Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…Sorry. Keep going. Ask a question like: how can this be done a lot better? Because every single day you do this for hours a day, how many hours did you spend on thinking how to do this better or whether to do it at all, in the case of meetings? People surprisingly just don’t do this enough. I see this, just to go back to jujitsu, there’s a lot of people that show up and do jujitsu or martial arts, and they do it the same way over and over and over, and they invest tremendous amount of energy. And they don’t ask like, “How do I do it differently to improve faster?” In the case of jujitsu or any kind of sport, same with practicing the piano or the guitar, they just religiously put in a lot of time and derive a lot of joy from getting better. They don’t enough ask the meta question of like, “How can I do this better?” And with editors, it’s surprisingly how often people do just that. With typing, it’s surprising how many people do just that. Like you said, they’re pecking or looking down. It’s like the quality of life improvement you can have by learning to touch type, by just like typing without looking. It’s immeasurable. You’re bringing a lot of joy to your life because all of us are typing a lot. And the reason, by the way, I was extremely efficient with Emacs… I’m sure you know, all jokes aside, it feels like Neovim has more room for the kind of efficiency I’ve had with Emacs to be able to move really fast as you described me to edit. There is a real joy. It’s not just efficiency, it’s a freedom that you can get when you get really good with an editor. The reason I chose to go with VS Code is it felt like there’s going to be an acceleration of features to which Neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up, in the… and I don’t mean in the next five years, I mean in the next 30 years. And it felt like I almost wanted to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that, because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, with this Kinesis keyboard, everything, all the shortcuts, I know how to program, and it felt like this is not… Neovim will not be here in 50 years. Possibly might be, I don’t know, but it felt like you want to learn these constant different technologies. Cursor is a great example of that. I primarily am using Cursor now. I go back between VS Code and Cursor. Just the skill of using AI is a real skill, from the shortcuts to the timing to the layout of the windows to how I think about where, when and how to use the AI that doesn’t distract me, that it empowers me, not just for the fuck of it or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity. windows to how I think about where, when and how to use the AI that doesn’t distract me, that it empowers me, not just for the fuck of it or for the fun of it, for the actual measure of productivity. It’s a skill. And I feel like I would be stuck in a local maximum of comfort if I stayed with Emacs. And maybe the same should be true for me with Neovim. I should try it seriously. I’m sure there’s a plugin, like a copilot type of situation that you could set up with Neovim. I should possibly consider that. But Cursor is doing a lot of really fascinating stuff on the IDE side, not just sort of generate code and edit that code manually, it’s like continuously be able to rewrite code. It’s the idea of tab, tab, tab, tab, move the Cursor around, but also modify parts of code and do the diff really nicely, that whether it’s Cursor or VS Code that wins that battle out with Copilot, I don’t know. But that feels like a fundamentally different experience than the really efficient, joyful experience that you just described in your selling me on this is Neovim. That doesn’t have an AI in the picture, obviously immediately, but you can, yeah, absolutely.…

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