branweb

I think it's oversimplified because there would need to be a long explanation on what is meant by "self", which the commentor very wisely put in scare quotes.

To the parent: actually I think this "death of decoherence" pretty closely matches the Buddhist doctrine of interdependent arising, so not sure about the disagreement there.

Thanks for posting it! Definitely going to add a couple of those to my list.

The only one on this list I disliked was the Wright book, mainly because it's not a scientific justification of Buddhism. It's really about how evolutionary psychology explains stuff like road-rage and dieting struggles and how insight meditation (Wright's brand of secularized Buddhism) helps us manage those emotions. Which is fine. Only he's not an evolutionary psychologist and almost all the evidence he puts forward for the effects of meditation is anecdotal. For me a pretty disappointing book.

This is a useful concept. I also thought these lines were insightful:

New features mean new sales opportunities, good for the company but not good for the user.

The problem with adding features to MVP is that when we ship more complex products like complete operating systems that are packed with programs, the complexity of the individual programs contributes to the complexity of the whole.

Not sure how to solve that particular problem though.

This made me think of a blogpost linked on Hacker News when Joe passed away: https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/32. This part seems relevant here:

Joe wrote amazingly simple programs and he did so in a peculiar way. First he wrote down the program any old way just to get it out of his head. Then once it worked he would then immediately create a new directory program2 and write it again. He would repeat this process five or six times (program5, program6, ...) and each time he would understand the problem a little better and sense which parts of the program were essential enough to re-type. He thought this was the most natural thing in the world: of course you throw away the first few implementations, you didn't understand the problem when you wrote those!

It's perhaps a little ambiguous, but I understood the comment as arguing the exact opposite. I interpreted "overdevelopment" to basically mean the kind of sprawl explainted here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... ...where cities expand horizontally for short-term tax revenue gains/federal grants while accruing long-term infrastructure costs that their tax bases can't pay.

I think you're being unfair. To say Arlington and Flint differ is not to say Flint and Peoria do not differ. If anything, Flint is being used as a stand-in for similar struggling communities in the non-costal, non-urban US.

Also your "more compelling argument" is contained within Summer's argument: Flint is way worse off than Arlington, this is bad, here are some ideas to fix it. He even goes on in the last paragraph to say:

These may or may not be the best ideas for enabling people wherever they live to share in U.S. economic progress, and they are no substitute for addressing inequality more directly. But it is hard to see how we can bring about enduring improvement in the nation’s condition without addressing the needs of the tens of millions of Americans who live in places that are failing to catch up with the rest of our country.

Not sure about the video lectures, but I'm fairly certain the original course was taught to MIT undergrads as an intro to CS and EE. See https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/sicp.html and https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/course.htm....

I don't totally disagree with you btw. Pretty sure in that interview with Hal Abelson someone mentioned above, he admitted the book leaned a little heavily on calculus because all MIT freshmen had to take that course, so it seemed a natural source for examples. Perhaps not as natural to someone who hasn't taken a calculus course in a decade (me). I still got a lot out of the book though.

Thanks! I like your linked article quite a bit more. The photos comparing known-milton handwriting to the folio in question adds a lot.

I don't think there is one, other than personal preference. It's really useful for going the other way though: <some format e.g. html> -> org.

yeah but what happens when they're up for re-election and they need money again? Maybe corporate donors back a rival who they know will "play ball".

ha ha I knew something felt off.

I agree it's more about the harmful influence of certain types of media than about censorship. An article posted on HN a while back quotes Bradbury saying this very thing (http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-...). Maybe most people focus on the censorship angle since it was played up so much in the Truffaut film adaptation? Pretty sure I saw the film first, then read the book, and it certainly influenced my interpretation.

What exactly do you mean by "decentralized information"? Like too many niches, social fragmentation, etc?

Previous discussion of a similar (and IMO better) article on the book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992956 . The article under discussing there includes lots of quotes from Bradbury himself.

Firefox reader-mode solves this problem well (most of the time).

Ah hadn't heard of these. Will check them out.

