cscheid

The assignments are not directly available, but my email is easy to find.

One final question/request (for which I'd happily pay for!) : it would be awesome to have a path away from Observable's infra if desired. Say I _really_ want to host a particular notebook locally: is something like that planned? I know this is not a trivial feature since notebooks can call other notebooks, but I'd love to develop stuff on Observable knowing that should the worst happen and it doesn't exist anymore, I can run it all locally on my webpage.

It seems that one of the covert channels described here has been fixed (SharedArrayBuffers) but many of the other ones have not. The passive reading of data from timing-based side effects (like CSS animation as described in the paper) seems particularly hard to avoid in general. HTML5 video will have the same vulnerability, I bet.

Although there's some dissent, in law the typical expression you hear is the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_cases_make_bad_law

There are research groups (I'm thinking of Tim Dwyer's specifically) that are specifically trying to improve the situation. When you say "it's just a pile of incompatible heuristics", it sounds like you haven't taken the time to try and implement a better solution.

Graph drawing is the kind of thing that seems trivial, right until you try to work on it.

(disclaimer: I'm clearly biased here since I worked with the people who wrote graphviz.)

> Note that this time is measuring the time taken to look up every element in the collection, rather than just looking up a single element.

http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/BenchmarkingScalaCollections.htm...

- if the average person is 6' tall, than at most 10% of the people are taller than 60'.

Because this is... illegal.

Page 3 of the complaint document has references: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3722345-UploadVR-law...

I love the idea of using monoids like they're described in the blog series, but the examples suggest that there's a certain amount of non-generalizable cleverness that goes into defining each monoid. Could you do CYK subtables inside the monoid, so that people can define arbitrary CF grammars, as long as they're in Chomsky normal form?

You do make an interesting point which I didn't emphasize: Aurora also makes a moral argument against generation ships.

But I think things get more complicated still. If you accept the book's argument, accept cryogenic sleep, but also accept that Earth is something like the biggest generation ship we have, then where do we stand? If we accept that cryogenic sleep solves that part of the moral argument, then we kind of walked into Woody Allen's plot for Sleeper (that is, why not sleep right here on Earth until things improve?) These are really tough questions to consider.

Needless to say, I think Aurora is the deepest, most introspective work that KSR has produced.

SPOILERS below

the characters go "well, eff it, I guess we have to make it work here on Earth". It seems to me that, in the arc of KSR's work, Aurora is the effective acceptance that humans will have to make Earth work for them, for better or worse, even as they collectively wrecked the planet. And that seems a nice segue into New York 2140.

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful" and all that.

f(x+eps)/f(x) ~= eps f'(x)/f(x) + 1

f(x) = x^2.2 f'(x) = 2.2x^1.2

f(x+eps)/f(x) ~= 1.2 eps/x + 1

Human response to light is not particularly well-modeled by a logarithmic response. It's --- no big surprise --- better modeled by a power law.

This stuff is confusing because there's two perceptual "laws" that people like to cite: Fechner-Weber, and Stephens's. Fechner-Weber is logarithmic; Stephens's is a generalized power-law response.