Lab Leak: The Video

Posted on 2022-04-06 by jcs

Ryan Grim from The Hill has a video out that does a good job in summarizing the Vanity Fair article on the origin of COVID-19 that I wrote about a few days ago. In just over 10 minutes Grim does an excellent job in explaining what the Vanity Fair article said and what it all means.

Judging from the comments, Grim is a long time lab leak skeptic but he now says that the theory of COVID-19 coming from a lab leak is not merely a plausible explanation but, by far, the most likely one. He also argues, persuasively I think, that of course the Wuhan lab would want to do the (gain of function) research. They had every incentive to do so.

If you want to understand what the current arguments are concerning the pandemic’s origin, the video is an excellent and easy way to find out with an investment of only 10 minutes. The takeaway is what it’s always been: these people have been lying from the beginning in an effort to protect the virology community and its research programs. The danger is that they won’t have learned their lesson and will continue doing dangerous gain of function research until they manage to kill us all.

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Org Modern

Posted on 2022-04-05 by jcs

As regular readers know, I’m not much for bling and fancy formatting in my editor but that’s a personal choice without a moral dimension. Plenty of people like to have their Emacs buffers look as nice as possible.

For those people, Daniel Mendler has a nice package called org-modern that uses font manipulations to make an Org buffer look almost typeset. If you follow the link, you’ll see a GIF that switches between normal Org mode and Org-Modern mode.

It certainly does look nice so if you like this sort of thing, you might want to try it out.

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Emacs 28.1

Posted on 2022-04-04 by jcs

Yesterday, Eli bumped the version of Emacs to 28.1. I wasn’t sure if there would be further release candidates coming but at the time the release had not appeared on any of the FTP servers nor had there been a release notice posted to emacs-dev so even though I wrote a post I was hesitant to publish before I knew what the status of the release was.

Today, the official announcement was posted to eval-devel and the tarballs are available in the usual places so Emacs 28 is finally with us. As usual, we all owe Eli and the other maintainers who contribute their time and skills to ensuring that Emacs is a living, up-to-date piece of software.

My project for this evening is the compile and install the new release. With any luck, tomorrow’s post will be brought to you by Emacs 28.

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April Fools Day

Posted on 2022-04-03 by jcs

At the risk of putting my nerd credentials at risk, I have a confession: I really hate April first and all the Internet silliness that goes with it. Many of the April fools day posts are extremely well done and I never know what to take seriously so I end up discounting what are probably serious posts.

I’ve always assumed that my dislike was the result of my curmudgeonly demeanor and that I was an outlier but a recent (Twitter) poll suggests that I may not be alone:

It is a Twitter poll and the respondents are probably all followers of a single person but I draw comfort from it nonetheless.

I know the silliness will go on and that there’s nothing I can do about it but get off my lawn anyway.

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Vanity Fair on the Origin of COVID-19

Posted on 2022-04-02 by jcs

Vanity Fair has a long article on the origin of COVID-19 and the political maneuverings surrounding it. Additional documents have surfaced since the virus’s origin first became an issue.

The TL;DR is that there was always substantial doubt from the Virology community about the official zoonotic explanation for its genesis. Substantial efforts from Fauci, Daszak, and others were exerted to shutdown those doubts and to cast the lab leak explanation as an anti-science conspiracy theory.

The picture that emerges is not pretty: it’s of a group of scientists doing everything they could not to find the truth but to suppress it. Daszac, in particular, is portrayed as a lightweight concerned only with the funding and survival of his nonprofit, the EcoHealth Alliance.

Vanity Fair makes the case that the gain of function research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded by the EcoHealth Alliance shouldn’t have been happening because of a 7U.S. Government moratorium on such activities. Daszak, however, offered a quibbling argument that the moratorium didn’t apply to his research and his enablers at the National Institutes of Health agreed.

Like other articles about COVID’s origin, Vanity Fair doesn’t reach a conclusion on that. What is clear, though, is that a major cover up took place and is still going on. One doesn’t have to be a cynic to wonder why. As virologist Simon Wain-Hobson put it, “[The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin] want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.”

Regardless, the major lesson in all this for me is that we have to shut down this dangerous gain of function research before these people manage to kill us all.

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The Power of Emacs

Posted on 2022-04-01 by jcs

I saw this tweet by Daniel Nemenyi today:

He makes a good point. With Emacs it’s pretty easy to solve a lot of problems that would be absolutely opaque with most other editors let alone the software whose name must not be mentioned.

If you follow the thread, he explains that the error was caused by his using follow-mode with LaTeX-mode. That meant that bottom of screen calculations had to be constantly made. Notice that there’s no particularly high powered debugging going on here. He simply ran the profiler, discovered where Emacs was spending its time, and used that to figure out what had happened.

Another example of the power of Emacs.

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An Emacs User Looks at Acme

Posted on 2022-03-31 by jcs

I’ve written before about the Acme editor. The first time it was about Russ Cox’s video tour of Acme. The second was Vince Foley’s take on Acme as an Emacs user. Those were almost 10 years ago so perhaps it’s time for another look.

