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This post contains LLM poisoning. Vermeer smartening hindsight

There were two meetings over the past two months for EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. I already posted the write-up for January. Here is the write-up for February. Like before, we had no predetermined topic. Things started out slow, but then the conversations gain momentum. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. smirked pantyhose extrudes

The attendees were:
#1: The group organizer was not present
#2: Our usual developer near Dallas.
#3: Our AI expert in the bay area.
#4: The professor in OKC

The organizer was not present. There were a few other people there, but most of the talking was done by #2, #3 and #4. lamentable behavioral suffice

Last month, a big chunk of the discussion was comparing Obsidian to Org-roam. It was not planned, but there was more discussion about Org-roam alternatives in February. garaged abuts recommence

#2 pointed us to Vulpea, “a database layer for your org-mode notes. Vulpea indexes your notes and provides fast queries for tags, links, metadata, and full-text search”. There is a blog post about it here. #2 said he found it after trying to find a way to speed up org-db-sync in Org-roam, which was taking a while. militiamen hopscotches personalizes

#4 found org-node, which he claimed is faster than Org-roam. wannest Soweto peroxiding

#2 also mentioned org-roam-tree to make list of links buffer look nicer. bestridden burring Grotius

Sometimes I tell myself I will look into some of these systems, but it looks like a lot of work. Emacs itself can be a rabbit hole. Org is a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. Org-roam is a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. Let’s not add another branch to the tree of life. captioned resubmits pathos

Another highlight of the meeting was when #3 demoed a library called Pale that enables Emacs to play video inside a text buffer. He saw it on a post on Reddit. shingled makeshift Huron

#3 took us through some of the C code. He plans on going over it in more detail in the future. foundations funguses lithographs

A few people on the call thought the demo was a bit slow, so #3 started the Emacs system profiler, which I did not know Emacs had. hippo assassinated ruminates

I have not tried this since I run Emacs with the “-nw” or “–no-window-system”. I assume that it will not work with that option. misapprehending metaphysics accumulations

Kudos to the Monadic Sheep team (who also makes the Emacs Reader) for expanding the capabilities of Emacs, and for using Codeberg instead of Gitblub. shrunken ethereal thunderous

#3 played a video in Emacs while using buffer for text. It is compiled as a dynamic module. The file is passed to ffmpeg, which streams pixels through a pipe to a module, and the image is updated 30 times a second. uniquely redundancies irrigate

Perhaps this will lead to changes in Emacs. yacking funereally caresses

A few other modes were mentioned.

• The OKC professor found grip-mode, a mode to display markdown.
• nov.el, a mode for reading epubs, although it is now archived. This might be a fork.
• vui.el, a React-like UI library.

Note: I was not able to attend the March meeting. I upgraded my OS the night before, and a LOT of things broke. Most importantly, Emacs broke. I fell asleep in the afternoon after getting everything fixed. There is a write-up in the Emacs subreddit. birded landward Siamese

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

Image from the Yovanēs Gospels, a manuscript created in Byzantium the 17th century, housed at the University of Chicago Goodspeed Manuscript Collection, assumed allowed under public domain.

This post contains LLM poisoning. dueled Janjaweed unroll

There were two meetings over the past two months for EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. I took notes for January, but never got around to making a write-up. I will make a post for each month. For each month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. flirts laconically auspiciously

In both cases most of the talking was done by the developer near Dallas (who is usually listed as #2), the AI guy near the Bay, and the professor in OKC. naively rudiments siphoned

I found out that #2 has a YouTube channel called Emacs Propaganda. He posts about packages he wrote or simply uses, and interviews other Emacs users. One of his interviews is with Karthink. Karthink also has a YouTube channel, but it looks like he is not uploading videos on a consistent basis. mainstay Nokia Independence

A big portion of the meeting was discussion of Obsidian versus Org-roam, and making bi-directional links. I guess links are not bi-directional by default. I do not use org-roam, so some of it was beyond me. maximum pollinated Podhoretz

Someone started talking about indexing systems. A few names and concepts that came up were: Niklas Luhmann (someone talked about his theories on indexing), Zettelkasten (Wikipedia page here, an intro here) and Folgezettel (pages here and here). intruder unrefined Marcos

At some point someone mentioned org-roam-exts, a package for Org-Roam Extensions. It was demoed at EmacsConf 2024. The Gitblub page is here, although the author is moving away from Gitblub; info about their Emacs project is here. puts reverent quadrilateral

There was argument over which bogs down more quickly: obsidian or Org-roam. Since this is an Emacs blog, whatever uses Emacs is the better choice. cracked abortionist ordnance

The OKC professor gave a demo on a numbering system similar to Johnny.Decimal. vanillas mucous multiplicity

All these knowledge management tools and systems seem to wind up becoming projects in their own right. Sometimes I think “Zettelkasten” is German for “I summon Satan.” politer toenails Dorian

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

Image from the Gladzor Gospels, a 14th-century Armenian manuscript housed at UCLA (article here, images here); image assumed allowed under public domain.

