Cats Effect is monadic effects. What is discussed here is sometimes called "direct-style" effects, and is an alternative representation.
I think you've missed the point regarding effect systems. Concurrency and resource handling, implemented in a way that is composable and reasonably easy to reason about, are two of the big ticket features.
> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk, the study found. This was consistent across all levels of fitness.
> In order to achieve substantial protection, classed as a greater than 30% risk reduction, between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week was needed.
So 30 minutes a day is still good, but more is better. Seems reasonable.
Also exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym. Daily activities can count, like cycling to the train station for example. Which gets to one of my favorite hobby horses: increasing exercise at the population level is an urban design problem.
Urban design can help, but only for those who actually want to take the 'hard' route. Most people I know would rather take a subway or call an uber for anything above 20 minutes of walking (which makes me sad).
The trick is to make the healthy option the easy route. That's what Paris did (creating more bike lanes, getting rid of parking spots, closing roads to cars) and cycling is now more popular than driving [1].
Indeed after the pandemic many more bike, for what I've seen a considerable percentage e-bikes, maybe understandably given the hills and distances in Paris, but imho not the everyday cardio exercise one needs.
I got a group of 5 or so friends looking at me like I just came out of a spaceship when I told them me and my wife go for walks almost every evening for 30-60 min... walking for the sake of walking was truly alien to them.
Walking to subway station and from destination subway station to final destination is significantly more walking time than using a car from home to final destination.
I used to live in a very walkable part of Victoria BC, which was great! Unfortunately I was eventually priced out, and the job market there was very competitive so I had to move
I wound up in a fairly walkable part of Calgary. But Calgary is not a super walkable or bikeable city. Transit here is at best ok, and winter gets very cold. There are some good bike paths but you have to be pretty determined to use them when it snows or it's -40 out.
I guess what I'm saying is urban design is super important, but geography has a say too. We don't all get to live in the relatively mild west coast weather.
Calgary could be much better, but the river pathway is really good. It doesn't snow that much and it is rarely -40 (as in pretty much never unless you go in for wind chill). They do a very good job of clearing snow from the core pathways; way better than they do the roads! I think the biggest challenges are that it's likely the non-car options are all managed by car driving bureaucrats. Things like commuter pathways that just end in construction, with convoluted or no detours; slow & widespread construction that seems to be focused on pretty landscaping vs. functional infrastructure; what it's like to ride a bike or scooter in close proximity to big volumes of massive trucks. This is not unique to Calgary, but if we made city managers walk, roll or bus to work for a month it would help IMO.
I think ebikes are amazing but it is more than a bit sad to me that less than half the people moving around in my neighborhood put in any energy. There's like two bicyclists under 25. Many many many scooters and ebikes.
Very torn on this one. I love it for them, but also, it seems super sad to me. I can't even really explain why it's so saddening.
i think that's a chicken and egg cultural problem. build cities in a way where bicycles/walking is encouraged, then over time you'll have people that want to do exactly that.
example: Calgary is currently debating removal of the free fare zone for the DT transit line. It's like 10 blocks of straight, flat walking but you hear things like "nobody will go out for lunch and support downtown businesses if we get ride of this!" Currently it's mostly used by homeless people to stay warm in the winter.
9 hours of moderate to vigorous seems like a lot.
When I do vigorous (2 times a week HIIT) I cannot do vigorous the next day, my body clearly needs recovery. I can do moderate.
But I wonder what scientists mean by vigorous at this point. I am starting to suspect I set the bar too high
I think the definition of vigorous is roughly 75% of max heart rate. HIIT would generally be more strenuous than that. Roughly speaking for a lot of people, running faster than about a 10:00/mi pace is probably vigorous.
In the WHO recommendations, they say to get 75 minutes of vigorous or 150 of moderate per week. I believe in this study they use the same double counting of vigorous minutes.
I’ve seen other studies that say you get most all of the cardio benefit you can with about 150m vigorous/300m moderate. You could roughly get that by running about 2.5 miles per day.
