151–160 of 437 posts
Is anyone doing this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l or whatever. I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII. If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to…
As you suggest, this is definately a legacy issue of being tied to the teat of a 1980's terminal. People still like to edit in simple editors. I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that shoul…
why can't I configure a bayesian filter on my inbox to do more than just filter crap I don't want? Can't I have another filter that builds a model of the things I click on first given any set of new emails and generate a likely list of things I will want to see first? Is anyone doing this?
Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists? Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).
Seriously? Search is another word for artificial intelligence. Email means a universal way for people to communicate. Lunar bases & flying cars aren't ambitious, they are just expensive. Personal robots are here now in vertical spaces[1] and there are at least 200,000 cyborgs walking around now[2]. I think both these areas are worth working in, but I think you underestimate the ambition of a word like search . [1] ht…
I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually.
And cleaning is just one of a large number of tasks that require similar kinds of intelligence. If robotics is able to close that gap, the world changes more profoundly and more quickly than ever before.
All of a sudden, most of the jobs performed by untrained people will disappear without replacement. The current thinking is that tasks that get automated are replaced by "higher level" tasks, but I think that's not actually what happened.
Automated tasks have largely been replaced by other tasks that are equally simple for humans but more difficult for machines. As a result, most people are still doing work that anyone can pick up in a week.
If that gap closes, we're in for a pretty difficult but ultimately wonderful transition. People have been crying wolf out of fear of this transition for hundereds of years. This time it's for real. Even if humans find new things that aren't yet automated, the transition will be too fast for at least a generation.
why can't I configure a bayesian filter on my inbox to do more than just filter crap I don't want? Can't I have another filter that builds a model of the things I click on first given any set of new emails and generate a likely list of things I will want to see first? Is anyone doing this?
I'm not a Gmail user so I'm not sure how well it works, but I thought Gmail's Priority Inbox was built to solve precisely this problem. How intelligent it is at determining what gets the priority label I don't know but at least someone's pursuing it.
The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…
I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia "pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in "pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link. Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and "search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still use Google for anything I haven't favorit…
* "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google
and many others. :)
0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/sh…
Huh? Free Internet is ipso facto not a business idea.
There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of d…
Do you think there is really a large number of hackers who are not satisfied by the Mac on the one hand, or Linux on a Thinkpad on the other, and who would buy into this new system? OK, so you really just want to target hackers first and then move into the consumer space once you have some traction. But consumers are starting to move away from laptops and toward things like smartphones and tablets. Apple is moving in…
+1! I think Jawbone has a great opportunity for post-phone consumer devices. They have a strong brand and are branching out to non-headset form factors.
I am surprised at how readily mainstream consumers have adopted Jawbone Bluetooth headsets. People where them all the time, even though 99% of the time they are not taking a phone call. They look like dorky Borgs, but I think this is a sign that mainstream society will be open to transhuman/cyborg enhancements.
The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication. My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I g…
> for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable cat…
I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI..
Might be feasible as a client-side app. How about a Thunderbird/Outlook addon with a subscription service for known filters?
(What is the Google Chrome of desktop mail clients, anyway? Hardly any seem to use WebKit.)