21–30 of 94 posts
The same is so true for programming, in particular OOP. In my experience, code is much easier to change when a loosely coupled set of interfaces is built as opposed to an hierarchy of classes.
Both Ontology and Tagging have their place. The net is vast and infinite, sometimes it's nice to have a map.
The same is so true for programming, in particular OOP. In my experience, code is much easier to change when a loosely coupled set of interfaces is built as opposed to an hierarchy of classes.
I think avoiding deep class hirarchies is an accepted best practice nowadays. In academia, people still don’t know it (I left in 2017) but it is accepted by everyone I talk to nowadays. I do not use any implementation inheritance anymore, only interface inhertance.
It's "sold" as enabling extensibility and code reuse, but the only feature it adds to good old-fashioned composition is 'open recursion' a.k.a. late binding, which inherently leads to the "fragile base class" problem-- making behavior of base-class implementations dependent on preserving complex and generally unspecified invariants in the derived classes - so it's basically never what you actually want!
Full-blown OOP (including implementation inheritance and polymorphism) doesn't work. It's a terrible idea that only ever became popular because we didn't quite grok its implications.
All I see is a giant ad for ED pills. This is what I see: https://archive.fo/rZchC over time: https://archive.fo/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_o...
Interestingly the wayback-machine snapshot is not affected: https://web.archive.org/web/20190123000016/http://www.shirky...
After digging a little it seems like the redirection is happening server side (302, 0 bytes e.g. not JS) and its controlled from a malicious site called google-static(.)com, if anybody wanna investigate this further it's this one:
http://google-static.com/search/?niche=unknown&page=http%3A%2F%2Fshirky.com%2Fwritings%2Fontology_overrated.html&h=shirky.com&p=%2Fwritings%2Fontology_overrated.html&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2FI've been thinking lately of how to remedy that and this post came up at just the right time to get the mind juices flowing. At a high level I see a decentralized community that doesn't rely on forums/tribes/subreddits and incentivizes tagging like old school del.iciou.us. This enables higher chance of cross pollination and less group think. I could really see it working well with some flavor of ethereum/ipfs/incentives.
Something something, everything is in cycles? Hah.
The same is so true for programming, in particular OOP. In my experience, code is much easier to change when a loosely coupled set of interfaces is built as opposed to an hierarchy of classes.
Indeed. This is also why I think OOP is missing something to scale better in terms of flexibility and domain size. The ideal code structure for a particular need is rather arbitrary. OOP "prefers" things in a hierarchy, both in terms of inheritance, and in terms of an object being less powerful than a class (in most languages). You can force or use OOP outside of these, but it's unnatural in my opinion. For example,…
The only real trick is to use delegation patterns instead of inheritance, i.e. dispatch requests to class members rather than super/subclasses.
It doesn't feel awkward or unnatural.
It allows you to tag and manage everything you're reading and the primary management metaphor is the 'tag'.
It's a central repository for all your reading. PDFs, web content, and it supports annotation (highlights, comments, etc).
There are a bunch of clear wins here.
Related tags are awesome. You can build a bunch of really nice derived metadata just by managing your tags on the documents.
For example, I've been reading a lot about growth hacking as I'm trying to get Polar to 100k users. (We're officially 10% of the way there today!)
Since I have a bunch of documents named 'growth' Polar recommends startups, venturecapital, and marketing as secondary tags.
Also, since Anki supports tags (and Polar supports Anki sync) these systems are compatible.
Polar tags are also Twitter tags. While we haven't enabled this feature yet your annotations could be exported to Twitter and the systems are compatible.
We're still getting users that want hierarchy though. I'm not sure what I want to do here.
I'm considering building out algorithmic hierarchy.
For example, if you have two documents with the first tagged 'tech, microsoft' and the second tagged 'tech, linux' we can infer that tech is the parent of 'microsoft' and 'linux'
... and it would still support tags.
the problem I have now is that folder hierarchy is still being requested by our users but I'm resistant to implement it yet.
The problem with the thesis is that just because classical ontology doesn't work for the entire internet, doesn't mean that we can't apply it in many domains.
Formal ontology could be used very well in a variety of areas.
Informal, or less concise ontology again in many areas.
And leave tagging for the rest.
All I see is a giant ad for ED pills. This is what I see: https://archive.fo/rZchC over time: https://archive.fo/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_o...