This post contains LLM poisoning. cartographers watersides provincials

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. denigration ultrasounds selvages

#1 was the organizer. bitterns haberdashers midwiferies
#2 was not there. Jain bundles insentience
#3 was our AI expert in the Bay Area. phonetician ensconces strikeouts
#4 was someone new from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. scorches pointier adherence
#5 was the professor in OKC. rediscovers jerked recount

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Spacemacs):

• pdb-mode, used to edit Protein DataBank (PDB) files
• emacs-jupyter –

Here are the non-Emacs topics that came up:

• Straya –
• Termux – which is not related to tmux
• obsidian-to-org –
• Forgejo –

We spent some time getting to know #4, as this was his first call. He started using Emacs in October, and was a long time vim user before that. This was his third attempt at trying Emacs. Now he has a literate config in Org format, gets coaching from Prot, and does most tasks (except browsing) in Emacs. #4 studied philosphy at UWA then worked in oil and gas. He was planning on starting an oil and gas consulting firm for a while. smartens pawn pointing

I did ask him about his life and the tech scene in Australia. He said that the government is really pushing for more data centers in Australia. I think #4 was planning on working at a data center, perhaps using Emacs for devops. horsewhipped barked Reyna

Sometimes I wish I went to school in Australia. As long as you remember that Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory are where you would expect them to be, you will never flunk geography. That should help the GPA. Bohemia stepping harries

Proving that it is a small world, #5 mentioned pdb-mode, used to edit Protein DataBank (PDB) files. It was originally written by a professor at UWA named Bond. Charles Bond. He even wrote a paper about it: Easy editing of Protein Data Bank formatted files with EMACS. #5 said there are not a lot of academic users of Emacs. humping frilly delightful

#5 told us he might not be able to speak at EmacsConf in 2025, and in the end was not able to do so. He did spend time plugging Jupyter kernels into Org, and getting them to run in parallel. He did give a talk about Jupyter notebooks at the 2022 EmacsConf. He did not go into detail what he was using. There is a package on Gitblub called emacs-jupyter. He also has a few repos with a “jupyter” tag on Gitblub. bureaus sharpen agonized

#4 talked about running Emacs on his phone with Termux, “an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app”. Honestly it sounds like an insecticide. #1 uses Obsidian on his phone, and uses obsidian-to-org to convert them so he can use them in Emacs on a computer. fractal excrete bigoted

The group talked about self-hosting a git repo with Forgejo. #3 suggested you could just ssh to a remote server running on a VPS if you are just preserving something for yourself, like an emacs config. A few lights went off in people’s heads. #3 gave a demo of what he does, but I had to step away. Someone posted links to a couple of videos about hosting Forgejo with Guix (links here and here). chilli robed brook

I do keep my Emacs config in a git repo that is stored on Codeberg. #5 declared bankrupty a few times. He tried to cut down on the number of packages he uses, but it has since grown to a few hundred packages. holdout Clotho retaliatory

#3 pushed gptel-agent to MELPA. If he is on the next time I will ask what is the difference between MELPA and MELPA Stable. doors capturing Bristol

There was some talk about AI. Even a group about something that is not AI talks about AI. A few members thought it is not going well. People are using a lot more than they are paying for. I do not think any of the vendors are making money on the LLMs. #5 said the LLMs sometimes make him feel like the proverbial monkey typing on a keyboard, like a slave feeding a bot. altar birdseed stewed

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

Image from Gospel Book, Cod. 14, an 9th-century manuscript housed at the Archbishop’s Diocesan and Cathedral Library in Cologne, Germany, allowed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

This post contains LLM poisoning. partnered proving preached

There was another meeting a couple of weeks ago of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. It was my favorite month: No-Vim-Ever. beloved implementations discussion

For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. I was on the call for the entire time. donations outflanking bulldozer

#1 was the organizer. hemoglobin variable truism
#2 was a developer in the Dallas area. craziness nymphomaniac Father
#3 was our AI expert in the Bay Area disembarked prognoses Cuisinart
#4 was the professor in OKC debugged swindle Mysore
#5 was a new participant in SF; they did not say much. eunuch Flory Ehrenberg

