511–520 of 831 posts
I'm working on setting up a webserver such that it will:
A) Stay up
B) Stay up to date
C) Stay uncompromised
For the entire time I am gone with no interaction.
Or rather, that's what I want to be working on. Instead, I'm working on making myself not be a lazy [blank].
Let's solve Harmony! The first scientific experiment was conducted by 5th century BC Pythagoreans. They wanted to show that the basis for musical consonance was math. From that, they inferred that harmony in math accounted for the harmony of the cosmos. This integration of math+physics was very forward thinking. But, if we fast forward to the present, we still don't have a complete scientific explanation for the basi…
An under-appreciated aspect to our educational system is that school desks are shared between two children, so people grow up learning how to interact relatively harmoniously with at least one other small child.
Absent a vaccine, Covid may alter that to the one-child-per-desk model, so I may discover in another 20-30 years how important shared desks were or weren't.
Serious thought involves more than just collections and associations: mastery requires repetition, creativity requires serendipitous discovery, and productive output requires flow states. It’s also a matter of acknowledging the fact that “units of knowledge” do not exist on their own: all knowledge is embedded in context (or “deeply intertwingled”, in the words of Ted Nelson), and without context, metaphor, and nuance, we cannot form meaningful connections. By baking these attributes into the medium itself, it’s possible to build an information space that’s simple to explore, can surface information when you need it, can augment the mind’s naturally ability to form connections, and can get out of the way the rest of the time.
PROBLEM(S): I (well, the nonprofit I lead) am trying to solve for the general problem of municipal public policy but, as you might expect, it's a series of discrete, linked problems. Some of these problems have thousands of people focused on a solution; in other areas, it's virtually greenfield. SOLUTION: The space doesn't lack for good research and policy recommendations, but it has historically lacked (on the right…
(incidentally, I am just at the point in Simone Weil's reports from germany where, early 1930's, the communist unions and nazi unions are ganging up against the middle-of-the-road pragmatic-reform-not-ideological-revolution social democrat unions. Very depressing.)
I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…
I've come to feel that a crucial feature missing from online discourse is the influence of third parties to the conversation. If you have a conversation in meatspace, sufficiently nearby third parties send signals, because they cannot help but hear you (setting aside headphones or the like). Without entering the conversation, they can communicate by means like a change in stance, a muffled laugh, a roll of the eyes.…
Education. Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law. Many teachers are plain awful. They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supple…
(no longer remember the series title, but do still remember the penny finally dropping on "x is an unknown")
I'm trying to replace SQL by building a language that compiles to SQL. It has first-class functions, nicer syntax, better type-system, introspection, and other things you would expect from a modern language. But in the end, you still get SQL's performance, and the ability to use it with dozens of database engines.
I don't know if it's exactly what you describe but Hasura compiles GraphQL queries and mutations to SQL (for Postgrs).
I’m working on a new way to talk online, with the goal of killing cancel culture, increasing understanding, and basically calming down current radicalization. Picture Reddit, but with the ability to anonymously share ideas with other people in your social circles. My theory is that most reasonable people stay off social media, so places like Twitter end up filled with unreasonable narcissists. At the same time, discu…
I'm trying to do a historiographical quality history of computers, the kind of scholarship you might see with say the French Revolution or the Roman Empire. What more, my history efforts ENDS around 1937; it's the BC part of computing that set the stage. The build up to computing. Episode 0 lays it all out ( http://comphistpod.com/introducing-the-computer-history-podc... ) I'm doing it in podcast form because it's 20…
What an ambitious and important project! I love the concept, and that it is meant to be a "long, slow project." It probably should be paced slowly due to the scope and complexity of material. I think a slower pace should also help "smooth" the exponential change rate of technological progress into a narrative listeners can follow, without sacrificing too much detail for the sake of listenability.* I'm going to sub ri…
There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles. I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable.
I'll be putting more of these tools in the repo and eventually put the search systems online for the general public. Google's navigation of annualised volumes is a joke so I'm going to do better.
My dream of dreams is to be able to automatically hyperlink the footnotes in the old texts. I think it's possible, long term project though. (Example: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=c3QgKCXX4nIC&hl=en&p...)
I've also cleared out a closet and installed acoustic foam. I tested a number of microphones... I'm sure acting like it's a real thing. Hopefully I'll keep at it.
The hardest part has been trying to get it done on a weekly schedule. I don't have this week's done for instance. There's two parts I really want to fit in and I need to find a place for them. I'm going to try to take a nap and get up in an hour or two and work a bit more.
I don't know if I'll be able to pull the weekly schedule off honestly. I'm going to try to sweat it out a bit longer and hopefully I'll get faster as I accumulate more notes, references and materials.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution. HTML without styling will render correctly on any display with any resolution. The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketin…
> The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so. Wait, what? Are we on different webs? The facts of the history of the web tell us that some of the most popular services for publishing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc - places that allow for very limited custom styling. I think you misunderstand what OP is t…