partially with that but not completely, what would undo and region do? I don't know. I think it... I'm just guessing. I would just think that it sees that the affected region by the big block undo is not completely contained in the region and then it doesn't undo it.
  Sacha: Okay, so I'm just going to conclude that you do not make mistakes with your keyboard macros.
  Omar: I can easily undo them instead of having to keep running on undo. So it's not that I don't make mistakes, but that I try to fix them right after running the keyboard macro.
  Sacha: All right, all right. I had another question.
  28:53 Cycling through Embark targets
  Sacha: Ou've got a lot of different Embark maps and you've got a lot of different Embark targets. How do you handle going through the different ones that are at the point? At the moment, I've got the label at the top and I just flip through it. I know sometimes I need to hit it twice or sometimes I need to hit embark-act three times for this kind of thing. How do you distinguish between lots of them when you're just going through it?
  Omar: I think that's the poorest part of the user experience with Embark Act currently. I don't really like it, but I don't have a good alternative. A lot of people like expand-region and I don’t like it because I feel like I have to hammer it off. I prefer to have a lot of… This is another thing I learned from Vim: have a lot of commands to mark specific things and just memorize all of them. But expand-region says, no, don’t memorize that. Just hammer on expand-region until you get the thing you want. Ffor me, even though it's objectively fast, it just feels very slow. It feels like I have to hit it four times whenever I want to mark something. I get the same feeling from cycling in embark-act. I don't really like it. But if we had come up with a better alternative, and I say we because I discussed this in the GitHub issues with with Daniel Mendler and Prot, and I think @hmelman was also in those discussions, and maybe Clemens Radermacher? I just couldn't come up with a much better alternative, so I put up with it. I don't need to cycle that much. I almost always want to act on the first target. Which is unfair, because I decided what the first target is in the default configuration, so it's sort of tuned so that I hardly ever need to cycle. I apologize if it means other people need to cycle a lot.
  Sacha: Nonsense. We can all modify our target list, so we can always tune it to what we want.
  Omar: I mean, it's a lot of work, right? I think the default Embark configuration is over half of the source code of Embark. The configuration is... Where does that start? Oh, I wish the autoload cookies were not in the outline.
  Sacha: If you do a space, oh, I guess it doesn't do that, right?
  Omar: Oh, yeah. For orderless, I use the escapable spaces, so I can do that.
  31:39 Imenu for navigation
  Sacha: I should also point out that your config uses a lot of imenu also, which was another interesting thing I picked up.
  Omar: Yeah, I like imenu, yeah. I should add imenu for this. One thing I did to imenu is I added a section for key maps.
  Sacha: I saw that. You have a regular expression so you can see it easily.
  Omar: Right. It's not half, but a big chunk of Embark is just the default configuration. It would be a lot of work to configure Embark from scratch. That's why the package comes with an extensive default configuration.
  Sacha: Charlie Baker says, “I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with Embark’s type awareness, it's easy to add a contract function.” I guess maybe also some highlighting helps with that. Charlie also says, “I also have a completing read interface in the transient menu to jump directly to one of the many types under point that I'm seeking.” Charlie, you're going to share somewhere so I can steal that part of your config, right?
  Omar: I mean, that would be something I would consider adding to Embark itself.
  32:51 Collaboration
  Sacha: You mentioned having all these conversations with Daniel and others through GitHub and other things. I wanted to touch on that because I think in the Emacs community, it's pretty rare to find people who are collaborating on packages and packages that work so well together. The partnership between your packages and Daniel Mendler or Minad's packages with Consult and Vertico and Marginalia is really nice. We don't see a lot of examples of that kind of inter-packaged conversation as much. How did that start?
  Omar: I think it was mostly Daniel's initiative. I had started work on Orderless and Embark. I think his first package was Consult, maybe, of this family of packages. I remember Embark was a pretty sad shape when Daniel started raising issues on the Github. He really lit a fire under me to improve Embark. It started with him complaining about things in Embark, and I immediately realized that he was thinking very carefully about the user experience, so I thought he is full of good ideas and I should listen to them. Back then at the start of Embark and Orderless, Prot was also very involved in discussing the design. All of this is on GitHub issues. Some software archaeologists can find all of it. So I think we started working together when we realized we were both writing Marginalia, so we decided to merge those two packages into a single one. I think maybe the name Marginalia was suggested by Prot, I don't remember, but it's a very good name. The collaboration was completely unplanned. We just did it because we had already talked on the Embark issues and Daniel's suggestions improved Embark a great deal in a short amount of time. So then when we both realized we were writing something like Marginalia, we decided to just merge those two packages and write a single one. Since that worked out well, we kept on collaborating. So far, we haven't co-written any other package. One thing like that is that now Daniel is a co-maintainer of Orderless, which is great because Daniel is extremely efficient at fixing bugs. He does it instantly. He figures out what's wrong and has a patch in a few minutes after he looks at the issue. He looks at the issue the day it was posted or the day after. I can't do things that quickly. It's great that he's helping out with orderless. It wasn't planned. It just felt right from the very beginning. I immediately realized he had some great ideas and implemented a lot of them. Then we started doing that the other way around. I started commenting on a bunch of issues in Consult and Vertico. I think I exerted some pressure on Daniel to add features to Vertico, like the grid view and the horizontal view. Or maybe specifically the grid view, because at the time I was... I'm sort of slow to switch basic Emacs infrastructure. I wasn't using Vertico for a long time, even though I was like opining on the Github issues for Vertico, and the reason was that I was stuck with the vastly inferior embark-live. There was this embark-live thing where you could pop up a buffer with the targets in the minibuffer, which just means a completion candidate. So you could use Embark as a kind of completion user interface. It was very slow, but it was very featureful. You could do a vertical list. You could do a grid. In the list, you could activate zebra stripes. Yeah, you can see that's been removed from Embark. But I kept saying to Daniel, I'll switch to Vertico if you add a grid view. He eventually did add the grid view. I kept my word and switched to Vertico, which is much better than the thing in Embark. I was just being stubborn by not switching earlier. But if I had switched earlier, maybe Vertico wouldn't have a grid view.
  Sacha: I think it's definitely a good example of a set of packages that has... So all this started in about 2020s or so. So we actually can see how people have gotten into using Vertico and all the other packages compared to, say, looking at more popular packages that have been around for a long time. "Of course everyone's been using Org Mode for a long time." It's there. It's part of the fabric.
  38:01 Technology adoption and Emacs packages
  Sacha: It's very interesting to see the technology adoption around it. A lot of the things that people struggle with as package authors is getting other people to try out their stuff. With Orderless and Embark probably in the early days, what was that like to put this thing out there in the world and have people start to try it? How did people find it?
  Omar: I personally found it very scary. At the beginning, I still thought Embark was a part of my personal Emacs configuration that sort of grew out of control and I decided to publish separately. But then I have all these people telling me how to improve what I still thought of as part of my personal configuration. I think one thing that helped was that people made very good suggestions. So I realized, no, no, it's worth publishing reusable parts of your configuration just for the GitHub issues, just for people finding bugs and suggesting improvements and so on. But yeah, I had to adjust to having some users. At first, it was very few people. But then they got added to Doom. I think they were made the default in Doom. That was a huge influx of users. That was very scary. We were suddenly flooded with new bug reports, like all of the packages in the family. I remember feeling like there's a horde of Doom users running at us.
  Sacha: All right. So, starter kit, then everybody gets into it, and then everybody starts talking about it because they're like, yeah, you know, it's great. You can specify things out of order. You don't have to remember what words come in, which order when you're completing things. Those of us who aren't on starter kits are like, yes, we should try that too. That's how it's done.
  Omar: Doom helped a lot to raise awareness and adoption.
  40:06 Personal packages and naming conventions
  Sacha: You've got a lot of other small packages. For something as small as block-undo, which you showed us, it really just fits in one screen. Is that something that you would set up as a different repository or just as a file within your current one?
  Omar: No, those are all in my user-lisp directory.
  Sacha: I have actually successfully used use package to grab stuff out of your user-lisp directory and use them in my config. Yeah, it works. I just say, all right, my load path is here where I've checked out your source code. It defines these commands. Then I can bind your functions to my shortcuts. Although, because your functions are named the way that I would expect Emacs functions to be named, I've been defaliasing them so that I don't accidentally say, oh yeah, that's totally built in when it isn't.
  Omar: Yeah, I'm inconsistent with these little packages in my user-lisp directory. In some of them, I do stick to the convention that the package name is a prefix for all the functions, and for some, I don't. For some, I just try to name them the way exactly what you said. Like, what would these be called if they were built into Emacs? Which means they don't share a consistent prefix often. I should probably make that more consistently use the package name as a prefix so that they're easier to dot.
  Sacha: Or I have another suggestion. You could get apply-kmacro-to-paragraph or whatever that is into core Emacs. That would be great for everyone.
  Omar: Yeah, maybe that one is useful enough. Some of these I don't use anymore because I think I've substituted them with workflows with Embark. For example, eval-region-advice. It bothered me that none of the evaluate commands are “do what you mean” in the most common sense in Emacs. The most common sense of do what I mean in Emacs is if the region is active, use the region. Otherwise, do the normal thing. All of the evaluate commands should evaluate the region if the region is active. So that's what this does. But I don't use that anymore, because to evaluate a region, I usually use embark-act e. What else is here?
  42:26 find-file-at-point and directory names
  Omar: Oh, some of these things are like tiny things that are almost invisible, like this. In Eshell buffers, By default, find-file-at-point doesn’t realize that if it sees the filename printed in an eshell buffer, it won't look at the prompt to figure out what directory it came from. If you type ls and you're in your current working directory, all of those listed files, the find-file-at-point guesses that they are files in the default directory, and that guess is correct. But if, further above, you had gone into a different directory, called ls there, then those files are no longer in what is now the default directory. So this just adds a little bit of smarts to find-file-at-point. It looks at the prior prompt to see what directory that was run in, and then tries to see if the files it sees there are in that directory. Of course, the only reason I want this is because I sometimes use embark-act on files I see written in the Eshell buffer.
  Sacha: I love this. I love how all these little bits of code show that at some point you were annoyed by a tiny, tiny problem and you're like, that's it, I'm just going to write some code and it's never going to be a problem again.
  43:49 The value of using Emacs’s APIs
  Omar: One thing I like about this is it also shows sticking to Emacs APIs. Embark uses find-file-at-point to guess what things are referred to files. I did this to improve the functionality of Embark in Eshell buffers, but what it really does is improve the functionality of find-file-at-point, which I hardly ever use directly. I almost always use it through Embark.
  Sacha: Send it upstream! Okay, so you use Emacs for working with a shell, working with your files, doing math, doing some programming as well. Are there unexpected things that you use Emacs for?
  Omar: I don't think so. Mostly I write. It's mostly writing prose. I think I was slightly misled about what a job in academia is like. I mostly write emails. That's the bulk of my job by the time consumed.
  44:56 org-ql and usual files
  Sacha: You have some shortcuts around org-ql for managing your agenda or other things.
  Omar: This notion of the usual files. I was often using org-ql to search this set of files: every file mentioned in a refile target, every file mentioned in a capture template, and every file agenda file. Here it is. So I thought that's what I want to search. I want to search every file I mentioned in a refile target, every agenda file, and every file that I mentioned in some template. That's what this does.
  Sacha: I don't know if you trust your hiding things enough for us to try that. Since you put so much work into it... Or do you want me to hide the screen first and then you can let me know when it's safe to look?
  Omar: No, no, that's fine. I can show you the censorship process. What I thought I would do is I could show you the... Wait, what is this? Why is that not an action? Oh, library. Oh, I have not loaded this. Yes, now it's loaded. Oh, so this should be... Why is this not recognizing org-ql usual files as a variable now that this is loaded?
  Sacha: Oh, great. I'm also open to debugging demonstrations live because that is something that a lot of people do.
  Omar: Sorry, I think it just hadn't loaded this file. Now I ran a command from here and now I should have a variable. Yes, I have a variable. So we can go to Customize.
  Omar: The ones that have sensitive information are tasks, home, health, Definitely work. Journal. I don't really mind people seeing my journal, but that's boring. There we go. Yeah. So now I got rid of all of the sensitive files. And so now I can show you. I usually just search through all of these files at once. So I had a list of things I wanted to tell you about.
  47:06 Shortcuts for org-ql search syntax
  Sacha: I should also point out that your config has some stuff for inserting things into the org-ql search syntax.
  Omar: You're extremely prepared for this chat. Yes, C-,has a little key map that will insert stuff like priority. Oh, I don't have, let me remove “Sacha”. Oh, yes, everything that I have with priorities is in one of the files I removed. I only use priorities for work.
  Sacha: Okay, gotcha.
  Omar: We could use to-dos.
  47:43 Org TODO states: TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE
  Sacha: I love that you have a to-do state called NOPE.
  Omar: It's for things that are cancelled, but I don't want to delete them yet. Actually, it's mainly there because when I archive them, I want to know that I had that task at some point, but decided not to do it.