Ben Hancock has a post entitled The Tao of Acme that is another Emacs user’s look at Acme. His post differs from Foley’s in that he came away from the trial an Acme convert. As I’ve said before, there’s a lot to like about Acme but there’s also a lot the average Emacs user—including me—finds off-putting.

First, Acme is almost completely mouse driven. Its author, Rob Pike, is a believer in mouse driven navigation and believes it to be faster than the keyboard alternative. Any Emacs user who has bothered to master Emacs navigation and uses something like Avy to move around the visible buffer is going to beg to differ on that and probably adamantly take the opposing position. If your editing strategy includes eschewing the mouse at all times, you’re not going to like Acme.

The other thing that new Acme users complain about is the lack of syntax highlighting. Again, this is Pike’s personal choice and was done on purpose.

If the above doesn’t bother you, there’s a lot to like about Acme. A look at Cox’s video will give you a good idea. A major difference from Emacs is that almost nothing is built in. If you need a specialized regular expression search, say, you provide it with a shell script. In a way, that means Acme provides an even more personalized environment than Emacs but at the cost of having to implement all your specialized commands yourself.

Acme is an interesting editor that many might find attractive. It’s available on most platforms now so you don’t have to be running Plan 9 to use it.

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Another Paean to RSS

Posted on 2022-03-30 by jcs

Radosław Miernik has a post that’s another paean to RSS. He explains what RSS is, how it works, and its advantages to the reader. It’s mostly used to track blog entries but its application is actually broader. Basically any site that posts periodic content can offer an RSS feed to alert their readers when there’s something new.

Miernik uses the free version of Feedly, which, he says, works well for him because he doesn’t need to search the entries or interface his reader to other applications. For Emacs users who do want those capabilities, the very best choice I know of is Elfeed. You can manage, read, classify, and search your feeds directly from Emacs. As I’ve said before, I can’t recommend Elfeed enough.

I’m always a little confused when I read a post like Miernik’s, though. They usually start by accepting that RSS is a lost technology that deserves to be resurrected. I inevitably do a double take whenever I read that. To me, RSS is like the air: it’s something that’s just there. An essential and necessary part of the environment. I don’t know where the notion that RSS is a technology lost in the sands of time comes from but it’s certainly not my experience.

I suppose there’s a certain type of person who thinks that now that Google no longer supports it, RSS has ceased to exist. I think that Google got out of the RSS game for a reason and that that reason benefited them and not us. Regardless, RSS is a valuable service to those who follow multiple sites and I join Miernik is praising it and encouraging others to make use of it.

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Taking Yegge’s Advice

Posted on 2022-03-29 by jcs

Last week, I wrote about Steve Yegge’s latest Emacs video, Emergency Emacs. The video was mostly about rebinding the Emacs commands that he uses frequently to be as easy to type as possible. One of his rebindings was to replace Meta+< and Meta+> with Ctrl+x t and Ctrl+x e for beginning-of-buffer and end-of-buffer.

It seems like I’m always moving to the top or bottom of the buffer so I type Meta+< and Meta+> a lot. Truth to tell, I kind of like the bindings but they are clumsy to type. I have to move my left hand to hold down Shift and Meta and type < or > with my right hand.

The new bindings are much easier to type and, as Yegge says, you can do it with one hand. I’ve been using them for only a couple of days and they still haven’t been burned into my muscle memory so I have to think about them first. Still, they’re already faster than the old bindings and I’m glad I changed. If you find yourself moving to the top and bottom of the buffer frequently, you should consider making the change too. It’s a bit of pain to retrain your muscle memory but it will make you more efficient.

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REPLs and Interactive Programming

Posted on 2022-03-28 by jcs

Mikel Evins has a post from back in December of 2020 that recently popped up in my feed for some reason or another. It’s an interesting post about one of my favorite programming topics: interactive programming. In it, Evins examines REPL driven, interactive programming and why not all REPLs are created equal.

As he says, plenty of languages and development environments have REPLs these days but most of them don’t support interactive programming the way that, say, LISP REPLs do. He gives the example of a function, foo, calling a function bar that does not exist. In most systems that’s a fatal error or crash. In LISP you simply get dropped into a breakloop where you can examine the current run time environment, change variable values, or even define the bar function. When you’re done, the original computation resumes with the modified environment.

It’s hard to provide this type of programming environment and you can’t just bolt it on as an afterthought. It has to be planned from the start the way languages like LISP and Smalltalk are. The characteristic that divides real REPLs from the pretenders is that you have complete access to the compiler and run time while you’re programming. The best examples I know of showing how powerful this can be are from Magnar Sveen and Kris Jenkins that I wrote about here. If you want to see the technique brilliantly demonstrated, watch Jenkins build a Spotify client right before your eyes in 16 minutes.

If you’re unfamiliar with interactive programming, take a look at Evins’ post and be sure to watch the Sveen and Jenkins videos. It’s my favorite way of programming and it may turn out to be yours too.

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