The process of drawing the version(s) I’ve drawn, deeply fulfilling, improved my abilities.

The process of wrestling an LLM to draw it for me, a Sisyphusian torment, atrophied my abilities.

Yeah, crazy lady, figures out it’s not a data center needing taken out, but upstream, or they just make more data centers… so takes out a computer factory… crazy lady, didn’t go far enough up stream. ;D

The depth of the implications of that moment though… the horror, the reality of it all, the scale of it… all encapsulated in that one confirmation, a terminator. So we didn’t stop it again yet. >:,-I What a gut punch, like seeing the whole world destroyed in an instant.

“Mom! Mom! Wait! He’s here to help!”

Sure.

Me: *Stand up and walk out*

since that was 10 hours ago, i presume you’ve already searched to discern tui means terminal user interface, … if that’s what your query was about.

mcedit came before your “MCEdit”.

same as bedrock linux came before bedrock version of minecraft for linux.

minecraft ((at least) twice) further confounded searches for the already obscure foss tools.

mc = midnight commander.

mcedit = midnight commander’s inbuilt text editor.

Yup.

It’s getting sickening isn’t it.

Which is a good thing.

We shall indeed return to,

(as was put in that star trek movie, something like)

“We believe when you get a machine to do the work of a man you’ve taken something away from the man”

all the faster, having seen where that goes.

… Or we could build skynet and the matrix, 1984 and brave new world, a new, falling into unconscious farmed meatsacks, utterly atrophied of any ability, rendered completely dependent on your abuser. That’s an option too.

How much poison, how fast? Enough to grow insensitive? Enough to get past how sickening it is? Well, many may keep believing it’s all good productivity at their fingertips, at their lips even, upon mere utterances, wishes catered for. Oh, except that bit that was wrong. Oh, and then needing to mend the rest of it too, because none of it was right really. Oh, and then there’s so much more that can be done. Oh, but then none of it is ever done quite correctly too. Oh lets just accept the slop, getting too exhausted by all the extra work. … How soon before we’re all out of the delusions, realising it’s not even fulfilling its marketing’s selling-point claims of helping our productivity.

I got an LLM to help me expedite an idea I had for a text editor written in fish with standard utils, and that was great, really exciting to see it come together, and what a great learning expedition too, as I was reading more lines of [bad] code per day than I had in the entire prior 10 years of using fish. I managed to wrestle the LLM to get it right enough, and incremented my way through it. Though, several times, I burned through over 30 back-and-forth with the LLM, just to get it to do simple things correctly. … Long story short, I burned out, fast, deep, and hard, in a month (and stupidly pushed on for a month yet trying get one more feature completed… which it was even more stubborn on). … How fast could I have accomplished similar, by just learning how to do it myself first, without the extra steps of seeing hundreds of ways not to do it? And how fast would it have felt? (answer: almost no time at all, engaged in the moment). Instead of a very long hard slog. And with all that wax-on, wax-off, I’d have it in muscle memory better too. And, it’s fair progress when you already know how, and can indeed just expedite a tedious portion, and check it’s done right, from your explaining how to do it right. It’s much worse when trying to learn from a teacher who is constantly hallucinating and leading you astray.

And that’s for code… that’s one thing… where utility and correctness are typically easily in a greater ratio to creativity. But pure art…

I tried it once there too.

There’s an image, an idea I’ve had, since around 1999, and have drawn several times in several forms… a sort of meek, mad, maker themed, where there’s a body of a sheep (the meek), a tail of a wasp (the mad), and the wings of a butterfly (the maker)… for a sort of wise humility and gentleness, but with a powerful proactive protective aggressive potential, and a beautiful subtle creative proliferative bounty… idk, words, don’t really do it justice… I’ll just show you… so… Here’s a crappy version I doodled in gimp:

and then, after trying (I think over) 30(?) “AI” image generator tools, several of which, trying again for another 30 times, and failing to get any of them to do the artwork anywhere near right, eventually getting to the point where I was feeding them that version of the image and they were still failing to get it right, so at least another 30 itterations yet, and it eventually, with a lot of bickering and rewording of prompts from me, produced:

… which I still had to lop off the 5th leg from.