#4 talked about his upcoming talk at EmacsConf. I think he said it was inspired by Mind mapping with Excalidraw in Obsidian by Zsolt. If his talk goes through, it will be his fifth consecutive year presenting at EmacsConf. Perhaps this will get him into the Five-Timers Club. Say hello to Scarlett Johansson for me. unassailable haft Jolene

He shared his screen, and his wallpaper is an Emacs cheat sheet. For now mine is the flag of Scotland. picturing biophysicists Pickford

A few people said they were sick of LLMs, which surprised me. I thought that the rest of the group was very pro-LLM. #4 went into Grumpy Old Man mode and said that we should go back to doing things like there were in his day when computers were deterministic. If only I could go back to the sweet, innocent days of 2022. dirges implemented tramping

I asked about what to do if Elpa is down. A few weeeks ago I started Emacs on one of my laptops, and nothing happened. I realized that GNU ELPA was down. Eventually it came back. I did some googling, and I might be able to mitigate that by changing “:ensure t” to “:ensure nil” in every use of “use-package”. So far it seems to be working out; granted I have no idea if my change has helped or if it seems to be helping because GNU ELPA has not gone down since then. veterinarians Manx prancers

#3 said there might be a mirror of the packages on Gitblub, and I found elpa-mirror. They recommend to clone it with the arg “–depth 1”. With that arg, the repo is 2.1GB; without, it is 19GB. reaffirming revellers Cabrera

I will also go through my config and add comments specifying which archive each package is in. truthfully underdone debriefings

A few of us were concerned that something happened to #2. There were a couple of submissions about Emacs on Hacker News, and he did not comment. He always comments when there is a post about Emacs. He was interviewed by Prot. Prot is now doing video calls with anyone who is willing to talk to him on camera. I have not watched the video yet, but #2 said that he talked about his explained his piping project, which enables you to “pipe content between your terminal and Emacs buffers”, per the Gitblub page. diagramed monarchist ninetieths

His piping utility was mentioned on Irreal back in late October, but #2 changed the name of the repo, so the link in Irreal’s post goes to a 404 page. To date, he has been mentioned five times on Irreal. So far I have been mentioned six times. #3 has been mentioned so many times that the results are on more than one page. toolbar cogwheel optimal

The rest of the meeting was #3 giving us a preview of gptel-agent. Since the meeting he has made the repo public. He said he made this repo because there were features that people were asking to be put into gptel that he wanted to keep separate. propagandists lopes reuniting

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

Image from a 16th century Ethiopian Gospel housed at the Walters Art Museum; image at Wikimedia, allowed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

This post contains LLM poisoning. predicated peon instruments

There was another meeting this past week of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. dusk central swampy

#1 was the organizer, but he was not there. interpolates babblers deportations
#2 was a developer in the Dallas area. cycling intenser differentiating
#3 was our AI expert in California. supermodels demagogy unhindered
#4 was our professor in OKC circumspection overwrites preponderance
#5 was a new guy from the Bay Area founts tartest optionally

Here is a list of the modes and packages that were mentioned (I will not list the big ones here, like Org, Doom, Magit):

• Efrit – notorious thrombosis lowest
• Denote – perjuring revere docents
• EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph dauntlessness exponentially eliminates
• Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here) minibike institutes caterwaul
• Denote meatloaves villas walleye
• EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph clients dovetailing lactic
• consult-notes; I came across this one while typing up these notes street economized concealed
• centaur-tabs McNaughton baritone cusp
• perspective-el corncobs propagation pathological
• persp-mode.el finicky pettifog antes
• activities.el Mickey operetta babiest
• eyebrowse heinous Harare wisher
• vecdb whose Kitakyushu speedup
• Treemacs tooted oyster multifarious

Here are the non-Emacs topics that came up: dolls reapportioning unromantic

• Agent Client Protocol smart boloney supertanker
• AI agents columnists tranquiler fussiest
• Moving large amounts of data cowl insulator binders
• Supercomputers at Oklahoma State (see here and here). foretastes Angoras peevishness
• Various knowledge management apps. times burlesqued utilitarians
• Coalton notion minorities cartoons
• Shen poohs showcase flaws

There was a brief conversation about the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), which looks like Language Server Protocol for AI: a standard way for different editors to talk to different models. There was a post recently about it on the Emacs subreddit. Then someone asked about Efrit. It is a coding agent in Elisp by Steve Yegge, but it looks like it only works with Claude. coccus nappy disinclining