  Sacha: Well, it's so much less verbose than CANCELLED, so I think I might actually just...
  Omar: For a long time, I was using monospace fonts, so I wanted to have everything fit in four letters. So I have... Yeah, all of my, I have TODO, WAIT, DONE, NOPE, and they're all four letters long.
  Sacha: Nope. Gotcha. Okay. So that's org-ql and that's your inserting thingy.
  48:26 The inserter macro
  Sacha: The other thing that I wanted to point out that your definition of the inserter was nice because it's a macro. So you have this thing that allows you to just define all these interactive functions. You can add it to the key map because the key map expects interactive functions. If people are watching, yeah, this is something you can do.
  Omar: I should tell you that there was actually a serious performance bug previously. What I had before this… This string is a keyboard macro that inserts those letters. It is extremely slow if you do it that way for some reason. I think org-ql searches after the T, after the O, after the D, after the O, after the colon. For some reason, that was extremely slow. So I switched to these lambdas that just call insert. That does it in a single step, and it's instantaneous. But my first instinct was, oh, well, this is a good use of keyboard macros. I'll just assign these to keyboard macros. It's not a good idea in this particular case.
  Sacha: I imagine there should be some kind of debouncing on org-ql to make it not do that if you're typing very quickly, but... I don't think there is.
  Omar: Let me see if... Maybe also do a longer one so it...
  Sacha: That's okay. I take your word for the bug that you ran into.
  Omar: I wanted to show you just because it just feels like a really long pause, but it didn't work right now and I don't know why not. That's okay.
  Sacha: Curse of the live demo. So that's inserter.
  50:05 luggage: generative art experiments
  Sacha: One thing that I definitely want to make sure we had time for was your little generative art experiment, luggage, because you're having fun with Emacs.
  Omar: Yes. Yeah. There are some people doing amazing generative... Oh my gosh. I do not even have it installed. Yeah. Let's... I forgot that we were going to do that. That's okay. But it should be easy. How is :vc used?
  Sacha: (:vc (:url …)).
  Omar: I have to go to a previous example to figure out.
  Sacha: I'm surprised you don't have a consult-line and then just embark-insert.
  Omar: I do that. I do that a lot. But I forgot this time.
  Sacha: Actually, looking at your config, I learned about consult-multi-occur because apparently there all these multi-buffer equivalents to the commands that I've been using. That is really useful for using stuff from buffers I'm not even looking at.
  Omar: Okay, load it.
  Sacha: Let's see if it actually can still do the thing. There we go. So you have some Emacs Lisp to generate this SVG. Yeah, and it's just got...
  Omar: And which other ones do I have? Luggage. There we go. Tubes. I think this one has some nice other color schemes. Classic? Classic is the one. Oh yeah, stained glasses is the one I wanted.
  Sacha: Nice. I wanted to mention it specifically because a lot of times people think, oh, Emacs is a text editor. But because it's also got support for SVG and other types of graphics, you can play around with it. Sometimes it's just doing it for fun like this, but also there might be some other visualizations that you can do with Emacs. That is actually pretty interesting.
  Omar: Yeah.
  Omar: Have you heard of this program?
  Sacha: No, I haven't come across it.
  Omar: There's an entire book with this title. So it's a single line of BASIC. 10 print. Oh, I'm not, I don't know BASIC, but the idea is like you randomly pick either forward slash or backslash.
  Sacha: Oh, yeah, yeah, that makes sense now.
  Omar: I'm sure this is not correct BASIC, but, you know, something like that. Yeah, I get the idea. Yeah. And that's what this does. And then you GOTO 10. It's like... It makes these elaborate mazes. It's an extremely simple program.
  Sacha: So this is the kind of stuff you do for fun. I mean, you probably do lots of other things for fun, too.
  Omar: Yeah. But this... No, that's not the buffer I wanted. Where is... Did I kill it? I killed it. Yeah, one of these I did. What is it? Dominoes. Yeah, this I did for a math talk I gave. It just produces random domino tilings of the board. I gave that talk from an Org file using Prot’s Logos package. I usually use PDF slides, but that time I wanted to use an Org mode buffer because I was going to run code on the computer. Like this, for example, generating random domino tilings.
  53:49 Teaching and Emacs
  Sacha: So you've given a number of talks. Do you also teach any courses?
  Omar: Yeah, I do teach both undergraduate and graduate math courses. Recently, mostly graduate math courses. But yeah, I really like teaching. You always learn something. Even the subjects that you think you know very well, teaching a course always teaches you something new.
  Sacha: Have you gotten students into Emacs?
  Omar: No, I don't even try. “I use this weird text editor Emacs, it's pretty cool, but it takes a while to learn. I'm not recommending it. I love it. If you do try to use it, you can ask me anything.”
  Sacha: Yeah, it's pretty hard. I know some professors are like, okay, this is what we're going to use for the course. But I imagine, depending on your subject matter, you might already have your hands full teaching the subject matter rather than adding it.
  Omar: Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. No, no. The students I try to talk to Emacs about are like the students that are writing their thesis with me. No, never in a course. I never mention it.
  54:53 The print10 generator
  Omar: Oh, there it is. In the docstring, I have the correct program in BASIC. The backslash and the forward slash are consecutive ASCII characters. 206 and 207. You add a random number between 0 and 1 to this one and then round to the nearest integer.
  Sacha: All right. You can get surprisingly interesting patterns out of it. That is also very cool. Fun with Emacs. This could definitely be like a zone screensaver if you wanted to.
  Omar: Yeah. I just thought it was really nice that Emacs displays SVGs natively. Those are very easy to generate by text.
  Sacha: Are there other interesting corners of your config that might not be immediately obvious to people who are just reading the source code? What other workflow things are nice for you?
  Omar: Sorry, what were you saying?
  Sacha: I can also start just occurring through my config for all the things that I've stolen from your config in the last two days.
  Omar: I don't think I have any concrete idea of what to show now. I think we've covered most of the ones I wanted.
  56:23 arXiv
  Omar: As an academic, I deal a lot with preprints on the arXiv, so I have a little library that will show me the PDF or copy the URL. I like personalized software because it does exactly what you needed to do. I noticed that there were a bunch of tags on Mastodon that related to archive papers. Often when I was in a Mastodon buffer, I wanted to do something to the paper mentioned at point. That's one of the acceptable inputs for my arXiv library. So, for example, this is an arXiv link and I can ask it to show me. So that's a bug. This should definitely have visual-line-mode activated. I can just quickly read the abstract without visiting the archive website.
  Omar: Or I can open the PDF.
  Sacha: Very cool. Very convenient.
  Omar: Yeah, so. I like that in Emacs you can do all these personal things that you'll need but are not likely to be needed by many people. They're just easy to do. Vim is also very configurable, but the Vim script language is sort of awkward, so I never did anywhere close to the amount of configuration in Vim that I do in Emacs. That's why I would never go back to Vim now. I would miss all the stuff I've written.
  58:29 Toggle keymap
  Sacha: One of the little personal customizations that I liked reading in your config was the fact that you have a key map just for toggling various things like the mode line or the header, you know? Yeah. You want to tell us more about your awesome key map for that?
  Omar: You don't need them that often, so it's OK if it's under a long prefix. It's just tedious when you want one of them, to have to type the command name. It also helps me remember which things I commonly toggle. I often have to hit C-h here and see what I have available to toggle. I don't know why toggle is a category for commands, because obviously these are very disparate commands that do very different things. But they're things that you occasionally turn on or off, and it's convenient to have them all together. Choosing the letters here was very difficult. Everybody wanted to have the same letters. L was for visual lines. P for variable pitch mode because I think of them as proportional fonts. It took a lot of tweaking. I'm sure if I looked through the GitHub history, you'd see a lot of tiny changes just changing the binding of one of these.
  Sacha: I find it difficult to get the hang of new key bindings, especially for things that I'm not using often enough for the key bindings to stick.
  Omar: I often forget that I have a key binding for something.
  Sacha: So how do you deal with that? I mean, yes, you stick it in an Embark keymap and you just bring it up to the target.
  Omar: Yeah, I do use Embark bindings in keymap a lot to just explore keymaps and remind myself. I don't need to memorize a binding. I just need to remember that I have a binding. If I have a binding, I can find it later. But sometimes I don't remember that I have a binding, so when I'm looking at my configuration, I'll just re-scan what things I have bound from time to time. Mostly I stick with just… I know under what the start of the prefix is, and then I'll just use Embark to remind me of what I have there. Which is nice, because you can also see the docstrings.
  1:00:54 isearch-delete-wrong
  Sacha: I like how you try to use some of the conventions to make it somewhat easier to remember. One of the key bindings that you have that I want to point out, because I think it's a useful technique, is you have an isearch-delete-wrong.
  Omar: Right. isearch keeps track of where the last portion of the search string that matched is. You can see it highlighted in the buffer, right? So this means it found up to “del”, and then it didn't find "tok". isearch-delete-wrong will just delete that entire part.
  Sacha: So that way, you can just restart from what actually exists. Combining that with the fact that you've got your search whitespace regular expression to be a wildcard means you can...
  Omar: Oh yes, this I stole from Prot. He recommends this.
  Sacha: Yeah, which means you can use isearch to find things, even if there's other stuff in between them. When you can't find something, you can restart.
  Omar: I'm not sure... I'm not sure if this is the best setting. I want to be able to search this way sometimes, and sometimes with whitespaces treated literally, so I should keep statistics on how often I actually have to turn this off. It might be that for me the better default is the other way around. You can turn it off with M-s SPC. Match spaces literally. isearch-toggle-lax-whitespace. I don't know. Maybe for me the default would be to treat whitespace literally, because I find that if I have a space in my search string, I often want to turn on the literal matching. But it's probably still this is the better default. I think I do it less than half of the time I have a space. But it's not that far from half, it feels. I don't have statistics.
  Sacha: How do you even collect statistics on this? Aside from making a little note every time you're like, oh, I didn't like this.
  Omar: I mean, I would instrument isearch somehow, but I haven't thought about that problem.
  1:03:14 isearch - continue from the beginning of the match
  Omar: One nice thing I do with isearch is another one of those things I got from Vim. isearch, by default, leaves you at the end of the match. I almost always want to be at the beginning of the match, because that's what I got used to in Vim. I think it must be here. I have something exit at start. I tell isearch to exit at the beginning of the match. The way you use this is you install it as a hook, I believe. Is that right?
  Sacha: You seem to have options.
  Omar: Yes.
  Sacha: I see. So S-RET lets you exit at the end, and then by default... Yeah, which is Emacs default.
  Omar: But I find that the better default is to exit at the beginning. Yes, and that's the whole point of that. For example, if I want to mark until that parentheses, then I would search for the parentheses, and I don't want to include the parentheses. That's not a good example. But with a word, it's often like, I'm looking for a word, but I want to highlight up to the end of the word. It's just like, if you want to mark a region from point to some search term, with the Emacs default, what you have to search for is the thing that is at the end of the part you want to match. But often I want to say until like the thing that starts here. It's just my brain works that way. So for me, it's much better to exit at the start of the search. Which means I don't understand isearch on other people's Emacs. It just leaves the point in the wrong location all the time. If you're going quickly, you won't realize that it's just a mess. It does mean that I can only use isearch if it's configured this way.
  Sacha: Well, that's the thing about Emacs, right? Once you've got it set up, you've got to use your config because everything else just feels off. It just feels weird.
  Omar: Yeah, that's right.
  Sacha: All right.
  1:05:12 Using keymaps to remember sets of commands
  Sacha: Going back to the toggle keymap, @gcentauri says, I'm not lazy enough. I just M-x orderless consult, find the thing that I'm toggling, which I do a lot also. I just use M-x for all the things because I can just specify parts of it.
  Omar: There's some toggles I don't have in the keymap because I use them very rarely, but yeah. What I like also about the keymap is that it's a place to remind myself of the toggle commands. I often just do this. What was the thing? I haven't used that in a while.
  Sacha: Having a shorter list, it means you can just use recognition instead of recall, right?
  Omar: It's short enough that I can read through it.
  Sacha: I like that a lot. I like the fact that with that Embark C-h screen, you can use completion even to select the commands from that subset.
  1:06:04 Other things from the config
  Sacha: A couple of other things that I picked up from your config: There’s your dired-open-externally, so it makes it very easy to open something in an external application.
  Omar: And it just calls Embark open externally. This function moved back and forth from different places. I think embark-open-externally used to be in consult. Daniel said he felt it didn't fit in with consult. Embark consult would put it in keymaps. He was right. Consult didn't have a very clear personality at the beginning. It was sort of like a grab bag of commands. Eventually, what gelled is that a command should be in Consult if there is a useful way to write previews for it. So, preview is the distinguishing feature of what is a good fit for Consult. Now, I hope Daniel would agree with that. That seems to be the criteria now. That's great. I absolutely love preview. That's one thing I miss a little bit with org-ql. I use org-ql mostly to search through Org files, but the preview is kind of manual in that I use Embark to do it. If I want to preview a command, I just use Embark to do what I mean.
  Sacha: Yeah, that's a good idea. I should try that.
  Omar: So any command that doesn't have a preview, I mean does, you can just use embark-dwim, it'll complete the command for you.
  Sacha: Okay, the kid has arrived, so I have to go off to lunch. But thank you so much for the quick peek into your config. I'll put the transcript together and then people can do that. But in the meantime, people can look at your config for all sorts of wonderful goodness.
  Omar: Thanks.
  Sacha: Thanks to everyone for hanging out. Looks like the isearch tip was popular, so you might see a lot of people getting that from your config. Anyway, thank you so much for this. I’ll see you around.
  Omar: Thanks, Sacha. This was fantastic.
  Sacha: Alright, nice.
  Chat
  
