gnramires

That definitely seems like it could be universal :)

Yes, and I think the question of stability is very interesting, specially as those are continuous systems with non-local effects. To prove universality, you're probably going to need to prove that small perturbations that might be inevitable (unless values decay in finite distances) maintain a given behavior, with "regenerative" properties: analogous to fan-in/fan-out in electronic gates (basically, iterated gate applications need to have points or basins of attraction, usually 0 or 1, such that if your system gets noisy, this noise is eventually eliminated and the signal "regenerated"). If you can build a NAND gate within a kind of cell, and show that it's stable w.r.t perturbations, and has regenerative output, I think that would be enough (in that case not only universality is achieved in a technical sense, but in a very robust sense as well) to build a TM.

The spaces of parameters that achieve Turing completeness would be really cool to see as well.

Preferably, your cell should output a "packet", which should permit, given a synchronization source, that this packet travel toward other cells but also avoid other packets traveling in say an orthogonal direction, that is, you should allow wire crossings. If your system doesn't allow wire crossings, I suspect you may be able to prove Turing completeness is impossible, at least I believe you can prove (left as an exercise :) ) that realizing some circuits may require crossings. Alternatively, you can build gates/cells with multiple inputs and multiple outputs, such that effectively one of the gates allows for information to cross over.

Note: I believe this difficulty of building complex systems in 2 dimensions might partially explain why we live in 3 dimensions! It's just very hard for a complex life form to evolve in a 2D system because of, among other things, this connectivity difficulty (in 3D you can basically just route wires/tubes anywhere :) ), this is assuming some form of a generalized Copernican Principle (that we exist probabilistically in possible universes). 4 dimensions and higher may produce similar connectivity difficulties, but in terms of too much connectivity instead of too little. I presume we can explain to a significant understand the whys of why physics is it the way is in our universe using this principle (which appears to me to be a generalization of the Anthropic principle).

It's an interesting idea, I've never tried it. It could also be a simple VM running a given OS (with reduced need for hardware support), or an application running interpreted code with the environment UI.

Generally the idea is to expand UX in more interesting/fun directions without incurring significant hurdles associated with an OS (where everything needs to run reliably and be secure).

I've found this quite interesting related discussion: "Classical "Single user computers" were a flawed or at least limited idea" https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/SingleUserComp... (discussion on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/plkdy5/classical_single_user_computers_w...)

I also think this kind of idea can be fun speculation, but I think there are better things to have fun that aren't promoting wrong ideas (like literal Science Fiction speculation!). When we can build fun on top, the physics of our reality doesn't need to be (academically) fun by itself :)

I think we shouldn't[1] be making Operating Systems, per se, but something like Operating Environments.

An Operating Environment (OE) would be a new interface, maybe shell and APIs to access file systems, devices, libraries and such -- possibly one that can be just launched as an application in your host OS. That way you can reuse all facilities provided by the host OS and present them in new, maybe more convenient ways. I guess Emacs is a sort of Operating Environment, as browsers as well. 'Fantasy computers' are also Operating Environments, like pico-8, mini micro[2], uxn, etc..

Of course, if you really have great a low-level reason to reinvent the way things are done (maybe to improve security, efficiency, DX, or all of that), then go ahead :)

The main reasons is the difficulty in developing robust low-level systems like file systems, the large number of processors you may want to support, and also creating or porting a huge number of device drivers. At this point Linux for example supports a huge number of devices (of course you could use some sort of compatibility layer). Also, developing a new UX is very different from developing a new low-level architecture (and you can just plug the UX into existing OSes).

In most cases an OS shell (and an OE), from the user point of view, is "just" a good way of finding and launching applications. Maybe a way of finding and managing files if you count the file manager in. It shouldn't get too much in the way and be the center of attention, I guess. (This contrasts with its low level design, which has a large number functions, APIs, etc.). But also it should probably be (in different contexts) cozy, comfortable, beautiful, etc. (because why not?). A nice advanced feature is the ability to automate things and run commands programmatically, which command shells tend to have by default but are more lacking in graphical shells. And I'm sure there is still a lot to explore in OS UX...