Light and moderate are mostly just "activities of daily life" (walking, commuting), and vigorous is whenever you exercise explicitly (running, swimming, speed cycling, soccer, etc). So it's more like 9 hours of active movement, or 4.5 hours of exercise (40 mins a day).
"exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym."
Most of the people I see in the gym are sitting on the benches on their phone 9 minutes out of 10. I'm pretty sure going to the gym is not helping at all...
If you're doing heavy compound exercises like 3x5, 5x3 squats, you kind of need to wait three minutes in between! Even adding something in between like press or pullups is quite hard on the nervous system.
The people who walk 45m on the treadmill while watching a show, or people who sit around chit chatting, yes... A waste of space.
Calling it 'the gym' sort of conflates its two distinct sections: the one containing cardio equipment, and the other containing strength training/bodybuilding equipment. So-called 'work capacity' aside, there's almost zero overlap between the two sections.
Whether someone's effectively strength training/bodybuilding or not, which is the section I think you refer to—nobody reasonably believes that does anything significant for cardiovascular health, which is the topic being dicussed here.
At certain times of day the London underground deliberately directs people to longer paths around the stations to alleviate congestion. This kind of thing could be a health benefit.
Which though, are not a sign of harmony- its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers, the losers becoming cattle, organs or worse and usually they do not defect only because then some horror from the abyss eats the whole gametheory board and their abilities have atrophied -aka cooperation usually is a sort of slavery.
> its more a sort of horrific balancing act at the abyss having clear winners and losers
No need to appeal to emotions this way. At the individual level there are only losers, and we all die. At the universe level, whatever happens, happens, and it’s up to us to find beauty in it.
Well, yeah. Murder requires intent and, at least in human populations where cannibalism is not a problem, the separation with predation is clear. It’s less clear in this cases where the killing also involves eating (parts of) the victim. We don’t understand why they do it, therefore we cannot really condemn this as murder, therefore whether we should intervene and what we should do are not obvious.
HN is currently obsessed with Rust vs Zig. OxCaml should be considered as an alternative to both. The argument for Rust is safety, while for Zig it's ergonomics, but OxCaml shows you can have safety and ergonomics together. In my little tinkering with it [1] I found it really easy to use.
OxCaml is more of a competitor to Go, JS/Typescript or the Java/.NET ecosystems than these two other languages. It's also a temporary effort that's ultimately intended to feed into upstream Ocaml.
I think that’s not true; vanilla OCaml is already a competitor to Go, etc. OxCaml is explicitly an effort to compete more with Rust (the “Ox” in the name is to evoke “oxidizing” = rusting)
Hah, I was reading it as `0x`, a common prefix indicating hexadecimal, though I can't say my brain made any leap as to why "0xCAML" would be any more hex than standard.
Agreed with this. OxCaml still requires a runtime, so it's not suitable for some applications, like embedded systems, where e.g. Rust can be used. But it certainly can be used for many of the same applications. E.g. Bun, which has been on the home page recently, could easily be written in OxCaml.
Ok, not the article I thought it was going to be. In fact it's the complete opposite of what Emacs means to me. For me, the point of Emacs is that I use one program to do everything. Why would I want a special bit of software just to view Markdown? I can view it in Emacs, and then it works with everything else I do. Developing lots of custom applications, AI assisted or not, is not replacing how I use Emacs.
The point of the article is that the whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface, and in that regard everything feels a lot more like Emacs.
It's not "about" Emacs, it's more about the vibe of personalized software in 2026 to someone who does a lot of Emacs stuff.
