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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

91–100 of 415 posts

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#91

I'm kind of outraged that he has a solution in hand to carsickness in the form of strange glasses and didn't prove a link to the product. Does anyone know what those are? I would kill to be able to read in the car. edit: seems to be these https://www.boardingglasses.com/?action=home&lang=EN

There is a link to nearly every item mentioned in the post in a section called "Product details". The glasses you mention are the last item under "On the move".

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#92

What’s HN’s opinion of Stephen Wolfram? Is he legit? Is the tome A New Kind of Science worth reading?

NKOS is probably the (or at least one of the) defining works on cellular automata and the thought around/behind them, at least when it was written. It will likely be as interesting as that sounds to you.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#93
I'm struck by how his Metasearcher is somewhat similar to Gelernter's Lifestreams concept. I've taken for granted for 20+ years that would eventually be coming and it hasn't yet. Some Google products are a little like it: Photos, Gmail. I like that Wolfram has his own.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#95
Here's a guy I think of as very successful, and very smart, and yet he seems extremely tethered to his computers.

Meetings while walking, and assuming nobody notices? Questioning the practicality of time spent outside? That's kind of... really... sad.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#96
post #29

I really like the personal homepage idea. Reminds me of the iGoogle days. Anyone know any products / tools to create a simple one consisting of essentially an organized collection of links? I guess any static site generator could work, but would be nice to have an out of the box theme and can show RSS Feeds.

I've been using Dropbox Paper and you can extend this AWS Lambda script I wrote that uses Dropbox Paper to generates a webpage to include RSS: https://gist.github.com/abhiyerra/7dcd96741cf98a1823da91f32b...

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#97
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is the creator of Mathematica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica I would consider that legitimacy.

Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used, especially since you effectively have to use their built-in editor that doesn't even have multiple undo. Of course, it is the least-worst symbolic system out there currently. But, it's not like lisp wouldn't have developed similar capabilities if Mathematica didn't come around.

You mean like Macsyma, now Maxima, where he probably got some early ideas from?

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#98
post #22

Through the article I found he livestreams many of his meetings on Twitch! This is particularly candid moment I happen to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be... edit: I wasn't aware of the negative opinions regarding his ego, but from listening to this meeting I can say they aren't unsubstantiated!

Thanks for the amusement, I'm left with the distinct impression that if everyone on that call were in the same room it would have gone a lot better. His staff didn't even seem engaged in the subject.

From the article:

"Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done)."

So they're not paying attention because he enjoys having excess people on calls and wasting their time.

Sounds like torture. The CEO wants you on the call, probably won't need you, and you're supposed to feel comfortable disengaging when he's berating coworkers about a missing third argument in a function's documentation.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#99
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is the creator of Mathematica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica I would consider that legitimacy.

Mathematica is literally the worst PL I've ever used, especially since you effectively have to use their built-in editor that doesn't even have multiple undo. Of course, it is the least-worst symbolic system out there currently. But, it's not like lisp wouldn't have developed similar capabilities if Mathematica didn't come around.

It's had multiple undo in notebooks (quite more than "an editor") for a while, and you can run it from a command line or use an IDE.

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/program/wolframsc...

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#100
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much do this daily for everything. If I don’t interact with it in a year, it’s fine to throw away next house cleaning. So if I walk by, it goes out. Often “going out” means sold on Craigs list or eBay, but still. I kind of force myself to do it, because deep down I think we are all pack rats. It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few…

> It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why? Um, money?

I mostly buy and resell so I actually don’t spend much at all on items. I lose from the depreciation, but not too bad actually.
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