[1] I mean, unless you really have a reason with all caveats in mind of course.

[2] https://miniscript.org/MiniMicro/index.html#about

Nice! I wonder if there are studies of Turing completeness for those systems?

I didn't get to read it in its entirety.

I personally think we can view logic(s) as tools. I think in a way Bayesian/probabilistic/fuzzy logics (and extensions) are more useful or appropriate in a greater setting than binary logic. We don't really know anything to absolute certainty in real life, as there may always be interfering things getting in the way of our conclusions and our senses -- and although that's just a theoretical impediment usually (we are quite sure of many things, like say that the set of primes is unbounded), in many real life cases it's very relevant, and we're usually making fuzzy judgements about things (like, the success of a venture, whether we will enjoy one thing or another, which path to take, etc.). But it doesn't make sense to declare binary logic obsolete. Think of it as floats and ints (integers). Although we can represent integers using floating point representation, in many cases representing things as ints is much more efficient and simpler. In the same way boolean logic, perhaps the simplest practical logic, is extremely useful in many cases.

Binary logic (in terms of binary expressions and binary circuits) of course is also universal, as you can represent anything in binary -- so the choice of logic, given several universal choices, comes down to application and setting (including physical realization of the circuits/logic and its match to your application).

For example, analog control circuits were (overwhelmingly up to the 80s perhaps) extremely useful in factories controlling processes, and there are relatively simple physical implementations of linear controls using electronics, and even (mechanical) mechanisms. Then we got really good at building small digital circuits and their analog implementation became mostly irrelevant (but still were an important stage for industrial development). With appropriate non-linearities large analog networks are universal as well though (hence Neural Networks, which happen to be implemented using binary circuits currently, but who knows this might change :) ).

So I think it may be fair to see fuzzy logics as more general and more general in some sense, but they are equivalent in other senses to any universal logic (at least as far as taking computable approximations of continuous quantities).

I read a while ago about Cyc's approach to Ontologies, which I understood to be systems used to prove desired claims. There were hierarchical ontologies, in the sense that if you failed to prove some claim in a certain system, you could resort to a slower, but more powerful system (in the sense that it could decide more claims). I guess you can interpret fuzzy logics as a higher ontology in another sense -- the sense of which our knowledge is really always uncertain and precisely evaluating this uncertainty may be necessary (versus just approximating claims as True/False) -- so probabilistic logics would be higher in both the sense of less efficient and more complete.

Note also how things can change and you may want/need to extend your logic indefinitely! Consider how it may be useful to go beyond a simple uncertainty of a claim, and consider for example how reliable this uncertainty itself is: e.g. it may be useful to distinguish between something you know nothing about, which you might arguably attribute probability 50% to, and something you know for sure has a probability of 50%, like a coin flip -- which in turn seems like a more powerful system to be used when it gives better results than the ones which convey less information.

The view of course that you're just building increasingly sophisticated binary systems that more effectively address your tasks persists valid (and relevant as we still use binary computers), again as the fact that other logics are valid too.

> The reason it gets reinvented all the time is because while it's often quite straight forward in statically compiled languages it isn't for dynamic languages as finding out what actually is unused is hard (for fine grained code elimination) or at lest unreliable (pruning submodules). Even worse for scripting languages.

It seems to me in a strict sense the problem of eliminating dead code may be impossible for code that uses some form of eval(). For example, you could put something like eval(decrypt(<encrypted code>,key)), for a user-supplied key (or otherwise obfuscated); or simply eval(<externally supplied code>); both of which could call previously dead code. Although it seems plausible to rule out such cases. Without eval() some of the problem seems very easy otoh, like unused functions can simply be removed!

And of course there are more classical impediments, halting-problem like, which in general show that telling if a piece of code is executed is undecidable.