> whole gestalt of what you do on a computer is now one big programmable surface
Emacs-effect. Use it long enough and everything becomes "one big programmable surface". I've been in that modus operandi for years. Emacs is my "control room", I don't necessarily do everything in Emacs, but for sure it converges all into it - everything flows through Emacs. I control my WM directly from the REPL inside Emacs. I can grab a content from a tab in my browser - I have access to my browser history, and all the tabs, I can switch to any tab, close and re-order them. I can grab a text selection on the page, I can extract entire readable corpus of an article while ignoring all the irrelevant fluff - banners, ads, buttons, etc. It works even for js-rendered content (React, et al.). I play all videos controlling them directly from Emacs - even though the video itself is playing outside, in mpv. I still can pause, change volume, fast forward, speed-up, extract transcript, etc. All without leaving Emacs. That's pretty useful when taking notes. I can grab any text I see on the screen. Even if it's in Slack.app. Why, If I can read it, there's no reason why Emacs shouldn't be able to. I can grab any region on my screen with Flameshot, it goes through Emacs, runs tesseract and OCRs the text out of it. Useful when someone's screen sharing in Zoom. This was all possible before LLMs. Now, LLMs running in Emacs can do some crazy, wild stuff.
mpvi [1] is the video control part. I have only used it a little bit but it is incredibly good. Control the playback completely from Emacs and quickly make timestamped org notes.
I don't know what the other parts are. Curious to learn!
Of course I can't explain in detail in a single comment everything I listed, besides, that's just a subset of things I do through Emacs.
Sometimes I want to kick off a process in the external terminal - long-lived processes are better handled that way. Kitty has remote protocol. I needed bidirectionally - being able to pipe into and from an arbitrary Emacs buffer to and from the terminal, so I wrote the Piper¹. This kind of stuff should be built into Emacs, maybe someone gets bored and sends patches, if I get to it, perhaps I'd myself do it one day.
I gravitate towards CLIs and tools with built-in IPC layers, Emacs is terrific with inter-process communication. That's how I manage my WM on Mac, where I use Hammerspoon. Wondrous piece on its own, it is Lua-enabled, which means I can use Fennel, which means I can have Lispy-REPL, which means I can connect to it directly from Emacs and manipulate all my windows among a bunch of other things.
In Linux, I have build a similar modal toolkit² (experimental) that is written in Babashka (Clojure), that means I can expose nrepl port and use it with the Lispy-REPL. If you don't know what's such a big deal about it being a Lisp REPL, here's my comment from the other day³.
MPV is amazingly hackable and has an IPC, you can nearly fully control it without touching it. I have built some customizations on top on mpv.el.
To access the browser, I use OSA (open scripting architecture) with some JXA snippets. Unfortunately, there's nothing similar for Linux - the only thing one can do is to run the browser with the RDP port exposed. Although, you still can access the browser history - every major browser keeps it in a sqlite db⁴.
OCRing any text is a straightforward piece of Elisp⁵ - it just checks if there's a graphic content in the clipboard and if it is - it saves it into a temp file and feeds it to tesseract cli. It's not as accurate as most modern OCRs, but it beats everything else in speed. For my purpose (typically grabbing a piece of Zoom screen share) - it works.
Not really the same. Emacs focus a lot on compatibility and common modules (even if there may be some different takes on those common things). So you got big systems like helm, consul, ivy, company,… and the. everyone building on top.
Another thing is configuration (which also ties to the previous statement). You have to be able to split the idea of the program (what it aims to do) and your personal preferences. Emacs make that easy by having a framework for user preferences. That makes for an extendable program.
The closest, but not as user friendly is unix and suckless philosophy combined. Small programs, easy to understand, configure, and extend.
The article provides an analogy, it doesn't tell you to do anything with Emacs in particular.
Besides being an everything app for you, Emacs is an (unconventional) operating system with weak boundaries between user apps. It makes it easy to modify anything, write new things, or combine two existing ones with very little code, something that e.g. Microsoft could have only dreamed of in Office with its awkward embedding that barely worked. Emacs is one the few survivors of the idea that users should program what they need, which was popular during the personal computing revolution in the 80's. Two others are spreadsheets and BASIC.