  takoverflow: Hello Sacha and Omar, thanks for this chat! :)
  
  CharlieBaker707: Definitely going to add the keycast transparency to my config! I've been wanting that for a while!
  
  gcentauri: i'm still a minibuffer noob - its been nil my whole Emacs life!
  
  CharlieBaker707: recursive minibuffers is amazing. biggest win for me is that it lets you select things and paste them in, like from a completing-read's history for example
  
  gcentauri: haha apparently i do have recursive minibuffers set to t, along with my Vertico config 🤔
  
  Zor_org: was there a time you wanted multiple cursors?
  
  Zor_org: if so, was there any workaround you thought of with embark or kmacro?
  
  gcentauri: keyboard macros are a fun mini-game
  
  CharlieBaker707: I have embark-act set up to expand in the same way expand-region does, but with embark's type awareness. It's also easy to add a contract function.
  
  CharlieBaker707: I also have a completing-read interface and a transient menu to jump directly to one of many types under point that I'm seeiking.
  
  CharlieBaker707: For sure!
  
  CharlieBaker707: I was going to create a tiny extension, but I can open a PR in embark!
  
  Zor_org: even more crazy with elfeed 4.0
  
  gcentauri: I found Orderless and Embark through Daniel's suggestions in his packages :)
  
  Zor_org: if emacs gets canvas patch soon, more things can be done in luggage (lik gifs and image frame as well)
  
  gcentauri: i am not lazy enough, i just M-x orderless consult find the thing i'm toggling
  
  PuercoPop: I didn't knew isearch had a built-in way to fix the isearch quirk. Now I can remove the snippet I use the implement it that I cribbed from the internets
  
  gcentauri: yeah adding something to a keymap you make does help recall
  
  PuercoPop: The isearch quirk is a common complaint from what I understand
  
  gcentauri: yeah i'm gonna use that iserach bit
  View Org source for this post
  
  You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
3. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Breaking the music supply constraint rss
  | I just cancelled my music subscriptions to save some cash and wanted to share the self-hosted music supply chain that replaced them. A nice side effect of this setup is breaking the constraint of a finite supply catalog that is tailored for the masses:
  1. 2 x DGX Spark linked via ConnectX 7 running Plex and multiple Ace-Step 1.5 XL models in parallel for music generation with GePa prompt optimization. Also holds my organic music that the models can remix. TODO: a reinforcement learning from human feedback interface.
  2. iPad Pro running Prism as a Plex client for bitperfect and sample rate-matched audio.
  3. Schiit stack -> Hifiman Arya Stealths
  This effectively gives me an infinite supply of music for free, that is personalized and private. It's immensely satisfying listening to Shrimp Bizkit and Phlegminem on repeat, I much prefer this to the organic music created after 2011. My only problem is the loss of community, I have noone to share my new favorite songs and artists with because they're generated for me. If anyone wants to hop on to my Plex share to discuss, let me know! submitted by /u/entsnack
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
4. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code rss
  
  | I guess the lawyers are sharpening their pencils already... submitted by /u/DeltaSqueezer
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
5. 🔗 sacha chua :: living an awesome life Yay Emacs 32: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: May I recommend... rss
  In this livestream, I chatted with Prot about the May 2026 Emacs Carnival theme "May I recommend". It was a joint braindump of quick recommendations for people at different points in their Emacs journey, building on our conversation about newbies/starter kits and the newcomer experience all the way up to power users, Emacs Lisp coders, and package developers.
  
  View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me.
  
  Related links
  2026-05-27-03 Emacs skills -- emacs.jpeg
  
  You can add the iCal for upcoming Yay Emacs episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/live/upcoming-livestreams.ics
  
  Find more Yay Emacs posts or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/topic/live
  Chapters
  
  Transcript
  
  Chat
  Chapters
  
  0:00 Opening
  
  2:27 Tip: Less is more. Start small.
  
  4:07 Tip: Start with what is built in
  
  4:27 Skill: Figuring out the words to look for
  
  6:25 Tip: Be okay with starting over
  
  8:26 Skill: Learning to discover
  
  8:42 Tip: Read manuals for fun
  
  10:16 Tip: Use Emacs bookmarks to save your place in the manual
  
  10:43 Tip: Generally, investing time into navigation and note-taking workflows pays off
  
  12:19 Skill: Keyboard macros
  
  12:53 Skill: Modifying the behavior of code via hooks and advice
  
  13:15 Tip: Learn to think in terms of buffers and windows
  
  14:07 Skill: Reading the source code; Tip: Just jump in
  
  15:33 Tip: edebug is great for exploring code
  
  16:26 Tip: Reading tests can help you understand code, too.
  
  17:02 Skill: Idiomatic Elisp
  
  17:17 Tip: Write tests.
  
  17:52 Tip: When writing Emacs Lisp that expects a list, use plurals
  
  18:59 Tip: When naming, be verbose rather than terse
  
  19:46 Tip: Iterate on your workflow in small steps
  
  20:20 Tip: Make things more automatic, and use context-sensitive clues
  
  24:48 Skill: Thinking in terms of elements
  
  26:16 Skill: Reading other people's configuration and adapting ideas to yours
  
  27:07 Tip: Start with focusing on just one thing
  
  27:33 Blog posts and videos are useful
  
  28:09 Tip: Take notes as you learn, and ideally, share them too.
  
  28:54 Tip: Accept being a beginner.
  
  31:16 Group: Power users
  
  32:13 Tip: Browse through package lists
  
  32:25 Tip: Dive deeply into the packages you have: customization options, code, etc.
  
  32:41 Tip: find-library gets you to the source code, occur can help you browse it
  
  33:29 Tip: You can also browse through Customize
  
  33:48 Tip: Have fun with randomness and serendipity
  
  34:32 Tip: Check out people's workflow descriptions and stories
  
  35:42 Resources: manuals, Mastering Emacs, Emacs Lisp Elements
  
  37:29 Skill: Figuring out what's possible and making a habit of writing tiny functions
  
  37:45 Skill: Being mindful of what you do over and over again
  
  38:26 Tip: Keyboard macros can help you jumpstart custom functions
  
  39:11 Tip: Use C-h k (describe-key) to describe shortcuts or menu items
  
  40:04 Tip: You can set up M-x to show keyboard shortcuts too (Marginalia?)
  
  41:26 Resource: Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters
  
  41:50 Tip: Old tutorials can still be useful, although don't treat them as the sole source of truth (things may have changed since then)
  
