Some folks like having an MCP package. I agree that gives you a bit more control. But I live dangerously and run emacs in daemon mode and tell claude to just run emacsclient to execute elisp as needed. It works amazingly well. Claude has full visibility into my editor and together we can pretty much do anything.
In fact, I increasingly think of emacs as just a live lisp machine. It's a surface that I and the agents can interact against. It acts as a document store, database, control surface, etc.
I like this, but the actual finding is a bit different. Trying to keep the water is wet makes this awkward, but I believe it's more like:
Everyone agrees that water is wet (P!=NP), but no one can prove it. In the meantime, a whole field of computer science was built on a stronger belief (ETH): that water, at its worst, soaks. Turns out, even at its worst, water only makes things damp. It's still wet. That said, this finding did produce a new measurement of wetness.
Commenting late, but just want to thank you for this. I've been using it for a bit now, replacing vterm for my setup. I'll be sure to submit feedback via github.
For similar reasons, I strongly prefer org-mode to markdown. I find that with org-mode and extensions (such as in-line elisp) I have a _significantly_ more powerful system. For example, specs can have tasks and roadmaps inline which reduces risk of drift. The biggest downside is, unfortunately, not enough folks are emacs proficient.
I hadn't considered HTML and I'm definitely going to try this.
The problem is that they aren't reinventing emacs.
The first person that makes emacs for the hoi polloi will suck up all the emacs people as well just based on interop frustrations.
I still can't believe that after seeing how slack just released irc for grandma's and pointy haired bosses that no one has done the same for a sensible defaults for normies emacs.
Yes! An honest to God, real, opinionated distribution of Emacs, with only curated packages with rules and regression testing actually enforced by the package managers. That would be neat.
Great write up. Love to see more of this topic on Hacker News! We've been building in this exact space since 2023, though we jumped directly into 3D with real-time multiplayer from the start.
My take: The "not a game" positioning feels like surrendering before the real design challenge begins. With our first experiment (Retail Mage [1]), we deliberately created a hybrid between traditional game structure and AI improvisation. We released it precisely because we were getting similar feedback from folks that an early implementation was too open ended and didn't "feel like a game." While I think we proved our point, we also learned a lot (including some mistakes we made).
That said, I _also_ think we can build _more than games_ with this technology. I think we’re edging into a new genre or medium: more improvisational and participatory than either traditional games or film. Structure still matters in this space, though. Without it you're really in the fanfic engine or writing assistant space. That’s fine! But it's a different goal.
Honestly, I'm very interested in this space. I was just speaking on a panel about this Monday at GamesBeat in LA and a few of us have a new podcast about this topic "Playing With Inference" [2] with folks like Nick from AI Dungeon as guests.
Last year, my startup launched Retail Mage as our first answer to the question of if there was any point in introducing ML/GenAI into the real-time gameplay loop. I hope this to be the first of a series of articles on what we learned.
Some other highlights, specific to the Hacker News folks:
- We have our own AI backend, running in AWS.
- Costs were a major issue and we did a lot to lower it
- We use a hybrid approach of mixing traditional game AI with machine learning
- We have not just AI NPCs, but an AI world interaction model
When I look back at it, Dugin was right back in November:
"So we have won. That is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy."
Dugin wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “We have won.”
Today’s White House display is exactly what he meant. A decade ago, the GOP would’ve never echoed Russian talking points. Now, they’re openly aligning with them.
This isn’t just isolationism—it’s the dismantling of U.S. hegemony from within.
I've been turning my attention to cold war and post-cold war Russia, their espionage, writing and interviews from various defectors, and generally trying to understand if talk of Russian influence is overblown.
It seemed very conspiratorial on its surface. I'm now fairly convinced that the Russians have been refining their espionage for generations, the USA is likely full of agents in all places of society.
Somewhat frighteningly, they anticipated the need to subvert any notions of this occurring, and very explicitly set out on a campaign to destroy trust and truth in US society such that when people began claiming Russia was infiltrating the country, it would just sound like conspiratorial nonsense. You can find plenty of references to this type of initiative going back 50 years at least.
The idea, ultimately, is to get the USA to destroy itself, as you mentioned. The dismantling of democracy in particular is a major accomplishment. Once that trust is eroded, every American's most immediate enemy is another American. Who cares about Russians when you've got neighbours like these, right?
It's hard not to see what's happening as a major victory for Russia. Did they actually orchestrate it? How much? I have no idea. Maybe only slightly, maybe a lot. Regardless, they're celebrating today.
They (Russia) have lost big time, because their goal was total annexation of the country in a couple of weeks. Now they got a unified Europe and Ukraine which is much stronger. Finland in NATO, and other things not to their liking. Not to mention a bunch of young and old people going back from front and causing chaos.
It is funny how they switched their narrative from “we are fighting US and NATO” to “US will do business with us and the war is with Ukraine”.
Finland and Sweden in NATO is a huge setback, but they'll probably get Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia, plus a guarantee against Ukraine joining NATO. This is not a great outcome for Russia, but it's certainly better than a NATO Ukraine and a second Euromaidan in Red Square next year, which was probably the alternative on offer.
Also, it seems likely that Russia will get the dismantlement of NATO as part of the outcome of the war, and that would be a great outcome for them. Will Sweden and Finland remain in a mutual defense pact with France, Germany, and the UK after NATO ends? It's up in the air. But in any case invading Russia from Sweden is vastly less feasible than invading Russia from Ukraine.
I think by 'we' Dugin meant 'anti-globalists', not Russia. There are pro-globalists in Russia and anti-globalists outside of Russia, so one doesn't equal the other.
These are the FP8 distilled versions of DeepSeek we've started testing at Jam & Tea.
We use LLMs for real-time gameplay. We released Retail Mage last year on Steam as a tech demo of what we can do. We've found FP8 to be the current sweet spot for accuracy and performance for our use case. It's one of the many techniques we applied last year to bring our real-time inference costs down by 3 orders of magnitude to make Retail Mage releasable.
Anyway, we're just sharing this with anyone who finds it useful.
You can read a few more note by our ML engineer, Yudi, on LinkedIn here:
I use agent-shell and I love the ecosystem that's being created there:
https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell
And for claude interacting back with emacs:
Some folks like having an MCP package. I agree that gives you a bit more control. But I live dangerously and run emacs in daemon mode and tell claude to just run emacsclient to execute elisp as needed. It works amazingly well. Claude has full visibility into my editor and together we can pretty much do anything.
In fact, I increasingly think of emacs as just a live lisp machine. It's a surface that I and the agents can interact against. It acts as a document store, database, control surface, etc.