531–540 of 831 posts
How can we document "human society" in 1000 pages or less? I've been casually researching for a while, and will eventually write a guide on going from zero to the moon. Step one is survival, basics of hunting, first aid and farming sort of stuff. That volume would end around homesteading and self-sufficient living. Volume two would be establishing society in larger groups than a family unit. Things like job specializ…
Existing mediums for note-taking (Evernote, Notion, Roam Research) are not sufficient for doing knowledge work over long periods of time. The functions these incumbents serve are primarily as “stores of knowledge” that we save because it’s interesting in the moment but never read through or “scratchpads” that we use once and never get rid of, which end up cluttering our information space like a junk drawer full of sh…
I hope this counts as weird enough ... PROBLEM: If time travelers from the future were to visit you, it would be difficult for them to quickly prove their authenticity. SOLUTION: Temporal passwords. At the start of each year, you devise a new password. You commit the password to memory, but you never write it down or divulge it to anyone until Dec. 31, when you submit it to the Temporal Password Registry, which publi…
I've worked on the same problem and came up with the same solution. My password was "Teapot Dome" from 2016-2018, and it's been "Cottage Cheese" since then. I have just come up with a new password, which I obviously won't share. This solution doesn't actually work. Maybe the people are mind readers rather than time travelers. Maybe they beat the password out of you and then wiped your memory. Maybe they are time trav…
They just so happened to evolve the same scheme. How do you prove to them that you're from the future?
I'm going to be gone (read: no meaningful internet access) for about two years. 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].
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…
The forum needs to strongly encourage every comment to have their opinions substantiated, and show rigorous reasoning and inference explicitly where it occurs (and where an opinion is not directly based on evidence but is a reasonable conclusion from evidence). It's not an impossible task, since we have a similar example of a forum with high standards in Stack Overflow and its network.
This means that the platform is primarily one for discussion and developing opinions grounded in evidence and reality, not one for free expression (which reddit primarily is).
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…
My grandfather used to sit with me for an hour every morning and used to teach me maths.
He would focus on basics first. He would make sure I had the basics drilled in to me. Not just understood them, but mastered them. Then we would move on to the next topic.
It was a bit slow at first. But after a while, once the basics were done, I finished the whole year's math book in 2-3 months.
I have seen this in software engineering too. Once I am good at basics, or once they're drilled in enough, I am faster and quicker.
Drilling basics is basically like having the basics in O(1) look up with very reduced space complexity too. It reduces the amount of overhead your brain utilises. This makes your brain free to think about the actual problem you are solving. Also, I think this is what allows your brain to work in the background, even when you aren't actively thinking about the problem.
Human-computer context switching. Which is why I started making Cleave: An application that lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows, tabs, open files/documents and so on. Started because of frequent multitasking heavy work with limited resources. Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manual…
I love this idea! I've never found a good solution to this problem, used to try different logins etc but the save and restore of state doesn't work very well. Could combine this with site/app blocking tools to ensure when you load the studying state you don't get distracted too.
Blocking sites was done with squid time-based ACLs. Now I’m wondering how productive I could be combining the two
Everyone seems to ignore the only critically significant hard problem: how do we mitigate the negative impacts that humans have had on the planet? Right now it looks like we are careening towards a quick extinction of the human race and most other species and we are not doing anything about it. True, the magnitude of the problem is daunting. True, it may be too late as we are past the tipping point. True, it is easie…
Solutions to the stated problems are, from a technical and policy stand point very simple. Yes, we know how to solve all of this - it's called market regulation and we know it works reeeely well. But it's politically hard. What we need is an economically pragmatic green political movement, who will not keep shooting itself in the foot with left-wing ideological purity competitions. Profit seeking motive is only a pro…
Specifically, I'm working with a local pro-refugee organization in a densely immigrant populated region in Spain. There's a complex chain of steps that you have to go through in order to acquire citizenship. Only people with access to good lawyers are able to deal with all the bureaucracy of the process, without mentioning other problems (missing obscure expiry dates that reset your process, language-related problems, local government workers not actually knowing/willing-fully ignoring migrants' rights...).
There's a good network of volunteer lawyers working on this issue, but its not scalable. I'm working on a platform that would allow migrants to solve their own situation, by crowdsourcing the knowledge of lawyers on a case-per-case basis and offering a simple interface in their language to track open processes & discovered the ones they need to go through and how.
As an abstraction for this, I've been thinking on how we could improve citizen/government communication. A small use case / example for this could be refugee camps. My previous experience here is that they are small, disconnected communities with a top-down type of organisation towards the camp organisers. It shouldn't be hard to provide real-time tools for connecting both, potentially leading to things like asking for their needs, managing their legal situation, or even allowing for voting & self-governing.
I wrote a new programming language, Eek, because it was impossible for me to handle the complexity of doing all with current languages (that lack built-in support for asynchronous database access and parsing). So far the first generation of the programming language is working, but as an interpreter written in TypeScript, and I wrote an English language parser with it, and a simple database. Now I am working on a better, LLVM-based implementation of Eek. I started this thing about 3 years ago, and it will take some more years before this will be even demoable...