I agree with you. I followed him out of curiosity for one or two months, watched about 10 of his videos.
He seems to have a good intuition, but he gives weak and often cherry-picked reasonings, to the point that many of his takes are completely unreliable.
For a channel called Predictive History, he made too many weirdly precise explanations and predictions that turned out to be wrong. Then, he'd look over the old failed ones to find new ones.
That being said, I'd say his macro level analysis is directionally correct, as well as his read on the incentives of each party involved. Watch his lectures, but be skeptical and double check everything he says, because he does indeed make factual mistakes... some of them are caught in the comments by other viewers, some are not obvious.
I agree with your more thought out assessment of the channel.
I stil think the effort of trying to predict history (trying to understand causal patterns and extrapolate) is a valiant effort, and don't want to write his entire channel off. So I can't comment on his Iran take until I've seen it.
But yes, everyone makes mistakes and that just shows we don't have some universal theory for predicting history, so one shouldn't get obsessed with one school of thinking, but try it out, find its limits, and be open to other school of thoughts too.
He might indeed need some personal development himself. I followed him when the US bombed Iran's nuclear sites last year. He was involved in a controversy with his kid and turned into a dick, going into a charade against the Western education system, for being overly harsh to his kid in a public space and getting reprimanded for it. I'm not condoning his behavior, I wasn't there, but I'd take anything this guy has to say on personal development with a pinch of salt. By the way, he published a post of apologies in his Substack IIRC.
It doesn't have built-in notifications and there's no panel to see all the open sessions, but I wonder how hard that would be to add.
I've used zmx since I ran into it a few weeks ago. Uses libghostty as well. It's great because it allows me to replace tmux completely in all my ssh sessions, and can keep one session per assistant.
zmx solves persistence well, and I like their minimalism (not supporting windows, tabs, or splits). I think it's possible to make a CLI wrapper for zmx that adds notifications though, so you can have some niceties of cmux without switching to a new terminal. Lowkey we might explore this direction as well.
ive been working on glue for zmx+kitty (would do ghostty if it had proper ipc/scripting support). just changed the repo visibility on on gh cwelsys/kmux.
Funny enough, I actually just (2 weeks ago) added support for streaming from Pyspark to Polars/DuckDB/etc through Arrow PyCapsule. By streaming, I mean actually streaming, not collecting all data at once. It won't be released probably until May/June but it's there: https://github.com/apache/spark/commit/ecf179c3485ba8bac72af...
I used it for close to a year and abandoned it because I kept running into issues with tabs getting randomly reloaded and extensions causing trouble.
What would you say has changed over the past few months?
I just felt like Kagi wasn't prioritizing Orion development enough, being busy with their main Kagi subscription and all.
`hx --tutor` is a life saver though. Did that to quickly catch up on hx keybindings and Claude chips in when I need more efficient things to do certain text editing operations.
I've fallen in love with Helix and now use it for everything. Moved from neovim and VS Code to Helix for the majority of my coding.
For me, after trying the Lazy neovim plugin distro and being a long-time vim user, Helix fills a unique need:
- It's beautiful (lots of attention to detail)
- It's fast (meaning: at no point did I think Helix is slower than it should)
- It's hugely ergonomic (each default keystroke resonates with me and the modal selection is a boon for my brain and productivity)
- It requires almost no configuration out-of-the-box
I can't be bothered to use neovim and configure it, and vim doesn't cut it. I need something in the middle between nvim and VS Code, and that's Helix for me. This might have been different had I been a vimscript wizard, which I'm not.
I don't need Helix to be more modular or UNIXy, I simply need it to keep on the direction they've taken. There's a thriving ecosystem of tools around it, and I can use it with Claude Code (by simply refreshing the buffer when there's a new edit). What else can I ask for?
Helix is a great editor, one of the very best I've ever used. As a result, I started chipping in monthly money to keep the project going.
In terms of future improvements, the only one I'm missing the most is the ability to render images or math formulas from the editor, which I hope can at some point be done through a plugin using Kitty's terminal protocol or sixel. This is especially handy when working on Markdown files for notes or blog posts.
So, I kind of agree with you, but that’s still a lot of dependencies baked into the editor. It’s probably not as bad as Neovim+plugins, but it’s still a supply chain issue.
it's 317 unique crates, some of which are internal
305 with helix- removed
258 with gix removed (git stuff in multiple packages from a single upstream group)
240 with windows api wrappers removed.
170 if you remove all subprojects (split on -/_ taking first field, then uniq).
what's left?
fast math and various hashes
backtrace utils
various build utils
some allocators, zero copy facilities, mmap and structures like lrus
time and date handling
character maps / internationalization
concurrency libraries (futures, runtime, etc)
cross platform path & directory helpers
support for general unix platforms, for redox, for linux, for windows
logging infrastructure
some compression libraries
markdown
various testing helpers
rope string representation
shell lexer and utils
terminal interaction models
toml
wasm & wasi
compared to neovim, which is hard to determine because c & cmake toolchains are a bit of a shitshow to figure out, but lets take a look at maybe debian, that says 34 package dependencies downstream. The list is clearly missing a bunch of the toolchain, has limited portability and so on, but certainly shorter at 34 - for a single platform. Note also that neovim bundles several dependencies (e.g. markdown and so on - so they're "hidden" (almost surprising debian hasn't done their usual trick of insisting this isn't hidden))
so where's the rest? well the rest is in the project: tokei says helix contains 132kloc. tokei says neovim contains 984kloc.
so round a little and you get: helix has an order of magnitude more dependencies, but also an order of magnitude less code than neovim.
while I'm sympathetic to concerns around dependency bloat, particularly with an eye to the js ecosystem and supply chain security, it's important to look through the right lens - when the functionality is fairly closely equivalent (there are differences, helix has a lot more modern features, vim has a lot more traditional text manipulation and unixy integration features), and there's an order of magnitude tradeoff in both directions - this is likely demonstration of fairly effective code sharing in helix.
there are important supply chain safety techniques required when using a wide number of disparately owned dependencies. there are also important supply chain safety techniques required when managing a wide number of disparately owned sub-directories of a larger project. there could just as well be a needle in neovims vimscript haystack as there is in helix dependency stack, i can tell you now though, as i'm familiar with almost all of helix dependencies i've put eyes over their code at least once, there's almost certainly been more eyes on helix deps recently than on neovims vimscript - though eye's passing over don't always catch things either of course.
But once helix adds plugins it will be exactly the same because those tens of VSCode plugins provide functionality not present in helix, so will be similarly implemented externally
That would've been the wasm plugin route, which was rejected in favor of this great emacs feature of using an obscure language, so sandbox are unlikely
I enjoy helix but don’t write nvim off entirely. I’m not much of a lua dev but llms have proven themselves to be excellent when writing and modifying nvim configs.
IMO that was the biggest motivator to switch was helix’s well put together lsp/lint config.
This is great. We definitely need something like this.
Where are the safe levels limits to interpret test results? This would be a small addition that would make any of the results interpretable. I had to open the PlasticList website to get the baseline safe thresholds for each chemical and to do some rough approximations.
He seems to have a good intuition, but he gives weak and often cherry-picked reasonings, to the point that many of his takes are completely unreliable.
For a channel called Predictive History, he made too many weirdly precise explanations and predictions that turned out to be wrong. Then, he'd look over the old failed ones to find new ones.
That being said, I'd say his macro level analysis is directionally correct, as well as his read on the incentives of each party involved. Watch his lectures, but be skeptical and double check everything he says, because he does indeed make factual mistakes... some of them are caught in the comments by other viewers, some are not obvious.
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