Programming turned out to be too complex for the untrained users to handle, but AI makes the idea of custom one-off apps or weird hybrids pretty damn close, that is true in practice. I see a lot of people that vibe code their own little things to get things done. That's precisely what BASIC (often shipped in the stock ROM!) was supposed to be used for.
I think that "the number of programs" you're suggesting is arbitrary. It's kind of like calling an operating system one thing, when it's a lot of things. You can "count" the things different ways.
The bigger takeaway is "making your own programming things."
Here is one company that provides the gowns for many UK universities: https://www2.edeandravenscroft.com/non-ceremony/. I could be kitted with the appropriate gowns for my UK degrees for a few hundred squid each.
Academics, who attend many graduation events, often end up buying their own gown. I believe you are supposed to use the gown of the university you graduated from, so they must be for sale somewhere.
Once you have your own gown you can customize it. I haven't seen any profs with LEDs additions to their gowns, but adding extra pockets to hide a book or snacks is fair game.
Yeh but most undergraduates (and probably graduates) will rent because it's cheaper for a one-off occasion. As you said it's mainly academics that buy.
I think this really down plays the value of mental model or strategies for organizing code. Take a compiler: often described as a sequence of transformations on an AST, taken to the extreme in the nanopass framework. That's a really useful mental model, and you can extract that model and apply it in other contexts. For example, many business applications are a sequence of transformations on JSON. So they're basically compilers. That can be good architecture in the right situation.
You don't have to call a sequence of transformations a compiler. You can say your AST is an algebraic data type, and your transformations are folds (or structural recursions; same thing). Now you have an abstract model that isn't tied to a particular application, and you can more easily find uses for it.
If you know a bit of maths you might wonder about duals. You will find codata---objects---are the dual of algebraic data. Ok, now we're programming to interfaces. That's also useful in the right context. What's the dual of a fold? An unfold! So now we have another way of looking at transformations, from the point of view of what they produce instead of what they consume. At this point we've basically reinvented reactive programming. And on and on it goes.
You can find most of this in the literature, just not usually presented in a compact and easy to understand form.
(Note, the above description is very quick sketch and I'm not expecting anyone to understand all the details from it alone.)
I’m not sure what part of the article this is attempting to critique.
But I would say that just because your preferred mental model is an abstract algebraic one where you build an abstract model that can apply to multiple situations doesn’t mean that such an architecture is best for every situation.
The article talks very clearly about the system and social constraints that it is optimizing for architecturally and ‘turning everything into a fold’ doesn’t immediately strike me as helping to meet the fast-build-feedback needs of the deep contributors and easy-and-safe-to-hack-in-modules needs of the weekend warrriors, which is what are described as the goals of the architecture.
But it also doesn’t strike me as very clearly not the case that the architecture has some of the features you’re describing.
It feels rather like you have a pet mental model which you think all architecture should subscribe to, and… I’m sorry but that seems naive.
You misinterpreted my comment. Algebraic data types and folds are an example of an architecture, that has application to many situations. They are not the only architecture, and I'm not presenting them as such.
I am trying to show 1) software architectures are useful, 2) if you abstract them you can find principles and relationships that allow you to transfer them to different domains, and transform them into different models, and 3) there is a lot of depth in software architecture and utility in learning it.
The article spends most of its time discussing social context in which architecture is developed (I agree it is important, but not everything) and in general downplays the utility of learning about software architecture (e.g. "“software design” is something best learned by doing", and later suggests there is little useful writing on software architecture).
I like this. No reason the terminal should only support text. Data science notebooks show one way the terminal can evolve. Lots of interesting stuff happening in this space, with Kitty probably being the most aggressive innovator here [1]. I'm not sure there is an overall vision, though.
No evolution necessary! With my project, euporie [1], you can have use your data science notebooks with graphical image outputs, HTML, LaTeX, etc, all in the terminal.
This is such an amazing project. I find it so awesome that I can bump on such projects (and their creators, Hi!) on hackernews.
