bschne

This reminds me of Astral Codex Ten's (fka SSC) series on the ontology of psychiatric conditions. Basically, you're often faced with the question of whether something is a binary condition you have or don't have which then translates into a more continuous expression of symptoms, or whether it's more like a spectrum where the extreme outliers are deemed "ill" and the rest is just character differences.

It's interesting to think about the various ways to model this, and in many of your cases, the most reasonable model probably depends a lot on context or what it's used for/what statement you're trying to make.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/?sort=search&search=Onto...

That's hardly in the hands of any one developer to make consistent, and it was hardly entirely consistent before. As long as it makes sense in the context of a given project...

Thanks, that makes sense — where I live most of the talk around video games was about school shootings, not "regular" violent crime among young people, that's why I was a bit confused.

> When the real problem is significantly harder. Social, governmental, institutional and systemic racism.

While I don't question that systemic racism is real, I don't quite see the link here. Isn't the kind of violence video games get blamed for more commonly committed by non-minority people who have mental health issues and/or were "social outcasts" rather than racially motivated? I mainly remember the topic as coming up in connection with school shootings and the likes, not potentially racial hate crimes.

100% agree on the looking for simple (and comfortable to admit!) fixes though. It is so much easier to say "we made a mistake letting kids play these games" than it is to face the truth that some people are either completely left behind by society or descend into incomprehensible madness for no comprehensible reason.

This is great! Would probably also work really well for selecting „into“ hierarchies of groups/frames in design apps

OT: The video really made me wonder if someone actually hand-crafted that ginormous testing file and how long it took

That's the point, there is no "method" to discover, it just has to click at some point that it's OK like this. Not sure what brought it about in my case, but hope you'll arrive there as well.

That's nice, I generally like setups like this that capture content and give me control over things (I've seen something similar on HN with passively saving any papers in PDF format viewed in the browser and then building fulltext search on top if, or e.g. approaches like this: https://github.com/thesephist/monocle).

That being said, in the spirit of my comment — I honestly don't care too much about what I might be missing due to sites going down etc. anymore. The truly great stuff I save somewhere offline, but that's one or two levels past all the random things I currently use bookmarks for.

My single biggest improvement in getting somewhat organized and productive so far has probably come from getting comfortable with some amount of chaos.

I used to try and set up the perfect system for my notes. I got caught in endless cycles of coming up with some structure, finding new tools, etc. — only to then barely ever write down anything because it never quite fit into any of the boxes I'd prepared.

I used to try out a new todo app every other month, enthusiastic that this time I'd find the system that would finally enable me to never let anything fall through the cracks.

I'd plan out the perfect pipeline of bookmark - triage - read/watch/listen so that I could stay on top of every great talk, article, interview or book anyone had ever created and shared with the world. You can probably guess what happened.

Then, for some reason, I just got more... relaxed? at some point. Have a thought? Just make a note, doesn't matter if I'll ever look at it again or it will still make sense in a week. Sometimes I go back and expand on things. Sometimes I event write something out of it. Most times I don't and that's fine. Find something cool? Just bookmark. Maybe I'll look through them in a moment of boredom one day soon, maybe the never-ending influx of hot new content means I'll never get around to it. Whatever. Want to or think I should do something? Make a task, don't set a date, maybe I'll get back to it, maybe it turns out I don't want or need to do it ever. Got something you keep putting off? Maybe just delete it after the tenth time, it'll come back to you if it's worth it.

Extremely naive question, but I always wonder how you can "bootstrap" this kind of precision — intuitively for something to be this precise, the tools and equipment that "create" it should also have to be more or less equally precise.

Or is it a matter of manufacturing it, testing it, and rejecting some percentage of things that don't fit your requirements due to imprecisions?

Are there any good background resources on how some of these things are done?

The Futur has a few online courses about typography (which I've never bought & tried), and they follow a similar pattern. They give the students some content to layout, and limit them to one font weight & size at first, progressively allowing more variation over the weeks.

The critiques of this are up on youtube, and it's some of the most insightful content about basic design principles I've seen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h4RNmemzB0

Yes but as I read it, the parent comment was not asking about that, but about whether we could even assume we could pick from a single set.

