Drafting a brief report on #EmacsConf 2023. The other organizers suggested including a section on conference highlights. It's hard for me to pick, although we should definitely mention @howard's talk on solo RPGs in #Emacs as a crowd favourite, and it was nice to have John Wiegley, @yantar92, and Stefan Kangas speak about core development. Want to make my life easier and reply with your favourite talks and why? :)
@sachac, the talks that impacted me the most were @takeonrules Jeremy Friesen's talks, ostensibly about writing with #Emacs and talking to others about Emacs. Substantively they got right to the heart of what makes Emacs so powerful as a platform, as a community, and as a model for how #FreeSoftware liberates us. His embodying the attitudes of self-sufficiency, mutual aid, empathy, open-mindedness, and authentic creativity showed us ourselves at our best.
@sachac@yantar92@howard I very much liked Yoni Rabkin's calm,measured talk about EMMS. It described not only the software but how the development team worked.
@sachac@howard@yantar92 actually there part of the conference I admire most is is the fact that that whole thing is obviously a labor of love by emacs geeks for emacs geeks, using and showcasing as much free software as possible. It creates community for those of us who are otherwise isolated in our dark holes using a 45 year old text editor and wondering quizzically why everything in our lives can't be reduced to text.
2nd favorite was Andrew Hyatt's LLM talk because it clearly showed how relevant a programmable text processing environment (that happens to have an editor) is to the brave new world of LLMs, possibly being as he intimated, positioned to lead the way.
What's old is new. Emacs was born in an AI lab. The challenge of computing as far back a Alan Turing was intelligence. This talk shows not the past, but emacs' place in the future.
@sachac@howard#EmacsConf2023 My personal highlights are not necessarily about specific presentations, but about represented topics:
Multiple talks on using Emacs/Org mode in university setting both on student and lecturer side. This gives a promise on more people being exposed to Emacs and more people using it in their professional toolchain.
The raise of LLM talks - Emacs being text editor is a natural interface to LLMs that do text-crunching.
"Parallel text replacement" talk showing us that even the most common text-based interfaces are not yet "figured-out". Even in Emacs.
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