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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

371–380 of 415 posts

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#371
post #353

A lot of people don’t know absolutely massive amount of functionality that is stuffed in to Mathematica. It does everything from symbolic math to astronomy to economics to deep learning to biology to ... If Wolfram had figured out how to make his software free while still having sustained business, he would undoubtedly be the hero of the tech/nerd/geek world, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with Jobs or Linus or Gates -…

It was free with every NeXT workstation! This right here, I believe, is the biggest problem facing software today. How do you pay for it? End-users expect software to cost $0, yet it takes a lot of time and effort to build anything. The most successful software projects and companies I see today are those which figured out innovative business models: advertising, hardware, free for open source / paid for business, ma…

Business models are the most significant innovations for any business. Google or Maps or Gmail is jaw-droppingly expensive software but its sustainably free.

There might be way for software like Mathematica. For example, having marketplace that sells professional plugins like aerodynamics simulation for aircrafts or autonomous trading library etc. You can also have special classroom edition that charges nominal amounts or the enterprise edition that has cloud and IT support. The large chunk of platform can potentially be free and open source.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#372

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.

Reminds me Perkeep also. https://perkeep.org

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world. I worked with the Knowledge Graph at Google and Wolfram Language seems like an easy to use personal version of that. I would be happy to pay for it, forever, if it were more responsive.

> Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world. Which is mostly pulled in from public data sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, US census and economic data, US Geological Survey data, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, etc. Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase, which in 2016 transferred its database to the Wikidata project ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page ). So once ag…

You have a good point!

Something to consider starting. A quicklisp library that caches wikidata, etc. and provides a uniform interface.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#374
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.

Why a commercial shredder rather than a $100 crosscut (Amazon Basics makes some pretty good ones)? I actually find the shredder pretty fun to use.

Even more fun is supervising a young child doing the shredding :)

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#376

I always find it interesting to see what personal productivity improvements highly successful people _do not_ implement. Considering that the typical productivity speel for technology & progaming tasks is tiling window managers (minimize mouse movement), mechanical/ergodox/split keyboards (ideal hand width and orientation), possibly linux or OSX w/ homebrew to automate tasks using scripts. It's interesting to see how…

I almost wish more CEOs published something like this. It's quite fascinating to see what sort "manpower" it takes to help them run/lead their org at their greatest efficiency... the behind the scenes look. I imagine head fashion designers or Apple and Tesla execs have a troupe of people working tirelessly to make sure the boss doesn't scew up.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.

Staples will shred for a $1 a pound, and a banker’s box is at most 30lbs.

Staples does, but indirectly. Your stuff goes into a lock box. Does it get shredded? No idea.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#378
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.

Why a commercial shredder rather than a $100 crosscut (Amazon Basics makes some pretty good ones)? I actually find the shredder pretty fun to use.

It takes many hours to shred and not worth my time. I have a shredder for the rare cases I need something shredded NOW.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#380
post #69
post #62

The implicit sharing of his sleep schedule through his email times over the past 25 years makes me feel better about myself. https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/data/uploads/2012/03/outgoin...

What happened in 2002? EDIT: oh, NKS. https://www.google.com/search?q=when+was+wolfram+nks+release...

Shouldn’t that link be https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=when+was+wolfram+nks+r...? ;)
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