  42:55 Skill: Finding preferred resources
  
  44:12 Tip: If you find your tribe, look for ways to keep in touch with them
  
  45:00 Tip: Manage unequal RSS frequencies with folders or tags
  
  46:33 Tip: Doing more things in Emacs has compounding benefits
  
  48:31 Tip: Learn to think of it as just text
  
  49:46 Tip: Take notes along the way
  
  50:16 Tip: Explore different ways to navigate and act on things
  
  51:09 Tip: Learn to combine different building blocks
  
  52:47 Tip: Get the hang of keybinding conventions
  
  56:06 Tip: Use which-key for keybinding help
  
  57:41 Tip: Figure out your ergonomics
  Transcript
  
  Expand this to read the transcript
  
  0:00 Opening
  Sacha: My typing is still going to be very loud, but that's okay.
  Prot: That's part of the charm.
  Sacha: Okay. All right. Here we go. Let's go live. Hello, everyone. This is Yay Emacs [32]. I forgot which number. Anyhow, I'm here with Prot because it's Emacs Carnival for May 2026, and the theme is "May I Recommend" because I like puns and couldn't pass up the chance to say "May." So "May I recommend..." is our topic, and our goal for this one is to brain dump a whole bunch of things that people might find useful in their Emacs learning journey. We've already talked about newbies and starter kits in the previous two conversations we've had in Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs. This time, we're going to focus more on *users* who are getting started with... They've decided this is going to be their everyday tool. They want to learn more about keyboard shortcuts and finding their way around, building the habits, finding their preferred resources. *Power users*, maybe, who are starting to look at different packages, these are maybe the people who are saying, okay, maybe let's try this package for working with Org Mode in addition to the basic stuff, or let's try doing email in Emacs. *Customizers*, who are beginning to get into Emacs Lisp to write functions. This is where you start to customize it a lot more to your tastes and your workflows. *Contributors*, people who are sharing their source code, maybe even turning it into packages, participating mailing lists and discussions. So this whole range of people all working on different skills at different levels. What I think we're going to do with this is we're just going to braindump a whole bunch of recommendations. You're welcome to ask questions, and I'll ask you questions as well. We'll just untangle everything and organize everything afterwards.
  Prot: That's great.
  Sacha: There we go. In this list of skills that people can develop, are you thinking of other skills that aren't on this list yet that do make a big difference to how people use and learn Emacs?
  Prot: I need to enlarge my screen a little bit. I think what you have there is good.
  2:27 Tip: Less is more. Start small.
  Prot: What I had in mind also is more of a meta-point, or more general thing, like an approach style, which is "less is more," if I were to condense it. Start small. Make sure you make it work when it's small. Extend it from there. Don't start big and try to simplify it, because that doesn't work.
  Sacha: I grouped that idea under managing time, notes, and attention and also breaking things down, because the overwhelming nature of things is something a lot of people struggle with, both Emacs and elsewhere. Even just that meta-skill of saying, "Okay, this is a small chunk that I'm going to focus on because I know that's what my brain can handle" versus "let's architect this entire thing" and you're six hours down the line and you're nowhere near the thing that you want it to do.
  Prot: And of course Emacs invites you for that because it's like, here are like a hundred powerful tools for you to combine in ways that nobody else has thought of before, right? So it's like asking you to do that, but it's a trap. You don't want to go down that route. Or at least don't go there too early.
  Sacha: Managing the rabbit hole. Yes, there are going to be a lot of temptations and some of those temptations are quite legitimate. Yeah, you do have to figure this part out in order to get this other thing that you wanted working. But sometimes it's just a trap.
  Prot: Yeah.
  Sacha: So that's managing. What other meta-skills here should we talk about as a framework so that when we dive into the specifics, we know we're covering a lot of the ground people need?
  4:07 Tip: Start with what is built in
  Prot: Not so much a meta skill, but consistent with this line of reasoning is as a good heuristic, start with what is built in and extend from there, because usually what is built in will give you a baseline of functionality. It works with a "less is more" approach.
  4:27 Skill: Figuring out the words to look for
  Sacha: I feel that sometimes figuring out the words to look for, finding out what it might be called in Emacs source or in the built-in packages... That's something that's hard to develop unless you're reading manuals and reading other people's posts because the terminology can be quite arcane.
  Prot: Oh yeah, for sure.
  Sacha: Getting a sense of what might be built in and what it might be called and where to look for it, I think, is definitely a skill.
  Prot: One good way to think of this is, what do I want to do? In the most simple form, if you forget about Emacs for a second, and you're like, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to write a blog, or I'm trying to deal with email correspondence, or I'm trying to manage my TODOs. In its most simplest form, how can I solve this problem? That can already help you formulate the questions.
  Sacha: Formulating the questions is actually really hard. Sometimes people don't even notice that there's a question that they can ask, and they don't know what kinds of solutions might address that problem actually. They get distracted by A, but actually it's B that will solve the problem. Considering the different kinds of solutions that can address the same problem, developing a sense of which ways are easier to do the Emacs way versus harder to do. Why make something really complicated when a built-in package or whatever can solve that problem in a more elegant way? All of these things require the development of intuition.
  Prot: Yes, yes, and with some experience, of course, that helps, for sure. But then it's the other, which you can also consider as a meta skill.
  6:25 Tip: Be okay with starting over
  Prot: I believe there was also a point of this, be okay with declaring bankruptcy in Emacs. Bankruptcy, I think... the essence of that is not really much bankruptcy, but be okay with trying something, which is an experiment, and then learning something from it, distilling the essence of that, and then trying something else. I think a sense of experimentation will help you build that skill of, okay, now I can intuitively figure out what works and what doesn't work.
  Sacha: I think that's a really interesting point because sometimes you get very attached to "there's this thing that I've started to build" and then you start bolting more and more things onto it, when really, sometimes the prototype is your way of understanding the problem. Then you take it all out and you say, okay, now that I understand a little bit more, what can I make? How do I change my workflow with that new understanding? Sometimes it's as extensive as declaring Emacs bankruptcy and starting again from scratch. Sometimes it's just maybe "The approach that I'm taking is not a fruitful one. I should go try something else."
  Prot: Yeah, exactly. You can only have that feedback loop if you try, so trial and error is the way to go.
  Sacha: @gcentauri has a question or a comment about discoverability, figuring out how to navigate Emacs in order to discover things. Where would we put that in this skill? This is figuring out the words as well, right? Isn't it?
  Prot: Yeah, by the way, I'm in the chat here.
  Sacha: Where did you read that?
  Prot: I see it here. It was off my screen. I see it now. And of course Christian... I'm reading the temperatures in Western Europe. They are terrible. Yes, I know.
  Sacha: Yeah, big heat wave.
  8:26 Skill: Learning to discover
  Sacha: So, figuring out discoverability, learning how to navigate Emacs. Emacs is lovely. It's self-documented, everything at your fingertips, but you've got to know how to get those fingers on them.
  8:42 Tip: Read manuals for fun
  Prot: The manual helps. It will present some of that. But of course, you have to read the manual. So you are in a situation where you have to have the skill of reading the manuals in order to discover, but to discover... So yeah, it's a tricky thing. You have to know where the manuals are.
  Sacha: Yeah, and you have to be unintimidated by them, I think. I got into it easy because I've always been used to reading books above my level. Even as a kid, I was reading my sister's data structures and algorithms books. I didn't understand anything the first time around. But after nine times through, you start to understand some of the concepts and how they go together. The more you read something, the more of those concepts start to make sense to you. You read it, you read other things around it or related to it, and then the jargon becomes less impenetrable. You begin to understand it. So one of my recommendations is I recommend reading the Emacs manual, the Org manual, all these book-shaped things for fun. Even if you don't think you're going to immediately use 90% of the things, every time you read it, you're going to learn something.
  Prot: Yeah. Plus, of course, you will know you are an Emacs user if you are reading manuals for fun.
  Sacha: How else are you going to find out about Org spreadsheets and whatnot, right? It's just too big to fit in your brain.
  Prot: Correct. Yeah, that's really good. You could even make it a habit of, okay, this day I will read one chapter from the manual.
  10:16 Tip: Use Emacs bookmarks to save your place in the manual
  Prot: Actually, to say something on this, if you learn about the bookmark mechanism of Emacs, you can bookmark info manuals. So if you are reading the manual from inside of Emacs, you can use the bookmark facility to be like, last point in the Emacs manual. You could have a bookmark that is a rolling bookmark, right? So you could be updating it whenever you go to the next chapter. This way, little by little, you can read the manual.
  10:43 Tip: Generally, investing time into navigation and note-taking workflows pays off
  Sacha: In general, figuring out your navigation and note-taking workflows so that they're super convenient for you, whether that's Denote or Org Mode Capture or whatever else that you're using... As you read, taking notes on the things that you find interesting in a way that makes it easy to jump back to more information is definitely worth the upfront investment of learning.
  Prot: Yeah, 100%.
  Sacha: @gcentauri confirms they are actually a true blue Emacs geek. "Was reading the manual right before bed and came across the forms library. No idea it existed." Read stuff, make it easier for you to jump back to the place that you left off or the parts that you found interesting. That's a great recommendation.
  Prot: Just to add another metaskill related to this. Don't read it before going to bed because if you discover something useful, you are not going to sleep.
  Sacha: I think the idea there is get really good at telling your brain, yes, that's really cool, but if you stay up until 1, you are going to regret it. So just add a TODO and let it go.
  Prot: Exactly.
  Sacha: This may have happened to me a number of times.
  Prot: Yeah, yeah, same. So, only read the manual in the morning or when you wake up.
  Sacha: Are there other metaskills that are not yet captured in this or do we start digging into each of these skills?
  Prot: I say we dig in and if we think of something we can always add it later.
  Sacha: All right. What strikes your attention here? Which of these things?
  Prot: No, no. You can go wherever. I don't mind. Anything will do well.
  12:19 Skill: Keyboard macros
  Sacha: There's a whole lot of stuff here in the customizer, packager thing around modifying or gluing together code that is not something easy for people to pick up because they're just not used to it in other programming languages or platforms or whatever. Things like: you could use keyboard macros to cobble together a quick workflow. You don't even have to write a big function. Just developing the intuition that, oh, this is a set of repeatable functions or repeatable commands is one thing,
  12:53 Skill: Modifying the behavior of code via hooks and advice
  Sacha: all the way to "this is how I use hooks and advice to either modify the behavior of something where the person who coded it has anticipated that a hook will be needed here, or advice in case they didn't plan for it at all." You're just going to override things yourself. How do people develop this sense of what's possible and how to do things?
  13:15 Tip: Learn to think in terms of buffers and windows
  Prot: Yeah, it's a difficult skill but it's something you develop by experience. The point to remember is that in Emacs, at its core, you have buffers and everything is a buffer and buffers are displayed in windows If you think in terms of that abstraction, something like a keyboard macro becomes a tool that will jump between buffers, will switch windows. It has no problem doing any of that. You are not limited in your thought to, okay, I have to work exactly where I am right now. I think that's a general approach that goes very far with what you do. Of course, when you are thinking of the advice and the hook, that I think is a little bit more advanced because you need to also have the skills to write advice. With hooks, maybe not. But for advice, you will need to understand exactly what is happening.
  14:07 Skill: Reading the source code; Tip: Just jump in
  Sacha: I have definitely jumped ahead here because this also requires the skill of reading people's code in order to find out there is a hook or there is some advice that you can do, or there's a variable and this is how you can let bind it to temporarily change its value during this part of the code. Let's talk about reading source. What sorts of things help people develop that skill of reading the source code?
  Prot: You have to just jump in at some point. Like, you might do it by accident when you are in a help buffer and either you misclick S, which goes to the source, or you follow the link from above. But anyway, the point is it's a good skill to just, a good habit rather, just jump in and try to read it even if you don't know any programming. Try to read it as if it's English and try to see what you can understand. And of course, some functions will be extremely difficult. Others will be more straightforward. So I think eventually by exposure through osmosis, as it were, you will already learn something.
  Sacha: I love the fact that our functions in variable names are often very long and it makes sense in English because we're not trying to squeeze into some very concise, very terse convention. Just put a full sentence in there. It's fine. We just use completion anyway. It's all good.
  15:33 Tip: edebug is great for exploring code
  Sacha: One of the tips that I'll put in here because people sometimes miss it is the power of Edebug. If people haven't come across Edebug yet, it's great because you can interactively step through what the code is actually doing and you can evaluate what the value is of this variable at this point. And every so often I had to go into the Edebug menu bar and remind myself, okay, you can set conditional breakpoints and all these other things that I have to remember that exist and can be used. But Edebug, if you're going to learn Emacs Lisp, learn Edebug.
  Prot: Edebug is really powerful for sure and it's especially useful when you have functions that are relatively long. I mean what they are doing like they have a lot of steps and you have to understand the flow. Like if it's a very short function maybe you don't benefit all that much from eDebug but in practice you will need it. It's very powerful.
  16:26 Tip: Reading tests can help you understand code, too.
  Sacha: And the other thing I want to point out is that sometimes packages have tests and reading the tests can give you even more of an idea of how this function is supposed to behave. It's not always the case, but when there are tests, they're great.
  Prot: In an ideal world, we will update our tests.
  Sacha: Alright, so that's reading source code. There's so much that's really interesting to read. Sometimes you come across interesting idioms for Emacs Lisp and you're like, oh yeah, that's a great way to iterate through all the buffers and match a certain thing, whatever.
  17:02 Skill: Idiomatic Elisp
  Sacha: And so if you're in this customizer phase of things and you want to move to the contributor level, learning idiomatic Elisp is definitely like, okay, it makes things a lot easier.
  17:17 Tip: Write tests.
  Sacha: Charlie says, "Edebug and ERT tests change the way I develop Elisp. No longer flying blind." Yeah, great. In particular, I tend to break things whenever I make changes, so it's really nice to be able to say, okay, I'm going to nail down this behavior, at least for now. With a little bit of thinking, sometimes you can write tests for things that you would do interactively. So you can test a whole lot more because you have buffers and windows than you might in other languages.
  Prot: Yeah, correct, correct. And you get to see it live.
  17:52 Tip: When writing Emacs Lisp that expects a list, use plurals
  Prot: Just to say on this point of when you are going through the tests and through everything, one basic thing which is in idiomatic Emacs Lisp is when you are writing the parameters of a function, if you are expecting a list, you use plural. For example, you have a function that goes through buffers. Your parameter is just called buffers. That alone should tell you that it's a list of stuff. You don't say "list of buffers," right? That's superfluous. You just say buffers. This automatically means it's a list. So that's very common. You will see this a lot.