( Of course, we can still write conservative decisions that only cull a subset of easy to prove dead code -- halting problem is indeed decidable if you are conservative and accept "I Don't Know" as well as "Halts" / "Doesn't Halt" :) )

The way I see it:

(1) There is kind of a definition of a chair. But it's very long. Like, extremely long, and includes maybe even millions to billions of logical expressions, assuming your definition might need to use visual or geometric features of a given object to be classified as a chair (or not chair).

This is a kind of unification of neural networks (in particular LLMs) and symbolic thought: large enough symbolic thought can simulate NNs and vice versa. Indeed even the fact that NNs are soft and fuzzy does not matter theoretically, it's easy to show logical circuits can simulate soft and fuzzy boundaries (in fact, that's how NNs are implemented in real hardware! as binary logic circuits). But I think specific problems have varying degrees of more natural formulation as arithmetic, probabilistic, linear or fuzzy logic, on one hand, and binary, boolean-like logic on the other. Or natural formulations could involve arbitrary mixes of them.

(2) As humans, the actual definitions (although they may be said to exist in a certain way at a given time[1]) vary with time. We can, and do, invent new stuff all the time, and often extend or reuse old concepts. For example, I believe the word 'plug' in english likely well predates modern age, probably used to refer to original electrical power connectors. Nowadays there are USB plugs, which may not carry power at all, or audio plugs, etc. (maybe there are better examples). In any case the pioneer(s) usually did not envision all a name could be used for, and uses evolve.

(3) Words are used as tools to allow communication and, crucially, thought. There comes a need to put a fence (or maybe a mark) in abstract conceptual and logic space, and we associate that with a word. Really a word could be "anything we want to communicate", represent anything. In particular changes to the states of our minds, and states themselves. That's usually too general, most words are probably nouns which represent classifications of objects that exist in the world (like the mentioned chair) -- the 'mind state' definition is probably general enough to cover words like 'sadness', 'amazement', etc., and 'mind state transitions' probably can account for everything else.

We use words (and associated concepts) to dramatically reduce the complexity of the world to enable or improve planning. We can then simplify our tasks into a vastly simpler logical plan: even something simple like put shoes, open door, go outside, take train, get to work -- without segmenting the world into things and concepts (it's hard to even imagine thought without using concepts at all -- it probably happens instinctively), the number of possibilities involved in planning and acting would be overwhelming.

Obligatory article about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

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Now this puts into perspective the work of formalizing things, in particular concepts. If you're formalizing concepts to create a system like Cyc, and expect it to be cheap, simple, reliable, and function well into the future, by our observations that should fail. However, formalization is still possible, even if expensive, complex, and possibly ever changing.

There are still reasons you may want to formalize things, in particular to acquire a deeper understanding of those things, or when you're okay in creating definitions set in stone because they will be confined to a group being attentive and restrictive to their formal definitions (and not, as natural language, evolving organically according to convenience): that's the case with mathematics. The peano axioms still define the same natural numbers; and although names may be reused, you can usually specify them to a particular axiomatic definition that will never change. And thus we can keep building facts on those foundations forever -- while what is a 'plug' in natural language might change (and associated facts about plugs become invalid), we can define mathematical objects (like 'natural numbers') with unchanging properties, and ever-valid and potentially ever-growing valid facts to be known about them, reliably. So fixing concepts in stone more or less (at least when it comes to a particular axiomatization) is not such a foolish endeavor it may look like, quite the opposite! Science in general benefits from those solid foundations.

I think eventually even some concepts related to human emotions and specially ethics will be (with varying degrees of rigor) formalized to be better understood. Which doesn't mean human language should (or will) stop evolving and being fuzzy, it can do so independently of formal more rigid counterparts. Both aspects are useful.

[1] In the sense that, at a given time, you could (theoretically) spend an enormous effort to arrive at a giant rule system that would probably satisfy most people, and most objects referred to as chairs, at a given fixed time.

