Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Eulogy for Vim

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 151 posts

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#141

Post by MSFT_Edging »

skeledrew wrote: post #103
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "People are seeing something I'm not, what am I missing?" I've seen people celebrate horrors beyond my comprehension. Cheer the deaths of innocent people because it may inch some abstract national goal closer to a similarly abstract measurement. Insist that lives in one place are worth less than lives in another. Should I ask "what am I missing"? I don't think so, sometimes you draw a line on moral or ethical groun…

> rip the livelyhood from under millions of people's feet I have never gotten this. How is livelihood being "ripped away"? There is enormous capability made available to anyone and everyone who wants to take hold of and do something with it. Just as it's on each individual to go through the process and pains of landing a job (or building a business, etc), it's also on each individual to keep up with changes that may…

> How is livelihood being "ripped away"?

Who does it benefit to automate away well paid industries? For every well paid industry mostly automated away, you remove one more path for financial mobility.

One less path available means more people doomed to the service economy serfdom. You can be incredibly intelligent, creative, personable, and driven, but bad luck can still doom you to the role of a serf.

It's incredibly naive to assume the pattern of the short history of industrialization will continue. More jobs may have been created in the past, but where are those plans for the future? Why is it imperative we accept the plans of people making money hand over fist, while also forced to endure the hardships of adapting?

Jeff Bezos won't have difficulties adapting, but the average citizen will lose their healthcare and get beaten by a cop for protesting their own social murder.

Pure automation and efficiency can't be the one true path if we want to maintain our current economic system. Capitalism needs waste and inefficiency. It has little room for charity when the shareholders are the end beneficiary.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#142

Post by JuniperMesos »

my_throwaway23 wrote: post #65

I opened the comment section expecting to find a slew (a slop?) of LLM enthusiasts. I was not disappointed. Whether you're a fanatical or not, of either side, LLM usage is driving energy and hardware prices to go up, it is an implicit driver of climate change, and it will replace jobs. I don't see what there's to argue. Great article through and through.

Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#143

Post by monkaiju »

embedding-shape wrote: post #48
sarchertech wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think he’s taken a moral stance against AI, so it doesn’t matter to him if other people find it useful.

Right, a difference of opinion, which is fine, OK and even good. But why paint it as "Obviously the rest of you aren't smart enough to understand" instead of "Other's disagree", seems really strange (although in-character).

He never said that, you're just strawmanning the piece

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#144

Post by monkaiju »

elcapitan wrote: post #32

One of the side effects of AI is definitely that a lot of people have way too much time at their hands which they can now invest in pointless community drama.

For a comment on a forum intended to foster a community of folks interested in software development, this is a remarkably anti community point.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#145

Post by monkaiju »

skybrian wrote: post #7

This doesn't seem like a good cost-benefit analysis for AI. Not sure what that would look like, but it seems like making some attempt to quantify the benefits would help.

There are hordes of AI-maximalists (many invested in AI being successful) to do that, far more than the critics

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#146

Post by monkaiju »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #142
my_throwaway23 wrote: post #65

I opened the comment section expecting to find a slew (a slop?) of LLM enthusiasts. I was not disappointed. Whether you're a fanatical or not, of either side, LLM usage is driving energy and hardware prices to go up, it is an implicit driver of climate change, and it will replace jobs. I don't see what there's to argue. Great article through and through.

Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.

Removing AI quite clearly doesn't fit into that category. It doesnt reduce human suffering, hell the primary propagandists behind it are explicitly anti-humanists and want it to replace human creativity. Thankfully its awful at that

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#147

Post by monkaiju »

canelonesdeverd wrote: post #88
mikkupikku wrote: post #2

I've long had great respect for Drew, way since way back when he was sircmpwn writing cool calculator software. Great programmer, and an incredibly based individual. Stays true to himself even in the face of overwhelming pressure. I completely disagree with his take on this; battleship vibecoder in vimscript is awesome and important, socially, because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses. I…

I disagree, I think the over-reliance in these tools turns AI providers into the final gatekeepers of the profession. And with the raising prices of hardware, I'm afraid AI will make computing as a whole inaccessible to most people.