  Sacha: Here I am, I've been calling my variables buffer-list. Sometimes figuring out what I should call a function or call an argument is a bit challenging, but I figure I'll just name it whatever comes to mind and then I can defalias it or do a search and replace afterwards.
  18:59 Tip: When naming, be verbose rather than terse
  Prot: When in doubt, of course, be verbose rather than terse.
  Sacha: Oh, yes. When you find yourself still using the wrong words to try to find it again, just add more aliases and you'll find it eventually.
  Prot: More verbose. More words. All the words.
  Sacha: All the words. All right. What are the things here do we want to dig into? Adopting is always an interesting challenge and it's a challenge at all levels here, right? From the user trying to figure out "How do I remember to use this keyboard shortcut?" to "I've written this new function, it's great, but I have to remember to use it." Do you have any recommendations around changing the workflow?
  19:46 Tip: Iterate on your workflow in small steps
  Prot: In accordance with what I said in the beginning, iteratively. Try to memorize one. You have this new function that, let's say, streamlines how you list files in a directory, whatever, I don't know. Use it. Don't have all 10 functions and try to remember them. Just use one. After two weeks, use the next one. After four weeks, use the third one, and so on. Little by little, make it something that you just do automatically, you don't think about it, with the recognition that you want to remember them all.
  20:20 Tip: Make things more automatic, and use context-sensitive clues
  Sacha: In fact, going on that point of automaticity, I also like making sure this stuff happens without me having to think about it. If there's a hook that I can take advantage of to just have it automatically turned on, or if there's a context menu I can add it to so that I know, okay, if I do this, then I'll see it in a shorter list. I can get to it more easily instead of having to remember how to find it and all these details. All these little ways to make it easier for myself to automatically enjoy the improvements, or at least have a chance of finding it again.
  Prot: Yeah, yeah. This is in the spirit of prefix keys, with the help of the which-key package, for example, or what Embark is doing. Of course, there are different approaches. Maybe you want to set up a transient and in the given mode, you just type question mark, for example, and it breaks up your transient with what you want to do. There are various strategies you can go about to do something like that. I lost your audio, just to say. Yeah, no problem. Let's see. Of course I can sing in the meantime, but I don't think the audience will like it. Let's see. Yeah, no problem. No stress. Of course we could do this. Don't forget that there was a time in history where cinema thrived with technology like this. So it will work. Okay, I can read a little bit from the chat. So something I love doing is after I've learned that one function at the late...
  Sacha: Can you hear me now? No. Test. Okay, okay, okay. Woohoo! Successful panicking. Alright. Great. Great. Magic? Something is happening? I don't know what is happening. My video is less important. It's fine. You may continue. Oh yeah, for sure.
  24:48 Skill: Thinking in terms of elements
  Sacha: Even just thinking, okay, here are the elements that it can work on and here are the actions that I want to associate with those elements. I guess it starts with the intuition of what are the things that I can address. And what I do is I just look at the embark source code and I'm like, oh yeah, okay, Org headings, that makes sense, and variables and all that stuff. I always like looking at people's setups. Okay, this one says you are now too quiet. Can you say something? Okay, okay, this is definitely a me problem. Hang on a second. Oh, okay, okay, okay, I think... Ah, technology. Why is it so fun? Test. Test. No, this is not right. No, no, no.
  Prot: Let me know if you can hear me now. And of course, in the meantime, I can comment on the weather. I don't know if I can be heard. But in Western Europe, the temperatures are record high. And here in the mountain of Cyprus, it's like 20 degrees Celsius max.
  Sacha: Okay. So did you hear any of the stream? Is Prot's audio okay now? You've got to keep talking, I guess.
  Prot: Yeah.
  Sacha: Oh, my goodness.
  Prot: It's completely different.
  26:16 Skill: Reading other people's configuration and adapting ideas to yours
  Prot: "We can hear him loud and clear." Wonderful.
  Sacha: Back to braindumping. Very good. So we talked about Embark and other things and practices and workflows. I learned by reading other people's configurations, but it does take a fair bit of intuition in the first place to realize this part of the configuration means this, and how to adapt that into my own workflow. Is there a way for people to develop that aside from just reading tons and tons of configs?
  Prot: At some point you just have to try. You just have to be like, "Okay, this package everybody raves about, they must be doing something good. I don't know what that is, so I have to try it and see for myself."
  27:07 Tip: Start with focusing on just one thing
  Prot: Then for something like Embark... We are just using it as an example, but I think it's a good example for other things. Something like Embark can do a million things, but you can also use it for just one thing, right? Find the one thing that you can use it for, use it for that, then figure out what is the second thing and take it from there. The same can be said for Org and all sorts of packages.
  27:33 Blog posts and videos are useful
  Sacha: I find that sometimes videos are useful for it in terms of seeing it in context, but on the other hand, sometimes I don't have the patience to watch a whole video. I particularly enjoy the posts that are both blog posts plus videos, so I can just skim the blog post, copy the code without having to pause and type things in manually, but also see how it works by somebody showing me how they use something.
  Prot: Yes. That's the idea.
  28:09 Tip: Take notes as you learn, and ideally, share them too.
  Sacha: I do want to sneak in this recommendation to share. I keep beating this drum. But whenever I write about something that I've learned, I always end up getting these comments from people who point out other things that I should check out too. So I highly recommend, whether you're a beginner or whether you're a power user of Emacs, try blogging. I am happy to add people's blogs to Planet Emacs Life so people can read your stuff. All the notes are great for both crystallizing what you know as well as possibly inviting other people to share other tips and comments that point out that what you just worked on is actually a built-in package and all you have to do is configure this. Happens to me often.
  28:54 Tip: Accept being a beginner.
  Prot: And what can help with blogging, especially once you are blogging about something that you know has a very high skill level, is to approach it in a diary-like way, where it's like, today I learned about such and such. I am not an expert, I am learning, and this is fun. That's your blog post. You don't have to present yourself as the foremost expert on the matter, because then of course you will have to wait many years to write that blog post.
  Sacha: I think that goes under this separate intuition thing for mindset and accepting the fact that no matter how many years of Emacs experience you have, you're going to be a beginner in 90% of the things that Emacs can do. So we can totally just accept the beginner's mind. There's no need to worry about imposter syndrome because we're all like this. We're all figuring things out. If you want, you can put in a disclaimer. You can say, "I'm totally a beginner. Read this for the idea and not the Emacs Lisp style," if you're embarrassed, you're self-conscious about sharing your code. But yeah, we're all just starting out, essentially. I like the fact that people in the community are so accessible. There's no one really saying, oh, I'm an expert. You should do it. You should do it this way and only this way, because we're all aware that again, we've done it this way, but there are probably five or six other implementations that could be even better that are really out there.
  Prot: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
  Sacha: Charlie says, "The leverage of blogging is unique in the Emacs community. Incredibly supportive, knowledgeable, and social group of people." That's another encouragement to go try it. That is all good. In fact, there are a few days left in this May carnival for "May I Recommend." If other people have recommendations, I'd love to hear about them too. Okay, so let's talk about... Actually, what do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about?
  Prot: Let's go and do something with the power users.
  31:16 Group: Power users
  Prot: With the power users, of course, you have a group that is, I would think, in some ways more diverse. Because of course there are different ways to become a power user. One, for example, is using Org more; another is using it as an IDE. So the common thread I would say here is that you are the kind of person who is digging deep. That's what you are as a power user. So if you want to become a power user, you have embedded as skills reading manuals and checking the source code, that sort of thing.
  Sacha: At this point, you're like, "Emacs is going to be my tool. There's a lot of depth to it." And this is where you start reading, okay, "How do I use Org Mode?" Or "How do I set up my IDE so that it's just the way that I want it?"
  32:13 Tip: Browse through package lists
  Sacha: For fun, I will sometimes look through the package lists just to see what's out there that I can easily reuse. But often, it isn't even a matter of adding additional packages to your configuration.
  32:25 Tip: Dive deeply into the packages you have: customization options, code, etc.
  Sacha: It could just be diving deeply into the ones that you do already have, looking for options, looking for little things that you can toggle on and off, or considering how the different functions can be integrated into your workflow.
  32:41 Tip: find-library gets you to the source code, occur can help you browse it
  Prot: And to this end, I will add something that I do frequently because it combines the elements of what we have already covered, which is M-x find-library. You select the package you are interested in. You go there, then you do M-x occur. And you search for defcustom with a parenthesis in front. "(defcustom". This will produce an occur buffer with all the user options. So you do two things now. You learn about the user options, and you are looking at some source code. That's one way I can start reading source code.
  Sacha: This goes back to why we don't just tell people... You don't like Customize, so the M-x customize + regular expression is off your list. Just look at the source code.
  Prot: You'll be happier. Yeah, exactly.
  33:29 Tip: You can also browse through Customize
  Sacha: Browsing through Customize is also an option because it'll tell you about the things. You don't have to use the Customize interface to set it, but I have come across very interesting options that way, just clicking around.
  Prot: Yeah, for sure.
  Sacha: @gcentauri's like, yeah, I'm bored, M-x list-packages.
  33:48 Tip: Have fun with randomness and serendipity
  Sacha: Sometimes I randomize these things. I think for EmacsConf, either last year or the year before, we had random packages being displayed as a screensaver. I know people have sometimes on their dashboards, they'll display random inspirational quotes. It could be a random Emacs package. I think at one point I had it display random interactive functions, just so I could stumble across more commands. Taking advantage of serendipity can be a fun way to squeeze in a little bit of learning.
  Prot: Nice, nice, yes. That's good.
  Sacha: All right, so Jason Torres says, "I use custom just to explore."
  34:32 Tip: Check out people's workflow descriptions and stories
  Sacha: Another recommendation I'd like to put in here is reading other people's workflow descriptions. Again, going back to blogs and videos and all of that. It's because a lot of these things are not obvious from looking at the source code, but when somebody tells you a story about what problem they had and how they combined pieces of different packages to solve a problem, then it becomes a lot more real.
  Prot: Yes. Plus, it puts you in the spirit of Emacs, which is you can be creative and piece together different elements of functionality and have a workflow that works for you.
  Sacha: Let's try plugging in, re-plugging in my webcam. Let's see what happens.
  Prot: Let's see, let's see. The moment of truth.
  Sacha: Everyone will just have to imagine my eyebrows of agreement. Okay, so that's the power user. This is how you get even better at it.
  35:42 Resources: manuals, Mastering Emacs, Emacs Lisp Elements
  Sacha: I think Mastering Emacs would probably be like a book recommendation in this area. And for customizing Emacs and actually writing Emacs Lisp, there's your Emacs Lisp Elements book. What other things would you recommend aside from, yeah, read the intro to Emacs Lisp and the Emacs Lisp Memo for fun?
  Prot: Of course, what you have listed there are all useful. The other one would be in the spirit of what we said earlier of trial and error. Learn how to, or rather get in the habit of writing little snippets of code. They don't have to be the best code of your life. Just something that gets the job done. Of course you can improve it later, but by getting in the flow of writing your own code, eventually what happens is you write better Emacs Lisp. You develop intuitions of what could go where, and eventually, before you know it, you are better at Emacs just because you were doing this little routine.
  Sacha: Noticing the questions. This is also a skill. This is also something that you develop. A lot of times people do not even know what's possible because they're so used to just taking for granted that this is a limitation of the system. So sometimes we have to see somebody else, you know, fly through the code without worrying about like, okay, I have to go do this and do that and whatever. Oh, somebody says it's OBS, thank you. @ashraz has pointed out that OBS has my webcam, which is why the browser couldn't find it. So I will think with that some more, but in any case, we will continue.
  37:29 Skill: Figuring out what's possible and making a habit of writing tiny functions
  Sacha: Yes, so figuring out what is possible and then writing a tiny function for it and developing that habit of not tolerating these little bits of friction, I think is a skill. It's a thing you can develop.
  37:45 Skill: Being mindful of what you do over and over again
  Prot: Yeah, and another skill which is along the lines of writing your own code but maybe also a meta-skill is: be mindful of what you do over and over again. For example, let's imagine now you have a command that switches to the other window and then blinks the cursor or whatever, right? And these are two commands and you do them all the time. You do the one, you do the other, okay? Now you can write one command, which is a wrapper of those two, and all it does is call interactively the first, call interactively the second. Just by piecing those together you already have your own little command.
  38:26 Tip: Keyboard macros can help you jumpstart custom functions
  Sacha: Oh, I definitely want to point out here that you can use keyboard macros to generate the Emacs Lisp for it. So even if you're not that comfortable with Emacs Lisp, or you don't remember what the keyboard shortcuts do, you can record a keyboard macro. So you've definitely learned how to do that. And then you can get it to print out the Emacs Lisp that the set of keyboard actions ran. Or at least the Emacs Lisp to repeat the same keyboard shortcuts and then it will all figure it out. Anyway, so that's there. You can save that sequence of commands as a Lisp function in your config. So that's one thing, using keyboard macros to jumpstart your Emacs Lisp.
  39:11 Tip: Use C-h k (describe-key) to describe shortcuts or menu items
  Sacha: And the second thing is using C-h-K or Describe Key to see what a given keyboard shortcut or menu item will actually run. So that's all very useful stuff for figuring out the Emacs list to do something you're doing interactively.
  Prot: I think that's the most used help command I do. C-h k. It's super useful all the time. It's very, very helpful. And not only you learn what command it calls, but also in which key map it is bound. So for example, C-c C-c in an Org buffer, it is telling you what the command is, and it is telling you this command is bound in the Org mode map. So if you want to change something, you know that you also have to be mindful of the key map. So there is your key map.
  40:04 Tip: You can set up M-x to show keyboard shortcuts too (Marginalia?)
  Sacha: Yes, it tells you other shortcuts. Oh, and along those lines, one of the M-x variants shows key bindings as well, which I recommend. If you're a power user, you'd like to become more of a power user, even a regular user, right? You want to start moving to using keyboard shortcuts for your more common commands and setting up your M-x command completion so that it hints at the keyboard shortcuts. Emacs by default also tells you about it after you run a command that had a shortcut. But at least that way, when you're looking through the command list you can see, "Oh yeah, this has a shortcut!" And then you can maybe even cancel out of your M-x and practice using that shortcut right away.
