Author Archives: jcs

An Update On The Copilot Suit

Posted on 2022-11-07 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about developers threatening a suit against Microsoft/GitHub/Copilot for copyright violations. The issue was that the AI assistant Copilot was “suggesting” code that was an exact copy of copyrighted code without attribution. That post … Continue reading →

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Mini Introduction to Elisp

Posted on 2022-11-06 by jcs

For those of you who are afraid of Lisp—and in particular Elisp—Suraj Kushwah has a short video on Elisp that posits the way to love Emacs is to learn Elisp. I can relate, sort of. I first learned Lisp and … Continue reading →

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Google and Twitter Compared

Posted on 2022-11-05 by jcs

Manu Cornet worked at Google for 14 years and recently moved to Twitter (he’s since been caught up in the great Twitter purge) and has an interesting discussion of the differences in the companies’ cultures as seen from a staff … Continue reading →

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Extracting and Displaying EXIF Information

Posted on 2022-11-04 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez continues to roll out new examples of applications for his dwim-shell-command framework. His latest offering is three functions that, given a photo: Display the EXIF information Displays the location of where the photo was taken in the minibuffer … Continue reading →

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FSM Diagrams in LaTeX

Posted on 2022-11-03 by jcs

I’ve written several times about my use and affection for finite state automata in programming. It’s amazing how often it can reduce a complex problem to a triviality. The first stage in taking advantage of this method is to draw … Continue reading →

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A Discussion of Markup Languages

Posted on 2022-11-02 by jcs

Alex Kladov has a post that discusses various markup languages and what makes a great one. He considers Markdown AsciiDoctor LaTeX reStructuredText HTML He finds them all lacking in various ways. He believes that any markup that’s tied to a … Continue reading →

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EmacsConf 2022 is Coming

Posted on 2022-11-01 by jcs

Leo Vivier announces on the Emacs subreddit that the 2022 EmacsConf is scheduled for December 3rd and 4th. The conference will be live streamed so you needn’t travel to participate. Most of us won’t be able to watch the whole … Continue reading →

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Emacs Modifier Keys in X-Windows

Posted on 2022-10-31 by jcs

Most Irreal readers know that Emacs offers the Hyper and Super modifier keys for use in keybindings. Less well known is that there is also an Alt key. It’s not the Alt key that appears on most modern keyboards that … Continue reading →

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The Coverup Begins to Unravel

Posted on 2022-10-30 by jcs

Irreal has long been suspicious about the back story of COVID-19. As I’ve written before, if you put on your scientific hat, the only possible conclusion is that there’s not yet any definite resolution to covid-19’s genesis. But if you … Continue reading →

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Mickey on Readline

Posted on 2022-10-29 by jcs

Mickey has another great post that will be immediately useful to almost every Irreal reader. The post is about the functionality of the GNU readline library. As Mickey says, almost everyone knows that readline (or at least BASH) implements the … Continue reading →

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