Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra I’ve been an Emacs fanatic for over 20 years. I’ve built and maintained some of the most popular Emacs packages, contributed to Emacs itself, and spent countless hours tweaking my configuration. Emacs isn’t just my editor – it’s my passion, and my happy […]
Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
In 2024, we launched Tess.Design, a marketplace of fine-tuned AI image models where artists got paid a 50% royalty every time someone used their style. Less than two years later, we shut it down. This post is a candid account of what we built, what the data showed, and what any entrepreneur should know before […]
A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)
This guide is patterned after my “Doing well in your courses”, a post I wrote a long time ago on some of the tips/tricks I’ve developed during my undergrad. I’ve received nice comments about that guide, so in the same spirit, now that my PhD has come to an end I wanted to compile a […]
It looks like the “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers
Sorry to interrupt your regular programming about the AI apocalypse, etc., and return to the traditional beat of this blog’s very earliest years … but I’ve now gotten multiple messages asking me to comment on something called the “JVG (Jesse–Victor–Gharabaghi) algorithm” (yes, the authors named it after themselves). This is presented as a massive improvement […]
Two Years of Emacs Solo: 35 Modules, Zero External Packages, and a Full Refactor
I’ve been maintaining Emacs Solo for a while now, and I think it’s time to talk about what happened in this latest cycle as the project reaches its two-year mark. For those who haven’t seen it before, Emacs Solo is my daily-driver Emacs configuration with one strict rule: no external packages. Everything is either built […]
No, it doesn’t cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user
My LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of screenshots from the recent Forbes article on Cursor claiming that Anthropic’s $200/month Claude Code Max plan can consume $5,000 in compute. The relevant quote: Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute, according to a […]
Sir Tony Hoare has died
Jonathan Bowen m’a appris le décès de Tony Hoare jeudi 5 mars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare Tony Hoare est un de mes maîtres via ses écrits dont : Dahl, O.-J.; Dijkstra, E. W.; Hoare, C. A. R. (1972). Structured Programming. Academic Press. ISBN 978-0-12-200550-3. OCLC 23937947. C. A. R. Hoare (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer […]
Rendezvous with Rama
I saw some news about a possible movie adaptation of “Rendezvous with Rama” and it set me thinking again about the book and what I thought about it. There’s quite a lot here, so I thought it would be worth sharing in a blog post. Let’s start with some history. Arthur C. Clarke Clarke (born […]
Thomas Selfridge: The First Airplane Fatality
On the evening of 17 September 1908, a young American officer named Thomas Selfridge climbed into a fragile wooden aircraft at Fort Myer, Virginia. Minutes later, he would become the first person in history to die in the crash of a powered airplane. The machine was a Wright Flyer, designed and flown by Orville Wright, […]
Things I’ve Done with AI
Mon, Mar 9, 2026 | View comments on Hacker News I started programming in middle school. The first thing I remember writing is HTML for my neopets homepage. That morphed into writing static sites for Minecraft servers, and later on Java plugins for Minecraft. Programming is so fun. I took it on as a hobby […]