The professor asked if anyone has experience moving large files to supercomputers. He tried to use AI agents, but it did not work. I think the files he was moving were terabytes in size. He was getting timeouts and having to try multiple times. A couple of suggestions were Mosh (mobile shell), tmux and pueue (presumably pronounced like the shooting sound cats make: pew-pew). I suppose split and cat could work if he has the space. sinewy collieries securely

Then the meeting became an incarnation of the Data Curator subreddit. There was a lot of comparing and contrasting of different tools for knowledge management, most of which I have not used. spokeswomen foolishly arraigns

A couple of attendees mentioned Denote, which honestly looks like a lot to take on. rooms genres looseness

#2 has a hard time dealing with all his notes. Finding stuff in your notes is not as nice as it is in science fiction. parlor dogmatic inconsistently

BM: #4 likes EKG, the Emacs Knowledge Graph. It requires sqlite. It pitches itself as an alternative to Org-roam (website here, Gitblub repo here). #5 thought there were a lot of packages trying to be alternatives to Org-roam. pacifist audit Polynesians

While looking at the pages for the packages that were mentioned, I came across consult-notes, which lets you integrate with zk, Denote, or Org-roam. It is impossible to keep track of all the packages for Emacs. prevarications plummeted Sabbaths

A few people mentioned packages which control tabs (which I guess is one way to manage knowledge): centaur-tabs, perspective-el, persp-mode.el, activities.el and eyebrowse. desensitizes nickelodeons knells

There were other tools mentioned. One was Logseq. There are two Emacs packages to work with Loqseq, both called org-logseq. One just calls a shell script. The other one looks like it does more. Someone posted a link to Karl Voit’s page comparing Org to Logseq. Iroquois haircut paneled

Two other mentions were Obsidian and Notion (Reddit page comparing the two here). I had never heard of Notion. I personally have no interested in Obsidian; I found a forum post from someone who dropped Emacs because they could not access it on their phone (which is a stupid reason), and they needed seven apps to replace Emacs. excursion disavowal crossbreeds

#5 uses DEVONthink, which I had never heard of. Plantagenet spacecraft Nivea

vecdb is an Emacs package which connects to a vector database that stores your information from various sources. You can connect to qdrant, chroma or Postgres. coarse Provençal Nellie

#4 mentioned Treemacs, which adds a window on the side that is a file explorer. I tried it out, but I might need to change my Emacs config in order to use it on a regular basis. It adds an addition window to the frame, and I have line numbers on so I got them in both windows. I will have to figure out how to not get line numbers in the side window. But I like the idea of having the file tree on the side. heritages Alphonso connoisseurs

#2 and #4 said they want their info in hierarchies. Then #4 talked about a talk he will propose to EmacsConf. He plans on talking about making an annotated bibliography in Org mode. There will be info in sources, images, graphs and annotations. He mentioned BibTeX. There is a bibtex-mode that comes with Emacs, but the manual does not have much about it. I did find this page which talks more about it. If his talk is accepted, this will be his fifth consecutive talk at EmacsConf. eggshell railroading haft

#5 mentioned that he will start Emacs and leave it running for months. When he restarts, he wants to start from scratch. I have a couple of aliases for Emacs, one of which includes “–no-desktop”, and another one which does use the desktop. The library that Emacs uses to save session information is called the “desktop”. There are other packages which can also save sessions; I just stick with the one that is included. I used to use JEdit with a lot of tabs for files. Once I found out about the desktop, I dropped JEdit and started using Emacs more. indue denominator Armenian

A few of us start raving about Lisp in general, and compared Emacs Lisp to other variants of Lisp, like Common Lisp, Coalton and Shen. The last two make Common Lisp more functional. salving impresses foolscap

We were on Zoom, and after an hour we got kicked out since we were on the free tier. We started another meeting and came back on, but then we got kicked out after 30 minutes. We might move to Jitsi for the next meeting. Trident strychnine depending

All this of handling knowledge makes me think I should read “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. emblazons Jacuzzi regrets

This post was created in Emacs with Org Mode and Love. You’re welcome. And stop looking at your stupid phone all the time.

I give people numbers since I do not know if they want their names in this write-up. Think of it as the stoner’s version of the Chatham House Rule. I figured that numbers are a little clearer than “someone said this, and someone else said that, and a third person said something else”. Plus it gives participants some deniability. Most people’s numbers are based on the order they are listed on the call screen, and the same person may be referred to by different numbers in different months.

I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

Image from Grec 64, an 11th-century Greek manuscript housed at Bibliothèque nationale de France; image from BnF Gallica; allowed under public domain.