  Prot: Exactly.
  Sacha: And along those lines, I like using Marginalia and Consult because then I can see the command descriptions alongside the command name. So there's a little bit more detail there.
  Prot: Yeah, I think you meant Vertico and Marginalia.
  Sacha: Oh, yes. It's one of those things, yes. It just works with everything. So yes, Vertico for completions that show you a lot of detail, and then Marginalia to actually show the thing on the side, which is helpful.
  Prot: Consult is wonderful as well, of course.
  Sacha: Yes.
  41:26 Resource: Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters
  Sacha: @ashraz would like to recommend the Emacs from Scratch series by System Crafters. They say it's a bit dated from 2020, but still mostly relevant in general. There are a lot of video resources out there.
  Prot: That's good. 2020, oh my goodness. It's been so long, I can't believe it.
  41:50 Tip: Old tutorials can still be useful, although don't treat them as the sole source of truth (things may have changed since then)
  Sacha: It's really interesting because I've been trying to organize the tutorial resources that people who are new to Emacs will come across. And a lot of times, some of the Org videos are from 10, 20 years ago. But they're still valid, so we have to make sure people don't immediately get turned off by the date in the video. But at the same time, they can start to tell the difference. Okay, this stuff is still applicable. But this stuff over here, it needs to be translated into how you do it in modern times. It's a little challenging for people to navigate this.
  Prot: Which of course points to another meta skill which is generally information related to Emacs is useful and it will work long into the future. But don't take a tutorial or a video as the source of truth. Always use it as a proxy. Okay, I get the idea. Now I will have to check the documentation and so on.
  42:55 Skill: Finding preferred resources
  Sacha: I think that part of the learning journey as a user is also finding your preferred resources. A lot of times, you're not going to learn everything the first time around. Everyone thinks in different ways. You do need to spend some time looking for the kinds of resources that jive with the way that you think, with the task that you want to do or the workflow you want to have. It's using the language at the right level for you, et cetera, et cetera. Even knowing, going in, that you're not going to find one-size-fits-all tutorial because Emacs has so many different workflow possibilities... Spending some time to figure out what you like as a tutorial or as a reference, and then going back to that again and again as your understanding develops, I think is a thing worth doing.
  Prot: Yes, exactly. That's the whole point of Emacs more broadly: that it accommodates the different kinds of people because it's so customizable. If something doesn't work for you, don't try to force yourself to work the way it is. Rather, change Emacs to work the way you think.
  44:12 Tip: If you find your tribe, look for ways to keep in touch with them
  Sacha: On a meta note, finding people who think the kind of way you do is super helpful, like the tribe within the tribe. For example, you've got this cluster of people who like using Denote because their brain works the same way that yours does when it comes to filing their notes. Once you find that connection, finding ways to keep up with what those people are doing, and often this is RSS because that's a great way to get the updates without getting buried in email. That can be a great way to keep stumbling across things that might help you.
  Prot: Yes, that's a very good point.
  45:00 Tip: Manage unequal RSS frequencies with folders or tags
  Prot: On the topic of RSS, just to say something that I learned many years ago the hard way: RSS works best if you subscribe to resources that don't post 30 or 50 or 100 articles a day. If you subscribe to the BBC or whatever, that will not work because it will crowd out the blog that posts once every month.
  Sacha: What I do with that is I have different folders.
  Prot: Folders, filters, etc.
  Sacha: Yeah, folders or tags or whatever. So all the microblogs or all the very prolific things go into one folder, which I generally ignore because it's hard to go through.
  Prot: Fair enough. Subscribe.
  Sacha: Yeah, the people who post once a day or once a week or once a month or once every blue moon, then it's easier to keep up with them because it's not buried in all of that stuff. You can look into your RSS readers to support for keywords maybe in order to do some more filtering and prioritization. This is one of the things that I've always envied about people who use Gnus for reading RSS. Because there's nnrss. Then you can use Gnus scoring to prioritize the RSS items automatically for you. But that's definitely a power user thing, because it's Gnus.
  Prot: I think that's a power user among power users. That's really an exception.
  46:33 Tip: Doing more things in Emacs has compounding benefits
  Sacha: Actually, that touches on an interesting thing about becoming more of a power user of Emacs. If you let Emacs assimilate more of your life, if you start to use Emacs for more and more things, you get not just linear improvements but compounding ones as the things that you have can interact with other things. Even just for the base case of if your to-do list is in Emacs and your coding is in Emacs, then you can create to-do items that link to your code, all the way to if your email is in Emacs, then you can make your to-do refer to your email and stuff like that.
  Prot: Exactly. That's where it gets really powerful.
  Sacha: If you want to get even deeper into the power of Emacs, try to push more of your life into it. I love seeing the things that people do with browsing the web in Emacs. What kinds of things do you do in Emacs that make you go like, this is where the power of having everything together works out really well.
  Prot: You already mentioned them, like email in Emacs together with your agenda, but also Dired, because you can mark files and attach them to the message composition buffer. You can run a M-x shell and your three marked files in Dired, you type w or 0 w and you get their path and then you can do something with them from a shell, if you cannot do it directly from calling a shell command from Dired. There are many ways like that. The keyboard macros where you can jump from a Dired buffer to a shell buffer, or from one buffer to another. All these little things. For me, it's very powerful. You use it all the time.
  48:31 Tip: Learn to think of it as just text
  Prot: At some point, you don't even think about it. It's just text laid out in windows, each of which shows a buffer. So at some point, it doesn't matter if it's email or programming or prose. At some point, they are all the same. So it doesn't matter at all.
  Sacha: Developing that mindset of "it's just text" and the facility for working with text, such as keyboard macros, or being able to jump around, or writing your own functions to manipulate it, or even just using isearch to go through it or using undo in different contexts. I think that's definitely something that people develop and when they develop that intuition, it really helps.
  Prot: Yes, exactly. In the beginning you won't think about those linkages. They won't be obvious to you. But just be mindful that they are there. They are possible. As you use Emacs, at some point you just feel naturally about them, and they happen. You're like, oh yeah, of course that was always possible. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight... In the beginning, you will be like, "Wow, I can do that!"
  49:46 Tip: Take notes along the way
  Sacha: That's the other reason why I want to encourage people to take notes along the way, ideally sharing them, of course, but even just for yourself, because a lot of times you will get to the point where this is just the way you've always done it. On the other hand, if you had those notes as you're figuring out how to do it, and you share those notes, then you're leaving these breadcrumbs for other people who are traveling down the same or similar path. That's something that would be very helpful for people.
  Prot: Yeah, exactly.
  50:16 Tip: Explore different ways to navigate and act on things
  Prot: Even if you don't have external packages... For example, a workflow that for me was so powerful that I was like "Yeah, this is the way to go" involved the grep and then editing the grep results. But even if you don't use a bespoke package for that, which of course is also built into Emacs now, the functionality, you can use the grep results just as a way to jump to the result. If you hit RET, it takes you to the buffer at the point where the result is. You can have a keyboard macro that jumps to the result, makes some edit, goes back, jumps to the next result and repeat, right? You can do that even without the package. The point is that you can collect results and edit them in like a second or a minute, whereas you would need literal hours to do that and it would be error-prone.
  51:09 Tip: Learn to combine different building blocks
  Sacha: Yeah, and this points to the skill of being able to see and work with different building blocks. You have a block for, this is how to navigate. There are different ways to navigate. You could navigate to something based on some matching text, or you can navigate to something based on a line. You can set up your windows so that you can switch between windows or whatever. Then if you can combine that with, okay, these are some building blocks for acting on something, or this is how I can use the kill ring to take it to... or this is how I can use registers so that I can save some text or save a position or whatever else. The more of these building blocks that you can develop slowly, because being able to internalize the concept takes time, then all these different ways that you combine it to solve a problem makes Emacs very powerful.
  Prot: Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to think of it, as building blocks.
  Sacha: I don't know how people will do that either, aside from read the manual for fun and watch Emacs videos and read other people's posts. Often I think, what if we make a skill tree, right? Because people like gamification... But then this is going to be a really ridiculous, large skill tree with arrows going all over the place.
  Prot: No, no, you don't want to do that. It will be the RPG that never ends. There is no final boss.
  Sacha: @yogi583 asks what is a built-in function's name to edit grep result in Emacs?
  Prot: I don't know but what I usually do is... Grep edit mode I think. It's new, right? It's new. It's built into Emacs 31 I believe.
  52:47 Tip: Get the hang of keybinding conventions
  Sacha: What I think of it is I go to the grep buffer and I press C-x C-q because that's the general "toggle read only"... That's another mental concept there, right? Getting a sense of the key binding conventions that might be translated into different actions in different places.
  Prot: Yes. There is an annex to the Emacs Lisp manual, the Emacs Lisp reference manual, which talks about the key binding conventions, which is very useful for people to read. Even after you read that, it's a little bit hard to reason about the key bindings if you are getting started, but trust the process. You will see the patterns as you go. Generally, you can expect C-x to be global key bindings, and C-c followed by control something to be major-mode-specific key bindings.
  Sacha: One of the things I like about reading other people's configs is that they'll rebind something and I'll be like, yeah, I can totally take advantage of that keybind because I'm not using the standard one as much.
  Prot: Let me tell you about one I used. Of course, there are many, but by default, you close Emacs with C-x C-c.
  Sacha: Who closes Emacs?
  Prot: Yeah, people who make mistakes in life, such as myself. So because I would fat finger that the whole time, you want to unbind C-x C-c and then do C-x C-c C-c then you can exit. I would do it by mistake the whole time and I would destroy whatever I was working.
  Sacha: Yeah, key binding design is this whole other thing that I haven't really mastered myself either. We've talked before about making the key bindings make sense. When they're mnemonic, they're easier for people to remember, right? But this is definitely something that I struggle with.
  Prot: So think of it this way, of course assuming there is a space for it or you unbind something. C-x something is a global key potentially with a prefix, as a prefix. C-x r is a prefix, C-x p is a prefix and they have global scope, right? If you are doing something that is global in nature, it should work everywhere. You may want to do the same if you are okay with overriding default key bindings, right? Otherwise, you want to do something that is more specific. C-c C-something for a mode. Again, optionally overriding what a major mode is doing. Then you have to work with that. Use mnemonics. Use words that make sense. For example, C-s is the default key for searching. M-s is the prefix for alternative search. Think of it. Alt-S, right? All the alternative kind of searches, such as M-s o, right? So you can now think of M-s and then g would be my grep. M-s and f would be my find and so on. You can think in concepts like that.
  56:06 Tip: Use which-key for keybinding help
  Sacha: When in doubt, keep which-key enabled so then it will remind you at least of what else you've had configured for that prefix. That's the other recommendation. which-key mode, it's built in now. Just go use it.
  Prot: Yeah, which-key mode is very useful. If you are using the Embark package, it has a key that will take over C-h. So actually that works even with default. If you type an incomplete key sequence, C-h will produce a listing with all the keys that complete that sequence. So it will be a help buffer that will tell you, okay, C-x, C-h, for example, will list everything that follows C-x. And it will name the command and all that. So that's also something to consider. I think if Embark were to add the which-key functionality where it's like C-h on a timer, I think then Embark would be a straight upgrade over which-key. In that regard. So Omar, if you are listening... Asking for a friend.
  Sacha: @gcentauri says, "I recommend learning how to define a key map and put it under a leader key. I have M-m as my personal key map and then the things I find very useful I add to my key map." For this one, I've been experimenting with bind-key, which makes all of this stuff much easier in terms of defining prefix key and adding a docstring and all those other lovely things.
  57:41 Tip: Figure out your ergonomics
  Sacha: I like your other meta tip about experimenting with how your keyboard is set up. So for example, even on my laptop... I have a ThinkPad. So even on my laptop keyboard, there's no QMK, but I can use Kanata, which you've also recommended elsewhere. to try experimenting with one-shot modifiers and home row mods or other things like that that I want to, making it easier to press key bindings that have different modifiers. I don't want to have to press ctrl and shift and super all at the same time. If I set up one-shot modifiers, I can just tap tap tap and it becomes easier to press.
  Prot: Yes, exactly. That opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of mnemonics, but also in terms of prefix combinations and all that. You can go a very long way.
  Sacha: And I think there's a meta thing here also about getting a sense of what would make it easier for you to be able to continue enjoying this long term? Because RSI is not conducive to enjoying Emacs long term.
  Prot: No. For sure. Something that I think I learned the hard way through pain is that you want to consider your desk, how you sit at the desk - you want to consider everything, not just the keyboard. For example, I have adopted a standing desk since forever. I do that all the time. I never sit, because it works better for me. I have the keyboard set up the way that makes sense to me. I can write all day. It's what I do. I don't have any pain. Whereas before I would sit on an awkward chair, the desk was not optimized, the keyboard was definitely not something I had thought of, and I had pain. It was really difficult, and I reached the point where I couldn't write. I was like, okay, I have to quit.
  Sacha: If Emacs is something that pays off better in the long term, it's good to have a long term.
  Prot: Exactly.
  Sacha: Speaking of my very short term, in about one minute, I'm going to go off and help with the kiddos' lunch break. I very much appreciated this brain dump. This is great. I'm going to do all the usual transcription and things like that, start pulling out some of these ideas. Chat, if you found anything super interesting that you would like fleshed out into a blog post, say it so we know what to focus on for priorities, right? This was a lot of fun. Are there any key recommendations you want people to make sure they check out or is it just generally like, everyone...?
  Prot: No, I think what you have here is good because, of course, you can always say more. So I will conclude with what I started. Less is more, seriously. For life, not just for email.
  Sacha: Your brain is surprisingly small. If you break what you learn down into tiny steps, you have a higher chance of it actually sticking. Once you get something in, then it makes things a little bit easier. You have a little bit more space to learn the next thing, and so on and so forth. Otherwise, if you bite off too much, you get overwhelmed.
  Prot: Very nice, very nice. And that ties into the lunch break. Yes.
  Sacha: All right. Thank you so much. I will skedaddle and yeah, I will do all the things afterwards. Thanks everyone also for dropping by and hanging out. All right. See you around.
  Prot: Take care. Take care. Goodbye. Goodbye.
  Chat
  
