Bad code becomes a liability after 6 months. Good code after 6.5.

This video, plus this comment, always makes me smile:

Nice to see the art of reasoned argument is still alive.

P.S.: I have this one printed on some of my archive binders, just in case someone has never witnessed such a work of art on the editor wars. Also, there is evil-mode.

The search for an ideal keyboard/setup is a common quest that Emacs hackers face at some point. Some time ago, in a terminal far, far away, jwz shared some fun results for searching finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it. Since then, this motif has been one of my favorites gems from his hostname—along with all the retro-computing, Emacs, music, movies, and Tron parties of course. These are some setups that I liked the most from his gatherings in the last years:

A personal contribution to the thread:

I also felt compelled to mention Yanni. I think we can call it… the Emacs feeling.

The '80s… Black Sabbath on the speakers, Heavy Metal on the big screen.

Summer of 1981. I was 11 years old and my mom wouldn't let me watch it. So I told her I wanted to see another movie that was playing at the same time. She dropped me off for the mantinee. I paid for Superman 2 and walked into Heavy Metal. I was blown away and the only kid in my neighborhood who got to see it!!

And you were thinking Sebastian was programming in Rust all this time.

Such a funny rant. But I think this video is here because of the farm segment.

"As of this moment I officially resign from my job as software engineer and will take up work on a farm shoveling pig shit and administering anal suppositories to sick horses because it will 1000 time more tolerable…" As a software engineer for 20+ years, I think this is true regardless of who you work with.

A comment that made me appreciate Second Reality even more:

I'm not sure younglings now can appreciate how utterly jaw-dropping Second Reality was in the day. In October 1993 my uni flatmate got it on a magazine cover-mount floppy, and he yelled at me to come in his room and watch it on his 486 PC (with stereo sound card). We just stared at it on a loop for about an hour, in complete disbelief that a home computer was capable of generating such images and sound. Then two months later we got the first demo of Doom and lost an entire weekend. In that second half of 1993 we thought we were plummeting into the future and it had no bounds. The only comparisons I can think of are the first time seeing Elite on the (32K!) BBC B, and watching Terminator 2; and some current experiences of Turing-test-beating Chat GPT-type LLMs.

Emacs takes a lifetime to learn. So the sooner you start, the longer it will take.