The best counter to this is to just forego these tools and develop actual knowledge. Knowledge & skill is still power, no matter what the AI propagandists say

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#148

Post by bigstrat2003 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #62
odst wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?

It takes most people years of burying their heads in a computer to become effective programmers of anything more than trivial software. This is rapidly changing.

That hasn't changed at all. You simply cannot be an effective programmer using AI. Heck, if you're having the thing write programs for you then you aren't a programmer at all at that point, because programming is the act of writing code. But you can't make good software if you just have the LLM bang it out for you, so nothing has changed.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#149

Post by Kwpolska »

tovej wrote: post #123
Kwpolska wrote: post #42

A Vim contributor vibe-coded some toy plugins, and the reaction to that is forking Vim? Sounds like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Not plugins: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/18800#issuecomment-3568099...

Drew complains about plugins made by a #4 contributor who is also a member of the Vim organization on GitHub. This complaint is about someone who is currently #11 and is not in the GitHub org. If that contributor regularly makes low-quality contributions, it is worth investigating by the Vim team, but at first glance, those might just be teething problems that are unavoidable when adding a major feature to a widely used and highly configurable app.

Re: A Eulogy for Vim

#150

Post by iLemming »

elif wrote: post #124
cweagans wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that doesn't address GP's argument, which I _think_ is "there's a time and a place for those criticisms, and _literally every time emacs is brought up in a public forum_ ain't it"

look i just made a single point about VIM OVERCOMING THE LOSS OF ITS CREATOR by pointing to emacs as a WORSE CASE. I didn't ask for these weirdos to come demanding to litigate every detail of every sick quote he's ever given. but i will not stand down to karma bullying to cover up sex crimes of a person just because i like his software.

I hope it's not my comment(s) that triggered your anger, still, please accept my apology.

> Stallman deserves to be criticized for his own positions.

I fully agree. I'm just asking to try to decouple that from Emacs.

> because i like his software

Can we agree that Emacs is no longer "his software" and it stopped being that long ago? Governance and ownership have separated from authorship, right? The point is - when the scandals got out, we didn't circle the wagons. If the tool and the person were tightly coupled, you'd expect the community to defend him. We didn't. The separation was/is real, not just rhetorical.

Sure, yes, GNU/Emacs is still officially an FSF project, and the FSF is still Stallman's institutional creation, even if he's been sidelined. His philosophical fingerprints - GPL, copyleft, free software ideology as distinct from open source - are baked into the project's DNA in ways that aren't cosmetic. So there's a version of "his software" that's genuinely hard to dislodge. I'm not trying to argue that or erase his authorship, no.

But can we still find a way to deal with it differently? Say:

- Wagner was viciously antisemitic; the music is still the music

- Caravaggio was violent, possibly a murderer, yet painted some of the most incredible art pieces

- Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer yet produced genuinely influential philosophy

People are complex creatures, sometimes we need to decouple the evaluation of the contribution from the evaluation of the person. I just want to avoid circles like: "using/praising Emacs is bad because Stallman is bad, therefore his creations are tainted".

I'm not defending Stallman or any of his behavior (good or bad), I'm defending something the community itself largely built, maintained, and steered. When people outside of the loop hear these things together, it hurts me personally - the conflation feels like a category error aimed at something I personally have a long relationship with.

The annoying thing about these whole thing is that you threw the Stallman material probably without even thinking about any of that. It's rhetorical ammunition, not a serious argument. You're not really engaging with what Emacs is to its users - just reaching for the most socially radioactive association available to win a point. And I'm now having to "defend" against an argument that was never made in good faith to begin with. Which is exhausting in a particular way - not because the argument is hard, but because you have to take it seriously even when it wasn't offered seriously.

Post reply on HN