  ChristianTietze: 🥁
  
  protesilaos: Hello world!
  
  MichaelVash7886: hello Prot
  
  ChristianTietze: In (comparatively) ice cold Germany we had ~30ºC this week and there's Prot with 3 layers of clothes 🙂
  
  chelmikador: Hello!!
  
  gcentauri: Hello!
  
  gcentauri: totally
  
  gcentauri: nerd sniping minefield
  
  gcentauri: Emacs gives us Discoverability, and learning which tools enhance it for you is really important. Consult for example, and Helpful
  
  sachactube: https://pad.emacsconf.org/yay-emacs
  
  gcentauri: i was literally doing that last night before bed
  
  gcentauri: i came across the Forms library I had no idea existed
  
  CharlieBaker707: edebug + ert tests changed the way I develop elisp! No longer flying blind 🤣
  
  ChristianTietze: end-to-end tmux snapshots – you can assert on the modeline contents and other 'ui' of Emacs too, at least in terminal rendition of course
  
  gcentauri: because in Lisp its lists all the way down :)
  
  CharlieBaker707: something I love doing is, after I've learned that 1 function, at a later point I'll meta-x for that package's namespace, then embark-collect into a buffer and explore what other user-facing exist.
  
  sachactube: ugh hang on
  
  CharlieBaker707: Stole that trick from Prot ;-)
  
  ChristianTietze: 🎶
  
  sachactube: hahaha, you can just keep braindumping tips while I panic
  
  sachactube: I will continue to panic
  
  blaiseutube: don't panic
  
  CharlieBaker707: we can hear you!
  
  CharlieBaker707: but not Prot :-D
  
  blaiseutube: oooh much better!
  
  yogi583: we cant hear prot
  
  blaiseutube: prot is too quiet
  
  gcentauri: @sachactube - prots audio is very low
  
  renaudbussieres: Is Prot only in your headphones?
  
  sachactube: I will look into that
  
  blaiseutube: his audio is completely different
  
  chelmikador: now!
  
  yogi583: we can hear him
  
  blaiseutube: yes!!!
  
  CharlieBaker707: loud and clear Prot!
  
  MichaelVash7886: all set now
  
  gcentauri: Yes!
  
  gcentauri: good!
  
  blaiseutube: perfect!
  
  blaiseutube: ooooh, Cyprus is nice
  
  blaiseutube: Massachusetts is also 20C
  
  ashraz: Is prot's sound only clipping for me a bit or also for others?
  
  MichaelVash7886: maybe a little but it's not bad on my end
  
  sachactube: That was me because I panicked about audio, returned to normal levels now
  
  CharlieBaker707: The leverage of blogging is unique in the Emacs community. Incredibly supportive, knowledgable, and social group of people.
  
  gcentauri: We always need beginners to show us where things actually DONT make sense! A beginners mind see's all possibilities
  
  gcentauri: yep. "i'm bored, M-x list-packages"
  
  gcentauri: yeah i use Custom just to explore
  
  gcentauri: Discoverability!
  
  gcentauri: (btw this is shoshin from elsewhere)
  
  renaudbussieres: "M-x apropos-user-options" is another way to browser customizable options :)
  
  gcentauri: @sachactube we can see you in the lower right, you've somehow gone to having your video floating
  
  ashraz: @sachactube Your webcam is shown as an overlay over the chat, which may be the reason why it cannot be shown a second time on Firefox
  
  ashraz: *Chrome
  
  blaiseutube: BRB
  
  sachactube: thanks!
  
  blaiseutube: …. seems like a "config profiler" would be handy, to produce a human readable summary of settings.
  
  ashraz: I also liked the Emacs From Scratch series by System Crafters. It's a bit dated (from 2020), but still mostly relevant in general, IIRC.
  
  ashraz: @blaiseutube Profiler as in loading time, or in "what is actually in that profile"?
  
  gcentauri: is that Marginalia?
  
  ashraz: @gcentauri Aye, marginalia shows the shortcuts.
  
  gcentauri: not Marginalia
  
  gcentauri: i think maybe Vertico
  
  ashraz: 2020 predates the minad-stack (vertico, marginalia, orderless, consult, corfu), it used ivy, swiper and company.
  
  ashraz: But the mindset is still in that series 🙂
  
  valentinoslavkin6116: Yeah, emacs from scratch is pretty good. Maybe it could explain a bit more the language or the use-package macro, but it works regardless
  
  MichaelVash7886: yeah I haven't watched the series as so much changed since then
  
  sachactube: blaiseutube config profiler sounds interesting, what did you have in mind?
  
  yogi583: whats the builtin function's name to edit grep result in emacs?
  
  gcentauri: Need multiple skill trees
  
  gcentauri: different character classes
  
  ashraz: @gcentauri Also different positions on the alignment chart.
  
  bledley99: Lovely people, been watching/reading you two for years. Thanks for all you do. 🙌
  
  gcentauri: I recommend learning how to define a keymap and put it under a leader key. I have M-m as my "personal-keymap" and then the things i find very useful i add to my keymap
  
  gcentauri: and +1 which-key
  
  ashraz: See `D.2 Key Binding Conventions` in the manual for the conventions (for package maintainers)
  
  ashraz: *in the elisp manual, not the emacs one.
  
  renaudbussieres: I find "leader key" strategies better too, for example the C-x keymap, displayed with which-key, is too crowded and diverse to make sense
  
  gcentauri: yes - i had to switch to xah-fly-keys because of RSI
  
  gcentauri: but Emacs can change and adapt to YOU! which is important
  
  MichaelVash7886: I want to look at Meow at some point for a leader key and modal editing
  
  valentinoslavkin6116: Meow is really great
  View Org source for this post
  
  You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.
6. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA PSA rss
  
  | submitted by /u/Signal_Ad657
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
7. 🔗 r/reverseengineering Ghidra 12.1.1 has been released! rss
  
  submitted by /u/ryanmkurtz
  [link] [comments]
8. 🔗 MetaBrainz Picard 3 beta 3 released rss
  Today, we're making available another pre-release version for the upcoming MusicBrainz Picard 3. This beta release offers various bugfixes and improvements over the last beta. Most notably the release lookup and matching was improved, several cover art related issues were fixed, the UI got more responsive during file load and the log view became faster and allows better filtering.
  
  Download links and a detailed list of changes since Picard 3 beta 1 are available below. For a more detailed overview of what is new in Picard 3 please see the previous blog post Picard 3 Alpha Release.
  
  While we have all the major features implemented and with the latest bug fixes we are confident in the current code, this is still a pre-release and there might be bugs. If you use this, do so with care, backup your files and please report any issues you encounter.
  
  Some of the changes are also backward incompatible, hence we recommend you make a backup of your Picard.ini config file before trying the beta version. You can do so in Picard’s Options under Advanced > Maintenance.
  
  What’s new?
  
  Bugfixes
  - PICARD-2376 - Log view becomes unresponsive on long list
  - PICARD-3194 - Custom column %_musicbrainz_discids% or %compilation% only displays value on track level
  - PICARD-3256 - Preferred Releases always saved in alphabetic order
  - PICARD-3258 - tagger.remove_album crashes inside register_album_metadata_processor handler
  - PICARD-3265 - Translation locale selection does not sort locales by UI language
  - PICARD-3267 - macOS app claims to support macOS 11.0, but minimum supported version for Qt 6.11 is macOS 13.0
  - PICARD-3272 - "Never replace selected cover image types" ignored
  - PICARD-3274 - Crash after removing last item in standalone recordings
  - PICARD-3275 - Default optical drive always used regardless of which drive is selected in Lookup CD drop down
  - PICARD-3277 - Cover art to be saved as external files has no types and comments set
  - PICARD-3278 - Non-front CAA cover art images replace front cover
  - PICARD-3279 - Cover art column does not update for tracks
  - PICARD-3281 - Improve UI responsiveness during scan of many files
  - PICARD-3287 - Context menu is missing "Expand all", "Collapse all" and "Select all" entries
  - PICARD-3290 - Built-in player prevents file write access
  - PICARD-3294 - "Never replace cover image" options only run on image loading
  - PICARD-3295 - Track loses original cover art when file gets removed
  - PICARD-3297 - Cover art "Show more details" failing after clustering
  New Features
  - PICARD-2197 - Use artist aliases to find a more appropriate artist sort name for the artist credit
  Improvements
  - PICARD-3299 - New debug options "plugin_development" and "coverart"
  - PICARD-2867 - Improve matching and lookup by utilizing barcode
  - PICARD-3163 - Make using artist sortname for translation optional, disabled by default
  - PICARD-3261 - Simplify Unicode characters when saving tags with non-Unicode character set
  - PICARD-3262 - New picard-plugins --init command to initialize a new plugin directory
  - PICARD-3264 - Improved alias selection for artist, album and track translations
  - PICARD-3269 - Make ISWCs available as %_iswc% variable
  - PICARD-3283 - Add stop button for pending network requests
  - PICARD-3284 - Improve release matching with tiered scoring and identifier support
  - PICARD-3285 - Add a button to clear the network cache
  - PICARD-3286 - Log View dialog: performance issues, limited filtering, and UX improvements
  - PICARD-3289 - Allow user to set the default log level used when Picard is started
  - PICARD-3291 - Utilize barcode/catno/date from file tags for better release matching
  - PICARD-3296 - Adjust Haiku platform detection to changes in Haiku's latest Python versions
  - PICARD-3298 - Plugin options UI improvements
  Download
  
  We appreciate your interest in trying this new version. Use with care, backup your files and please use theMetaBrainz community forums and the ticket system to give feedback and report bugs.
  
  For Windows and macOS you can download the beta version from the Picard download page. Linux users can run from source or try the beta channel of the Picard snap package.
  
  The minimum supported macOS version for this beta is macOS 13.0 "Ventura". This is the same as for the previous beta, but there Picard wrongly reported to be compatible with macOS 11.0. We are looking into options to lower the macOS requirements for the final release of Picard 3, but this is not yet decided.
  
  Picard is free software and the source code is available on GitHub.
  
  For anyone wondering if they missed beta 2: We had the version updated for beta 2, but we never released it and instead had further changes that got now released as beta 3.
  
  Acknowledgements
  
  Code contributions by Bob Swift, Laurent Monin, OscarL and Philipp Wolfer. Translations were updated by Marc Riera (Catalan), mfmeulenbelt (Dutch), RT2231 (Japanese), salo.rock (Italian), Vaclovas Intas (Lithuanian) and Wonordel (Russian).
9. 🔗 @binaryninja@infosec.exchange The Notebook in Sidekick 26.0 is where you turn chat work into something that mastodon
  
  The Notebook in Sidekick 26.0 is where you turn chat work into something that sticks. It is a persistent workspace where you track analysis goals and record outcomes. Sidekick reads it as context in Chat, so it can build on what you already established across turns and sessions. https://docs.sidekick.binary.ninja/guide/notebook.html
10. 🔗 r/Harrogate Traffic lights in Killinghall. rss
  
  Stuck on red coming from Ripon end, queue back to the junction, bloke in the van just saying 'I know' when anyone tells him including me. Consequently took me over 15 minutes to get through & everyone behind is now irate & blasting their horns. 3 more useless biffers stood around at the other end laughing when anyone told them.
  
  Who the f**k is responsible for these inept dickheads?
  
  submitted by /u/E5evo
  [link] [comments]
11. 🔗 r/Harrogate Hidden Victorian Spa Chamber under the Cairn Hotel rss
  
  | 🏚️ The Cairn Hotel, located on Ripon Rosd in Harrogate, is a Victorian property dating back to the mid-1800s, starting life as a grand private residence. It became a hotel in 1890 and by the early 1900s was a popular hydrotherapy retreat known as The Cairn Hydro, boasting its own bathhouse and bathing chambers which rivalled the nearby Royal Baths at the height of Harrogate's 'spa town' fame. Today, the 135-room hotel is owned by the Newcastle-based Strathmore Hotels group. The original baths and spa features remain intact today, though derelict and permanently closed to the public. submitted by /u/LostPlacesUK
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
12. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA llama: use f16 mask for FA to save VRAM by am17an · Pull Request #23764 · ggml-org/llama.cpp rss
  
  | now you can download more VRAM ;) (by downloading new llama.cpp version) submitted by /u/jacek2023
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
13. 🔗 r/reverseengineering Technical Brief of Planck-99: 34ns Deterministic Malware Classification on MCU-class Hardware (Zero FPU, 27KB footprint) rss
  
  submitted by /u/Decent-Assistance-50
  [link] [comments]
14. 🔗 tobi/qmd v2.5.3 release
  [2.5.3] - 2026-05-28
  