I know next to nothing about set theory, but. If you have a single set, you must know its elements or some rule that defines its elements. You can then just pick an arbitrary element that is part of the set at will and let that be your choice.

Since it's just one set and not a collection of sets, you don't need some general rule that will give you a well-defined element from each set in your collection.

Am I missing something?

I think the point was that anyone familiar with the scene/business would readily infer that from the text, not that they knew the specific author.

From the README:

> darktable is not a free Adobe® Lightroom® replacement.

Does anyone know what the deal is with this remark? At a glance, the feature set/use case look sort of similar to me...

This is just a subset of people who do it, but I've seen some people in fairly spiritual/esotericist circles get into genealogy. It seemed like some of them were hoping to find answers to some issues they were struggling with in their family history.

Apparently in some schools of thought from that area there is a lot of focus on family relationships and the fate of one's ancestors and how those may affect people across generations. I feel like newer generations tend to take more of an individualistic/"blank slate" view of their heritage, whereas I've encountered a lot of older people who gave much more thought/weight to where their ancestry came from and things that happened generations ago.

For those in the thread interested in spaced repetition, Andy Matuschak has made a good writeup of some things to keep in mind for creating good prompts / cards:

https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

Agreed! As much as nuance can get lost in short posts, these limits have saved me from putting many an overly convoluted, rambling mess out there.

You could alternatively just go to Prague to sort it out in person, but you will have to pass through a rather tricky to navigate airport :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

Funny, I always thought people did that for aesthetic reasons because they liked the cleaner look.

That sounds pretty bad! I always thought the login flow was super sketchy, but wasn't aware of this part — has this been covered/analyzed somewhere or is it evident from their terms or something?

When I was a teenager, one of the local mobile providers had some plans where they would only charge you for a call after being connected for more than five seconds. One friend abused the hell out of this and started using it as "free push-to-talk" essentially. I had a plan with free calling time, so he would also sometimes call me, tell me to call him back, and hang up within about three seconds.

The moralistic decisions shaping parts of the internet and technology are getting pretty ridiculous. I'm not interested in making any grand statements or drawing parallels to Orwell or what have you here.

But sometimes I really just want to indicate my situation by pointing an emoji gun at my emoji head, or respond to a friend with a GIF some might consider offensive, and I really think anyone who can be trusted to use the internet should also be trusted to handle that ability somewhat responsibly, and eradicating it from our communications repertoire like this really does not serve anyone in my view.

Exactly my point — there's space for those who put together amazing but infeasible-as-product demos to communicate lofty ideas, those who take those and repackage them for "mass consumption", and of course the rare genius who does both, and anything in between.

> ...but it doesn't feel like this project is actually going to achieve it's goals beyond letting a small number of lucky users play around with stuff.

Will they end up building some product that will be adopted by droves of customers and offers a completely new paradigm for interaction? Probably not.

But I'd argue that's hardly where "esoteric" research like this ends up going, and in my book that's OK. Bret Victor, who is behind Dynamicland, never shipped the full drawing app from his interactive visualizations talk as far as I know. Neither did anyone ever get to buy or download the editor he shows in "Inventing on Principle" as a new IDE that offers incredibly great feedback while programming.

Nevertheless, his talks are among the most inspiring things I and I think many others have ever seen in the area of HCI, and at least in my case are responsible for a large part of my renewed interest in the field.

Will anything out of Dynamicland capture people's imagination and enthusiasm like that as well? Maybe. Maybe not. But the point is to explore, and I applaud those who do.

I think this part here is important regarding your interpretation — it‘s not just about loc

> Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.

More on this here, goes a bit into the background of the models that inspired SimCity: https://logicmag.io/play/model-metropolis/

Onur Mutlu‘s Digital Design & Computer Architecture course at ETH Zurich seems to be quite well regarded, and all the lectures & materials are openly available online. It uses Harris & Harris as a textbook, IIRC.

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/lecture-videos.html

I figure to a certain kind of player the appreciation for how it was done is just as, if not more beautiful than the illusion ever was.

I think they do use "donated" credentials in the background, but the article makes it sound like people would be phished into handing over their logins, which is not the case at all.