I wish to ask a question if I may (and as such pardon my ignorance on jupyter kernel, I don't know much about it and I hope you can tell me more about it :-D)
but my question is, is there a way to swap the jupyter kernel within euphorie to something else more minimalist?
And when you run a project with ssh, there are ways to give access to other users with user:password if I may ask?
I didn't know that there were ways to run jupyter kernels in terminal, I don't know when I might need it but I am prepared with this information now, this feels so nice to me, thanks for making it!!
This is like a checklist of a thing I didn't know that I needed/existed but the second I know that it has existed, it feels like my mind has checked it off and just a satisfaction from knowing projects like these existing.
(I think in some sense this is a bit of same reaction to me on Ratty too), Its just so good seeing projects in these spaces :-D
Edit: just remembered the one time I think I was using some websites which gave me jupyter and then I tried to use browsh to run jupyter to run jupyter in terminal so that it can be controlled by terminal but it had some issues and I wasn't able to run it.
I also wish to ask if there is a way to sign in to jupyter instance like that itself perhaps? (IIRC it was a jupyterhub instance)
> is there a way to swap the jupyter kernel within euphorie to something else more minimalist?
You can use euporie-console for a REPL-like terminal experience (still with rich outputs) if you don't want the full notebook experience.
You can also select the `local-python` kernel in euporie to run code using the local Python interpretor which runs euporie, instead of connecting to a Jupyter kernel.
> And when you run a project with ssh, there are ways to give access to other users with user:password if I may ask?
> I also wish to ask if there is a way to sign in to jupyter instance like that itself perhaps?
euporie-hub supports spawning notebook instances for connected users, but I haven't implemented collaborative editing like JupyterLab supports (yet). I believe that jpterm [1] might support this.
that looks awesome (btw: a demo video would be nice, i could not find any), but it's not solving the problem terminals are generally used for.
i want something like jupyter but for unix shells, not for programming languages. and, i don't want it in the terminal, i want it to be the terminal, that is, i want to get rid of terminal escape codes that you currently need to make this work.
think about it like this: in jupyter you have pieces of code and their output. you change the code, it changes the output.
a unix shell version of this would be a commandline, and its output which would be text or an image or whatever the commandline produced. every output box would be itself a terminal if the output is text. but that's only necessary to support programs that produce terminal output. new programs could produce structured data that this jupyter for shells could interpret and display directly.
You mention using this over ssh. Is there any way to get this working in tmux or anything similar by any chance? Or is the idea that euporie itself is acting like a multiplexer?
Joking apart, the whole thing was both an exercise in madness and genius. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy. We will never know...
He'd probably be writing poison pill generators for AI, obfuscation tools (in the vein of public key crypto, but using entirely plaintext, in a style similar to Cockney rhyming slang) for social media posting.
He was pretty anarchistic and antiestablishment. I'm sure we'd still see that coming through.
> Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy.
At what point do you consider he had "gone crazy" relative to the development of TempleOS? Only when he committed suicide? Shortly before then? Last ____ years of his life?
Without trying to sound insensitive, I'd personally argue the entire OS was the byproduct of a "crazy" individual.
The inspiration may have been all "crazy" but the implementation was still really neat, and it takes a lot of effort and skill to get to the point he did before his death. The thing about people who lose touch with reality is that their efforts to create or express something often make no sense to the rest of us. TempleOS, however, works. Terry create an OS from scratch, an entire new language (or variant of a language) in the form of HolyC, and not only does it all work together in a way that requires no disconnect from reality, it works well for his goals and philosophy.
The entire thing may be the result of a person suffering from schizoaffective disorder, but that person still held a great deal of skill to implement that idea and enough of a touch with the reality of computer hardware to make it happen.
I managed to get `pyvista` to render arbitrary 3D shapes directly to the terminal using kitty graphics.
It's a giant hack, only way to make it performant is using shm.
