Viewing profile — jveld

Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who pur…

Fascinating! I wonder if Tolstoy was depecting Dostoevsky. I guess I'll have to read War and Peace as my enormous literary undertaking of the summer.

Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime And Punishment) was sentenced to be executed by the Tsarist government in 1849. He was actually in front of the firing squad , waiting for…

> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games. Bahahahah…

@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at …

It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetim…

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus c…

I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some …

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone i…

I agree, thus my suggestion that we try and move towards apprenticeships. But I think we should avoid framing apprenticeships/bootcamps/whatever as a replacement for universities, …

>> The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children suggest even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so that academics can transfer out in…

Emotional beauty is a multiplayer game. It's created when people use their time and energy to break the script and let the people around them know that they are valued. It's not so…

The tendency to characterize educational institutions as 'factories' for producing intellectual laborers (or knowledge workers , to use a synonomous but less harsh sounding term) i…

I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc). There's also a mental hygei…

good point - for some reason it hadn't clicked that number theory only involves the integers and not, ya know, complex numbers.

Here's how I explain "pure math" to people, based on my experience taking a highly theory-oriented linear algebra course and thinking that "this stuff couldn't possibly be useful."…

Why the ad hominem? I understood the scope of the OP's suggestion. I just thought it could've been presented more clearly. The fact that tons of the comments here are directed at t…

Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately. - Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic. - It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily writable . With just a pen a…

Yes, but since he frames it in the title as a "redesign," it's hard to get out of the frame of thinking about it as such. If he had titled it "A Simpler Notation for Piano Music" o…

Thanks for the correction! It's been a couple years since I've actually done any calculus. I couldn't remember the exact function, so I had to google - I guess I read too quickly.

I've thought it was paradoxical that infinitely long curves could have finite integrals ever since I first took calculus. For example, the integral of 1/x is |ln x|. I wonder why i…

It got the job done by making the 99% majority of use cases more difficult in order to make the 1% minority simpler. This is a design pattern I think is being repeated in systemd. …

Reading Stallman these days always gives me such mixed feelings. I appreciate the fuck out of all the work he's done for the software community, and admire his courage and willingn…

To me, the defining feature is automation. A "programmable" system is one where smaller actions can be composed into larger ones and saved for invocation later (by name, in respons…