Well, I started using Emacs because I was feeling limited by my Vim+Tmux-based workflow. Like you’ve heard from others, what convinced me was the consistency in interface, and the composability that enables.

Everything is a text buffer. When the text is drawn to screen, it might be resized, colored, hidden, replaced with images, etc, but it’s all still just text. Because of that consistency of medium, all your interactions boil down to manipulations of that text.

What’s important isn’t the verbatim text, but what the text represents. It could be code (symbol, function, library, in any language, literately), prose (word, sentence, paragraph, or whole book), a file or directory, a button, a list, a foldable outline, a process, a container, a game tile, a typo, a secret, a git object, a pull request, the string you’re looking for, a definition, a chat message, an RSS feed/item, a web page, etc…

Each of those has a mode (or modes) that makes interacting with those objects in a semantically meaningful way both efficient and composable (to varying degrees).

That’s why Emacs devotees try to do everything in Emacs. Leaving Emacs means leaving that consistency and semantic expressiveness behind. In a CLI shell, yes everything is text, but it’s comparatively raw. The best you can do is define variables and color it. TUIs bridge the semantic-meaning gap, but aren’t composable with each other. (Same with GUIs, but because of administering remote systems I avoided them when possible.) You can’t add functionality to htop without recompiling the whole thing. You can’t pipe ncdu’s results to rsync. Emacs is a live Lisp machine. You can redefine (or advise) any function on a whim, without restarting.

That’s not even getting into how everything you do to improve interacting with text improves your experience with all those text-encoded objects. Completions can be filtered and ranked by different algorithms, lines can be “narrowed” to, it has an interactive regex builder, you can autofill with simple, intelligent predictions (like, what’s under your cursor, or a prefix-matching word up-buffer), you can deeply integrate LLMs, reflow and pretty print, follow externally-edited files, transparently access remote resources…

I don’t know. Obviously it’s not for everyone, but using Emacs makes me feel liberated; in control of my software. I love it.

Thanks for giving me a soapbox and the opportunity to put my thoughts together.

(Full disclosure – I put your post verbatim into GPT-4o and checked to see if the answer looked right.)

Ace Online (previously Space Cowboy Online)?

This almost certainly doesn’t help you, but I do this kind of interactive-computing-in-a-consistent-interface with Emacs.

Emacs has modes (think, extensions) to do all those things and more.

It can also be a global application (/arbitrary function) launcher as demonstrated in this post.

The only problem is you have to give Emacs your heart, or it won’t work.

If you make Tailscale your VPN in Android it will never be killed. Mileage may vary depending on flavor of Android. I’ve used this on stock Pixel and GrapheneOS.

Under Settings > Network and internet > VPN

Tap the Cog icon next to Tailscale and select Always-on VPN.

Like most of GMing, it’s an art. You get a feel for it based on the players and the system.

Follow one group until there’s a natural break in the action, or their need to make decisions, or just until the other group gets fidgety.

Like television does, with cuts back and forth on story beats.

“Okay, you guys set to work rooting around for the McGuffin in the library. Meanwhile! Group B, what are you doing?”

Secondarily, encourage (remote) communication if the setting allows it. Give one group a clue that will help the other group, but it must be conveyed.

Objects in LEO fall quickly (months to single-digit years) without station-keeping, mostly from atmospheric drag. Anything we put there wouldn’t contribute to a long-term Kessler Syndrome situation. It’s geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) we have to worry about, but once you’re up that high there’s a lot more room for everything.

It was many months between announcement and release of their previous hardware. How soon do you need a laptop?

There’s an app to pull the Astronomy Picture of the Day and set it as a wallpaper

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.jakelee.apodwallpaper

Dissenting opinion - You don’t need to change your payment method, but you might want to rent a box outside your country.

The seedbox provider is providing you sufficient cover. They’re the ones who would have to make the link between the IP you’re using and you. That’s unlikely to happen because they’ve protected themselves.

A copyright owner (or their agent) that is interested in identifying you from your seeding would send a letter to the data center owner (OVH, Hetzner, etc) saying “Hey, one of your IPs is infringing our copyright! Tell them to stop.”

The data center owner might forward that letter on to the seedbox provider who is renting space in their data center. Either way, the letter will be ignored and everyone goes on with their day.

If the copyright owner is sufficiently motivated they can press the issue with some lawyers. Then the data center will provide a name, to make it all someone else’s problem. They don’t have your name though, just the seedbox provider’s, and the seedbox provider is smartly incorporated in another country, which makes litigation complicated (to say the least).

Now, maybe the copyright owner is a cabal of publishers looking to make a point and have buckets of money to spend. (You did say you wanted to mirror Anna’s Archive.) In that case they’ll work with local law enforcement in the jurisdiction that the seedbox provider is incorporated to go after them there.

That court case will take some years to resolve, but then your involvement will come down to whether the seedbox provider kept logs associating payers and IPs. They might or might not. If they didn’t, you’re just one person in a big pool of customers.

If they do have logs associating you specifically to that IP at the time you were infringing the copyright… well, who’s to say your credit card wasn’t stolen?

But it’s the big releases that have the most bugs and UX breakage

I use it often to share large files (pictures and videos, mostly).

Clones of face buttons.

Discord Push-to-Talk.

In Factorio the keyboard modifiers (alt, ctrl) are back there.

On the topic of build times, it took me too long to learn that nixos-rebuild supports remote build workers and targets.

For example, if I am editing on my laptop, want to build on my desktop, and apply the build to my file server, then I’d run…

me@laptop$ nixos-rebuild test \
--flake ~/wherever-it-lives \
--build-host desktop \
--target-host file-server \
--use-remote-sudo

The host names should match the name of the nixosConfiguration output from your flake. If they don’t I think you can specify like, --target-host .#some-machine

Remote sudo avoids having to SSH as root.

Bonus tip: Having Tailscale on every machine makes this work reliably from anywhere, network speed as the limit.

No, just this example code from their site:

browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)

My mistake was not knowing where newspaper4k fits in the stack. They’re wrapping it with Playwright, which it seems you could do here.

Looks like newspaper4k uses headless Chrome. You could try loading the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension and browsing the pages directly.

I regularly use it (in Firefox) without even thinking about it. Only notice when I send someone an article they can’t access.

KineStop

Clever idea. Thank you!

Radarr and Sonarr both have features to sym/hardlink files to new places after the download client tells them it’s finished.

Filebot also gets mentioned a lot for this task, though I haven’t used it.

Ah, sorry. I was answering about hyper.

The earliest reference to “meh key” I’m turning up on Kagi is from ErgoDox’s Indiegogo in 2015.

They may have coined the term.