His Abstract Algebra course is still the best one on YouTube.

Going live for Emacs Reader development

https://tv.dyne.org/w/aqbcMQuPaBV8X92EZaxx1d

Not going to stream here today, since I'm streaming from my libre laptop that doesn't have telegram. Feel free to join the peertube and/or the IRC #phi-mu-lambda

Or, as usually misattributed to Mao: "There is great disorder under the heavens, and the situation is excellent".

50th birthday of the Scheme Programming Language

Finally a new Guix release after ages.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/gnu-guix-1.5.0-released/

To be emphasized these are accepted papers. Accepted by some of the most elite academics from the most elite companies or universities. Definitely we've made tremendous progress in intelligence, so much so that we are unable to distinguish it from useless hallucinations.

Imagine how much the average person is not being able to distinguish between stupid hallucinatory propaganda if these hyper-educated academics can't, in their own area of expertise.

Either that, or they were paid to accept these papers regardless. Both explanations denote the degradation of the already terrible state of academia. It's similar to the slop PRs free software maintainers have to spend time perusing through.

I sort of made a breakthrough, I originally thought this would be impossible but it eventually worked!

We now have a cursor for navigating the text in a document in Emacs Reader! And you can navigate entirely by keyboard!!

Right now in the demo below it can only emulate forward and backward movement, but I'll be implementing vertical movement. Not just that, you would be able to set marks and highlight just by your keyboard!

A bit of history, once integrated Emacs Reader would be the only document reader inside Emacs, and actually beyond Emacs even to support a fully keyboard-driven document reader. Even zathura or sioyek only navigate the page, not at character, word or line level.

Notoriously there was a huge (3K!) LOC PR to pdf-tools to enable this, which implements exactly this but it never got merged:

https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools/pull/39

I got Emacs to actually render a video.

It flickers terribly, and of course no audio. But it still does better than what I had ever imagined.

This came out of my fights with Emacs' graphical capabilities while working on Emacs Reader, which led me to see if I can create a library which can use the GPU to render stuff into Emacs. And somehow it does. I cannot still believe this.

Another animation using the same library, also an Emacs buffer.

Our main finding is that using AI to complete tasks that require a new skill (i.e., knowledge of a new Python library) reduces skill formation. In a randomized controlled trial, participants were assigned to the treatment condition (using an AI assistant, web search, and instructions) or the control condition (completing tasks with web search and instructions alone). The erosion of conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging skills that we measured among participants using AI assistance suggests that workers acquiring new skills should be mindful of their reliance on AI during the learning process.

Shen & Tamkin, How AI Impacts Skill Formation (2026)

Just to be clear this research came from the "leading AI company" Anthropic's research fellowship program. Even though I'm always skeptical of the methodologies of such tests, I think this one has a pretty rigorous one.

Go ahead, make another app with Claude and call yourself an engineer until you can't :)

Together, our results suggest that the aggressive incorporation of AI into the workplace can have negative impacts on the professional development workers if they do not remain cognitatively engaged. Given time constraints and organizational pressures, junior developers or other professionals may rely on AI to complete tasks as fast as possible at the cost of real skill development. Furthermore, we found that the biggest difference in test scores is between the debugging questions. This suggests that as companies transition to more AI code writing with human supervision, humans may not possess the necessary skills to validate and debug AI-written code if their skill formation was inhibited by using AI in the first place.

Shen & Tamkin, How AI Impacts Skill Formation (2026)