And, for all that effort… [remember, faffing through hundreds of completely wrong]

Where’s the expressive nuance?

There’s none.

It’s dead.

It’s so dead. Flat. Empty.

And it’s killing us.

So yeah… [excuse the expressive language, but, vital to express:]

“PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!”

and to paraphrase

“YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS ON TV RUNNING AI, TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT!”

Thanks Bill Hicks.

We’ll never find quality parity, and if it ever does, then the nightmare dystopia will have manifest itself fully, far beyond the alarm bell of the atrophying skill and beginning of the acceleration of degeneracy to total collapse, for so long as we chase the money and the reductive and the productive and believe the fairy tale lies of marketers trying to take every last thing from us.

How much already, known and unknown, is our expression curtailed by:

Computer says no.

Time to relax into persistently thrusting ourselves into our own work of art.

(Interestingly, some significant overlap in this as from what I saw this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNGyqgoMM (crap title, touches on far broader themes). Especially the clip from the writer, starting at 30:52 … Beautiful insight, bolsters the point of the OP).

… Anyway… Let me leave this comment on that friendly rousing note…

PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!!!

:)

I often revisit the notion of making a linux distro with scant more than just mc (& mcedit).

Does kate have a tui mode?

… I may have to revisit it again, if it’s viable to use when simply ssh’d into another computer.

Hah. The text editor I wrote has that covered.

… ignore the bugs.

there’s an emacs mode for that

First time I tried to buy weed, I was sold mixed herbs, by the french exchange student. Cheeky git. I’m still pleased with my effort, as a 13 year old. First opportunity, taken. Pity it was bunk. Good lesson, learned early.

The groceries that come out of the plastic shopping bag?

They’re the family of the plastic shopping bag?

So when we’re in the shop, filling the bag, are we impregnating the bag, and the pregnancy lasts for the duration of the journey home, and a typical healthy birth involves removing the groceries from the bag, and putting them in the cupboard and fridge and freezer and fruit-bowl etc.

Then sometimes there’s a more difficult pregnancy and labour… like whatever’s going on there… up tree branches!? And still there are a family of groceries in there?

… I think I should stop over-thinking this.

It is an eccentric view, to entertain the invertedness of the mushroom, compared to e.g. mammals. The brain, and the digestive system is inside out! So it’s like we are all inside the mushroom’s digestive system. And inside it’s brain.

So instead of being left alone to survive a while, I’ll have cluster B personality types seeking to use me up as fast as possible?

I think I’d rather be treated like a bag of cheap weed, thnx.

Got me considering making that fit the swimming meme image. Y’know the one.

• introverts supported
• extroverts splashing around struggling
• ambiverts drowning

I don’t know if that quite works though. Heh.

I think you have the skill to take this further, and make it interactive, clickable, explorable, even wiki’fied (or at least git’ified) to allow others to contribute too.

I noticed some were missing.

• BedrockLinux
• CRUX
• SLAX
• Tin Hat
• Hannah Montana
• KISS
• Carbs
• Exherbo
• … Okay, I’ll not exhaust this list with dozens more. ;)

Well done for including as many as did already. Was joyous seeing Slitaz made the lislt. :) A fave of the small distros.

*Ahem*

mcedit

under sung hero of easy tui text editors. [Has controls on screen.]

overlooked because it’s part of mc, and thus does not show up in the text editor categories in package managers and websearches?

could do a similar THGTTG bit for it. … or other parodies of other stuff… idk, my brain not conjuring such things with ease just now.

(And yes, I missed the reference, at first, too… Thought about responding with some contrived towel elaboration).

Which text editor do you use?

• Emacs mostly
• sometimes fin for configs and some other small file tweaks and when developing/testing fin,
• sometimes mcedit just because it’s an awesome under sung hero of easy tui text editors. … beats nano imo.
• sometimes leafpad, like when i need some intermediary between things that are being stubborn to paste between
• rare neovim, like when i’m trying to learn neovim, or trying something that only neovim has
• rare nano… there are probably still times…
• once kate to see what it was like, I liked it, then I added the features I liked to emacs.

It’s worse than the picture depicts. It’s not just the lovers, the elitists and the evangelists, it’s the sheer range of choice too, beyond the loudest.