I wonder if something like this could work for thumbnails in the terminal; I prefer to browse my filesystem from a terminal rather than the point and click file manager typically, and it would be really useful if I could have a grid-style `ls` with terminal based renders of the 3d models (thinking STL/STEP, 3D printing) in that directory. Bonus points if I could preview/rotate the model to inspect it.
as a compromise i started using nemo/n̶a̶u̶t̶i̶l̶u̶s̶ with a plugin that puts a terminal at the bottom of each tab. so i have a graphical view of the terminal but a commandline in the same folder right next to it. the two don't interact other than being able drag and drop filenames from the filemanager into the terminal, so it is far from what we really want, but it's a small start.
Do you mind sharing a little more about the plugin you use? A quick online search wasn't very helpful to me but I've also been hoping for something like this.
fedora has a package for it. just installing it will make the plugin available so it can be activated within nemo preferences.
one problem is that common terminal shortcuts are captured by the filemanager. ctrl-c for example will copy a file from the file manager and not kill a process in the terminal if you have something selected (there is no shortcut to unselect everything (you can do ctrl-a,shift-ctrl-i (select all/invert selection))).
if any shortcuts bother you, these keys can be changed in ~/.gnome2/accels/nemo
i wish the shortcuts would work based on where your focus is.
dolphin also supports builtin terminal, but it shares the same terminal between all tabs which is a bit less convenient. it handles control keys a bit better though.
despite its shortcoming this integration has changed the way i work and got me interested in exploring better solutions.
now when i want to run a command i go to the right tab, the visual presentation of the contents tell me that i am in the right directory, and i can run the command in the right context.
i do a lot of stuff in the terminal, but i prefer a visual orientation. i normally use tmux everywhere, and i have a tmux window open for each directory that i operate in. but ls or terminal file managers are not visual/interactive enough. sorting for example depends on the use case. in a file manager i can have different tabs sorted as i like, in tmux i would have to remember the right ls command and then still don't see everything i need, especially selecting multiple files for opening at once in the terminal is a lot of typing, whereas in the file manager it is a few clicks. a separate terminal and file manager window would make it difficult to keep the two connected. (although a window manager feature that allows me to connect windows would be cool)
Or for that matter, the magic that was a Tektronix storage scope terminal (and compatibles. At school there was a vt10x that had been modified to act like a Tek 4014 by some third party).
Mix this 3d graphics, with data science notebooks, with local LLMs, and perhaps an integrated coding harness, with visibility over your personal data and you’d have something absurdly good.
This might overtake “a haiku+macOS mashup” as my idealised computing future.
Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming states that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
well, almost. if emacs offers a graphical file manager i'll consider using it. this seems to be a start: https://github.com/emacs-eaf/eaf-file-manager. the file manager needs to also integrate with a terminal though so i can run unix commands in the same directory. and it needs to support mouse-based operations too. finally, and that's the real kicker, i'd like a better integration of the terminal output and the graphical display by supporting the passing of structured data that the display knows how to handle without terminal escape codes. those need to go away. (which is why sixels are not a solution either)
you got a point with the notebook, except both it and vscode are for programmers. i want the same for non-programmers for the unix commandline. i looked at jupyter-qtnotebook. it can display graphics inline. now instead of a repl for programming code i want to enter unix commands and display their output with graphics.
What's overlooked here are the insane political and economic forces that were required to get anywhere close to the (sort of!) consistent implementation of plain text we have today. These projects try to piggyback off that success yet only contribute back harm. We have standards for a reason.
I'm not saying people can't have fun, but don't try to start a cyberpunk-inspired revolution and then blame the side effects of groupthink and software rot on everyone else when it goes sideways.
Exactly this. They are slowly turning the terminal into a web browser, just for attention. We already have web browsers. If you want something at the midpoint, make it, but please don’t call it a terminal & destroy one of the few non-trojan-horse standards that we have left.
In contrast, I had great support the one time I contacted them. Have used them in business and personally across a number of different accounts with no problems.
I think you've missed the point regarding effect systems. Concurrency and resource handling, implemented in a way that is composable and reasonably easy to reason about, are two of the big ticket features.
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