As to the article: good reading. I was always mildly curious why literary societies should grow around Robert Browning of all people. It's bewildering: America gripped by Browning fever? A children’s performance of Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin drawing more people than a baseball game...in TEXAS?! Truly the past is a foreign country.

ah oops. Thanks for the correction!

To see a jacquard loom in action, check out this clip from James Burke's excellent documentary, Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI

The clip doesn't show it, but Burke in the documentary makes the same connection as the article, but in a little more detail. He goes from Jacquard -> Babbage -> Hollering ( who used punchcards for the 1890 census), who founded the company which later became IBM.

Really fascinating to watch Burke pull up existing pieces of the modern world and examine their roots. Most of the time, it reveals that most revolutionary innovation was just a variation/consolidation of existing technologies.

Granted DoD acronyms are insane and that CAC Card is like ATM machine, but the 12 year old in me always winced a little when referring to "my cac". To the emotionally immature (me) it's a useful redundancy.

1. maybe not your intention, but this reads as quite rude

2. you mean 2.5k not 2500k. The latter would be a king's ransom for a wordpress site, even by your (apparently) high standards

Thanks for following up. It's definitely a hard problem to solve. I've considered just writing whatever expression I want to learn on an ipad with an apple pencil, then figuring out some nice way to pipe that into my SRS.

That's a really intriguing idea! Though even equipped with a tool like this, I think it would be difficult to use SRS for learning math or computer science concepts. The process might look something like:

1. learn the concept

2. break it into atomic question/answer pairs

3. define some dependence relation for all these pairs (X is foundational to Y and Z but not A)

4. input them into your SRS of choice

Each of these steps require significant amounts of time and brainpower. Also it would be harder if you were still learning the concept since you'd continually need to go back and redefine relations as your understanding grew.

On the one hand all this would be a great way to understand a subject. On the other, one could argue that it's very inefficient, and it would be better to not bring SRS into it all all. Compare this to say a vocabulary card, which you make, enter into SRS, then you're done. So far this (the vocab thing I mean) is the only SRS use-case that makes sense for me.

As a long-time SRS user, I've really enjoyed Michael's recent essays on the subject though I haven't had much luck using SRS to learn structured, abstract things, despite several attempts. These days I use it mostly for things that are naturally atomic--vocabulary words, quotations, etc.

It seems he and I approach SRS very differently. I see it as a place to drop bits of information I want to remember, and once the info is in there, I no longer have to think about it, outsourcing the effort of remembering to the algorithm. He seems to use it as a tool to mentally digest a subject, constantly revising his understanding and readjusting his cards. That process isn't foreign to me, but I prefer to use something besides SRS for it. If I had to constantly revise my cards, that would seem to defeat the purpose of using SRS anyway.

Very interesting to get a different perspective on this though, so I'll have to think more about his approach. I'm also interesting in the creation details of his math-cards. Does he use LaTex? Maybe he goes into it in one of his earlier posts...

I mean, yeah, I agree. And it's useful to be reminded that it isn't natural lest we take it for granted. But why the strawman setup/teardown at the end:

  Nowadays, unsubstantiated fears of monstrosities created by genetic engineering...threaten to slow down research and development in crucial areas, including coping with climate change.

One could respond that progress is responsible for climate change in the first place. Point being, fears about progress are hardly "unsubstantiated", and it is useful to step back from time to time and think about what we're moving towards.

Will Durant? I've always liked that quote.

yep...specifically, use the -d flag in a loop since all it does it exits the process when a new file is added:

  while true; do ls -d src/*.c | entr -d <cmd>; done

As I understand it, the ever-increasing interior volume of a black hole is deduced from the equations that support general relativity theory, which itself is supported by experimental evidence, so I think that's how it differs.

I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate feedback."

No genuinely thought that's what they got him for. Should read up on it I guess.

technically it was for hiring someone to murder a guy. Or are you implying that was entrapment?

edit: i stand corrected

So happy to see this mentioned here. I was able to visit David's workshop last time I was in Tokyo. Great guy and a great artist. Really love the prints I've bought from him over the years.