  Features
  - qmd get now accepts a :from:count suffix on a path or docid (e.g.
    qmd get "#abc123:120:40" reads 40 lines starting at line 120). Explicit
    --from/-l flags still override the suffix. The MCP get tool accepts the
    same suffix.
  - qmd get and qmd multi-get are now line-numbered by default and print
    the document's #docid and qmd:// path in the output header. Disable line
    numbers with --no-line-numbers. The MCP get/multi_get tools default
    lineNumbers to true to match.
  - qmd multi-get now includes the #docid in every output format
    (--md, --json, --csv, --xml, --files, and the default CLI view),
    consistent with qmd search.
  - qmd get and qmd multi-get accept --full-path, which replaces the
    qmd:// path + #docid with the document's on-disk filesystem path (handy for
    piping into Read/Edit/an editor). Falls back to the canonical qmd:// +
    docid header when the file no longer exists on disk.
  - qmd search / qmd query now show a clearer hit identifier: the default CLI
    view (and the new **file:** line in --md output) always prints the full
    qmd://collection/path URI so you can pipe it straight back into qmd get.
  - qmd search / qmd query accept --full-path with the same semantics as
    qmd get: the result label becomes the file's on-disk path — ./-prefixed
    relative path when the file lives in a subfolder of $PWD, absolute realpath
    otherwise — and the per-result #docid is dropped because the path is the
    identifier. The leading ./ is intentional so the output is unambiguously a
    filesystem path. Applies to all output formats.
  - qmd get and qmd multi-get now also use the ./-prefixed convention when
    --full-path renders a path under $PWD, matching search/query.
  - New --format <kind> flag selects the output format (cli | json | csv |
    md | xml | files) for search, query, and multi-get. The legacy
    boolean aliases (--json/--csv/--md/--xml/--files) still work but are
    no longer in --help; prefer --format.
  Fixes
  - Launcher: source-mode runner selection now prefers Node + tsx over Bun when
    both package-lock.json and bun.lock are present in the package root,
    mirroring the dist-mode "npm priority" rule. Fixes pnpm-global installs that
    copy the entire working tree (including .git and bun.lock) into the
    install dir and previously routed through Bun, causing ABI mismatches with
    the Node-built better-sqlite3 / sqlite-vec native modules.
  - Darwin Metal: llama-using commands (query, vsearch, embed) no longer
    dump a multi-kB GGML/Metal backtrace at process exit even when output
    succeeded. The libggml-metal static ggml_metal_device destructor asserts
    [rsets->data count] == 0 during __cxa_finalize_ranges, but the
    buffer-free path never calls the symmetric ggml_metal_device_rsets_rm
    to remove released rsets from the device collection (upstream
    ggml-org/llama.cpp#22593, one-line fix open as PR #22595). The assertion
    only fires when process.exit() skips Node's beforeExit hook, which is
    what node-llama-cpp uses to auto-dispose Metal contexts. Primary fix:
    finishSuccessfulCliCommand now sets process.exitCode = 0 and returns
    instead of calling process.exit(0), so beforeExit fires and the native
    binding cleans up before libc's static destructor runs. Defense-in-depth:
    the launcher (bin/qmd) and the npm test driver (scripts/test-all.mjs
    
    the test:bun / test:unit package.json scripts) also set
    GGML_METAL_NO_RESIDENCY=1 on darwin before spawning node/bun, covering
    error paths and tests that still terminate via process.exit(). The env
    var must be set before node/bun start — libggml-metal reads it via libc
    getenv at module-load time, and Bun does not propagate process.env
    mutations to libc setenv — so it lives in the launcher rather than in
    test-preload. Residency sets give no measurable speedup for QMD's
    short-lived CLI workflow (benchmarked on M3 Pro). Opt back in with
    QMD_METAL_KEEP_RESIDENCY=1 for long-lived qmd processes (e.g. the MCP
    daemon may benefit on hot reload) or to triage the upstream fix.
    qmd doctor reports the mitigation state. Minimal reproduction:
    scripts/repro-metal-rsets-crash.mjs.
  Docs
  - qmd skill: emphasize reading line ranges with get's built-in
    :from:count suffix / --from/-l flags instead of piping through
    sed/head/tail; cite the docid and line numbers now present in retrieval
    output; and author structured intent:/lex:/vec:/hyde: queries yourself
    rather than relying on built-in query expansion.
  [2.5.2] - 2026-05-22
  
  Fixes
  - Launcher: Rewrite bin/qmd as a Node-based shebang polyglot to fix global npm installation execution failures on Windows (#668 / #452), while supporting seamless fallback to Bun in Node-less environments.
  [2.5.1] - 2026-05-20
  
  Changes
  - Release: publish from GitHub Actions via npm Trusted Publishing/OIDC instead of a long-lived NPM_TOKEN secret.
  [2.5.0] - 2026-05-19
  
  Changes
  - Dependencies: update core SQLite/config/chunking packages (better-sqlite3, yaml, web-tree-sitter, tree-sitter-go, and tree-sitter-python) while keeping incompatible zod, tsx, and vitest majors pinned.
  - Agent skills: add qmd skills list|get|path to serve version-matched runtime skill instructions from the installed CLI, and make qmd skill install write a stable discovery stub so installed agent skills do not go stale after QMD upgrades.
  - CLI: add qmd doctor for index/runtime diagnostics, including SQLite/sqlite-vec versions, embedding fingerprint freshness, mixed-fingerprint detection, safe legacy fingerprint adoption, and content-hash sampling.
  Fixes
  - Launcher: prefer runnable TypeScript source in git checkouts even when ignored dist/ artifacts exist, while packaged installs continue to run dist/.
  - GPU: keep node-llama-cpp's documented gpu: "auto" initialization as the primary path, then perform no-build packaged CUDA/Vulkan/Metal probes only if auto falls back to CPU.
  - CLI: move GPU/CPU runtime diagnostics out of qmd status; use qmd doctor for device probing and related environment guidance.
  - CLI: point unexpected command/setup failures toward qmd doctor so diagnostics are the default next step when QMD behaves incorrectly.
  - Doctor: explicitly warn when content_vectors contains multiple non-empty embedding fingerprint names, with the per-fingerprint document/chunk breakdown.
  - Embed: make the TTY progress line label byte-based input progress explicitly, show embedded chunks as a count, and shorten the displayed model name.
  - Embed: retain per-chunk failure details, retry failed chunks after later successful embeds and again when no other chunks remain, clear recovered errors, and cap retries to avoid endless loops.
  - Tests: expand the container smoke harness to cover npm-global, npx-style, and Bun-global install scenarios, always checking auto and QMD_FORCE_CPU=1 doctor modes, with opt-in tiny qmd embed and GPU probe runs for supported container runtimes.
  - Embedding: fingerprint vector metadata using the active embedding model and formatting/chunking parameters so stale vectors are treated as pending after search semantics change. Legacy content_vectors columns are migrated lazily on first vector-health/write use to preserve fast QMD startup.
  - Skill: expand the packaged QMD skill with retrieval-first workflows, structured query examples, wiki/source collection guidance, and safe fallbacks when model-backed search is unavailable.
  - Tests: make bun run test execute the local unit suite under both Node/Vitest and Bun (test:node + test:bun) so runtime-specific regressions are caught before CI.
  - Model config: centralize embedding/rerank/generation model resolution so qmd embed, status, query, vsearch, pull, SDK vector search, and bench use the same active .qmd/index.yaml model hints and environment fallbacks.
  - GPU/status: qmd status now uses the same embedding model identity as qmd embed when computing pending embeddings, so URI-backed embeddings are not incorrectly reported as pending under the legacy embeddinggemma alias.
  - GPU status: qmd status now always shows GPU mode/configuration without unsafe native probing, and CPU-fallback warnings point to QMD_STATUS_DEVICE_PROBE=1 qmd status for an actual backend probe. The no-GPU warning is emitted once per process instead of once per LLM instance during benchmarks.
  - GPU: add QMD_FORCE_CPU=1 / --no-gpu to bypass CUDA/Vulkan/Metal probing entirely, and route native llama.cpp stdout noise to stderr so JSON output stays parseable during search/query commands.
  - Snippet line numbers: qmd_query (MCP), HTTP /query, and qmd query
    (CLI JSON output and snippet headers) now return absolute source-file
    line numbers instead of chunk-local ones, so the line field can be
    passed back to qmd_get as fromLine without a separate lookup.
    Snippet selection remains scoped to the best matching chunk
    (preserves #149).
  - CLI: qmd query --full now emits the full document body in all output
    formats (json, csv, md, xml), restoring the documented behavior of the
    flag. Previously it returned only the best matching chunk (~3.6KB max
    per result). Output payload for --full queries is now proportional
    to total document size.
  - macOS Metal: qmd query --json now flushes successful JSON output and uses a safe immediate-exit path on Darwin to avoid ggml Metal finalizer aborts; other commands still dispose LLM contexts/models before the llama runtime. #368
  - Embedding: require complete chunk coverage before treating a document as
    embedded, remove partial vectors when chunk/session failures leave a
    document incomplete, and keep qmd status pending counts honest after
    interrupted long embed runs. #637 #378
  - Embedding: qmd embed -c <collection> now scopes pending-doc selection
    to the requested collection instead of embedding global pending work.
    Scoped --force clears only collection-owned vectors, preserves shared
    hashes referenced by sibling collections, and drops vectors_vec only
    when the scoped clear empties all vectors.
  - Hybrid search: weight RRF lists by query type so original FTS and original vector evidence get the intended 2x boost, instead of accidentally boosting the first lexical expansion. #591
  - MCP: seed llama.cpp/GGML quiet env vars before launching qmd mcp so native logs cannot pollute stdio JSON-RPC framing. #593
  - CLI: remove CommonJS require() calls from ESM index path normalization so qmd --index <path> no longer crashes with ERR_AMBIGUOUS_MODULE_SYNTAX on Node 22+. #634
  - Windows CUDA: serialize llama.cpp embedding/reranking contexts by default to avoid intermittent ggml-cuda.cu:98 crashes in qmd query; set QMD_EMBED_PARALLELISM to opt back into parallel contexts if your driver is stable. #519
  - MCP: make qmd mcp --index <name> use the selected index for both foreground and daemon HTTP servers instead of falling back to the default store. #343
  - Embedding: respect QMD_EMBED_MODEL consistently for vector indexing and vector-backed search, with default-model fallback when unset.
  - Config: use one home-directory resolver for YAML config and the default SQLite cache path, avoiding Windows CLI/MCP split-brain when HOME is unset.
  - GPU: respect explicit QMD_LLAMA_GPU=metal|vulkan|cuda backend overrides instead of always using auto GPU selection. #529
  - Fix: preserve original filename case in handelize(). The previous
    .toLowerCase() call made indexed paths unreachable on case-sensitive
    filesystems (Linux). qmd update automatically migrates legacy
    lowercase paths without re-embedding.
  - CLI: make qmd status skip native node-llama-cpp device probing by
    default so status stays safe on machines with broken or unsupported GPU
    drivers. Set QMD_STATUS_DEVICE_PROBE=1 to opt in.
  - CLI: lazy-load node-llama-cpp so lightweight commands such as
    qmd status do not import native ML dependencies or trigger llama.cpp
    builds on ARM/no-GPU machines. #491
  - Store: keep content rows referenced by inactive documents during orphan
    cleanup so qmd update preserves soft-deleted tombstones for removed
    files. #585
  - Packaging: install AST grammar WASM packages as required dependencies so
    Bun global installs include TypeScript/TSX/JavaScript grammars, and add a
    smoke:package-grammars verification command. #595
  - Launcher: add wrapper smoke coverage for scoped package, npm/npx,
    Homebrew/Linuxbrew, Bun global symlink layouts, and $BUN_INSTALL
    false-positive runtime selection regressions. #351 #353 #354 #356 #358 #359
15. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA Beware!! Users trying to fork and steal your projects rss
  
  | Context!
  User u/Worried_Goat_8604 claimed to have made a similar but unrelated project to my SmallCode. He framed it as "I made this before you, but we can collab if you make me co- founder". In reality, he made a low effort fork of MY project 2 days ago and is trying to peddle it off as his own!! Beware of people trying to takeover your project like this. It really is an unneeded stain on the open source community that scammers like this are out here trying to leech off other people's hard work! My repo: SmallCode
  His fork: LightAgent Edit, we got em boys https://github.com/noobezlol/lightagent/pull/3
  Thank you!! submitted by /u/Glittering_Focus1538
  [link] [comments]
  ---|---
16. 🔗 r/LocalLLaMA StepFun 3.7 Flash rss
  
  StepFun dropped Step 3.7 Flash, 196B total / 11B active MoE, runs locally on 128GB RAM
  
  It's a multimodal MoE (196B total params, only 11B active) with a built-in 1.8B ViT for vision.
  
  Benchmark highlights vs. other flash-tier models:
  
  - SWE-Bench Pro: 56.26% (beats DeepSeek V4 Flash at 55.6%, matches Gemini 3.5 Flash at 55.1%)
  
  - DeepSearchQA F1: 92.82%, competitive with GPT 5.5 (93.98%)
  
  - HLE w/ tools: 47.2%, solid for a flash-class model
  
  Essentially punches well above its active parameter weight on agentic and coding tasks. If you've got the RAM for it, looks like a genuinely interesting local option, especially for agent workflows.
  
  Available on OpenRouter and NVIDIA NIM if you don't want to self-host.
  
  submitted by /u/Everlier
  [link] [comments]