Prot Asks: Ag about Emacs, Lisps, LLMs, and story-telling

Raw link: YouTube OR Internet Archive

In this ~2.5-hour video, I talk with Ag Ibragimov about Emacs, Lisp programming, Large Language Models, social interactions and the use of language, as well as the importance of narratives and story-telling.

Ag shares with me his enthusiasm about all things Emacs, including the fact that it is a “Lisp machine”, so to speak, through which you can control your computer. We discuss a lot of cases where Ag has benefited from using Emacs and how it has conditioned him to think of problems in a certain way.

Ag tells me how he did not have an easy time switching to Emacs. His back and forth may have been what he needed to develop his current appreciation for the tool. Talking with him made me feel that he is enthusiastic about the topic, both technologically and in terms of its social potential.

Emacs would not be what it is without Emacs Lisp. In this regard, we comment on Lisp dialects more broadly. Ag tells me about his experience with Clojure and how he defaults to doing his work in Lisp, with Emacs at the epicentre.

Throughout our chat, Ag shares his thoughts on the significance of story-telling. We explore how narratives contribute to our everyday affairs and even make some comments about how Socrates would relate to our modern world and our increasing use of LLMs to get things done.

Ag has a pragmatic view of technology in general and of LLMs in particular. We cover these issues at some length and connect the dots with everything else.

Links from Ag Ibragimov

Here’s my Emacs config: https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d

Some Emacs packages I wrote:

https://melpa.org/#/mw-thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Thesaurus
https://melpa.org/#/consult-hn - Hacker News search with Consult
https://melpa.org/#/browser-hist - Search through the Browser history
https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el - Lookup Wiktionary entries. This one is not published only because I need to finish the org-mode branch of it - I need to solve the problem of converting html tables with sparse columns and rows to org-mode compatible format and there’s no good solution for it in elisp.

About “Prot Asks”

In this new video series, I talk to anybody who is interested to have a video call with me (so do contact me if you want!). The topics cover anything related to Emacs, technology, and life in general. More here: https://protesilaos.com/prot-asks/.