> But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.

Thank you for your comment. To be clear, I am not an objectivist as stated above. Also, I did not know Hume's Guillotine, thanks.

I believe in fact Hume's Guillotine (henceforth HG) can be definitely disproven with what we know today. The root at what's wrong with HG is that feelings are actually real.

To understand why, I like to open with Alan Watts quote: "If nothing is felt, nothing matters.", and also "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. (...)".

Suffering is a real phenomenon, even though it is manifested in our brains and minds. All sorts of joys and good feelings are also likewise real. If something really is bad to experience (deep suffering), than that's essentially a fact about reality, and subjective experience is part of reality. If something feels bad, it feels bad, and if something feels good, it feels good (even though our desires and judgements about what feels good and what feels bad have serious issues and limitations we should be keenly aware of). This implies we can (at least in theory) understand the nature of those feelings, and understand what feels good and bad. This constitutes the "ought" -- I would say Hume is right in the sense that oughts derive from feelings (defined in the most general way possible), but wrong in the sense that oughts are inaccessible from "is" or science in general. Feelings, emotions, the character of our inner world all forms various "is"es -- essentially "What you felt, you felt".

The meaning of life is to curate and promote good feelings on everyone's minds, and logically we should be able to defend it couldn't be otherwise. If nothing is felt, nothing matters. Consciousness is an experimental fact, and given we observe it and conclude it's real, it provides a unique sole basis of morality and theory of action. A theory of morality that defends fundamentally something that is besides or disregards consciousness (say claim 1: "The meaning of life is arranging rocks in geometric patterns; humans and sentient life don't matter") is inconsistent with the reality of subjective experience -- bad feelings are bad as an experimental fact and good feelings are good as an experimental fact. A being that asserts Claim 1 is disregarding facts of nature.

In Buddhism one of the Noble Truths recognized by Siddhartha is that suffering exists. In other words, suffering is real. So if an action of mine provokes suffering (conversely if it provokes joy/good feelings) then that provides a solid and definite basis for morality: not all your actions are arbitrary, at least they should avoid causing suffering (and more generally, promote good inner lives).

(Note: Again, finding out what really is good with high certainty is actually difficult and our judgement caries risks and imprecision. I discuss about how to find what is good in the link below)

See more about this here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the...

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As a final concession, I suppose you could deny that, although feelings are real, and bad and good feelings exist, that we "ought" to promote good feelings is a "fact" about existence, even though I think that is really inconsistent:

How could a bad feeling factually exist and promoting this bad feeling be good or neutral? If a feeling is said to be bad, that is fundamentally associated with a negative valence of its existence. Negative valence of its existence logically implies it should be avoided in any theory of action or value.

But even if you reject that argument (which I believe in a sense definitely wrong!), once you accept the primacy of consciousness instead of a fact as an axiom/"passion", then I believe you need no more "passionate oughts" in your theory, given you accept subjective experiences to be real, as well as accepting the rest of science and logic of course. Basically all oughts would follow essentially from this single axiom which really makes utmost sense to accept (and as I argued I really think is a fact, or an "is") -- otherwise you might be defending the geometric arrangement of rocks in a dead/unconscious universe, which I really think is absurd and indefensible (both in the sense of our "passions" and to me in the sense of factually false). But it should be fine to take the primacy of consciousness as an axiom or Near-Universal Passion of the Reflective Mind, because we then should agree with everything that follows in any case :)

It should be noted: Rand's definition of objectivism doesn't exactly match what you expect from the common sense usage of the word.

I think Objectivism fails because at least in part it doesn't establish solid enough foundations, and takes as fact unproven things that rely on mountains of suppositions and not always reliable evidence.

For example, whatever you think of "laissez-faire capitalism" (as supported by Rand), it's very weird to make its defense part of a philosophy, more so as a kind of axiomatic statement. Imagine someone were deep into some math book, say a dense Algebraic Geometry textbook, and it was just declared out of the blue that "laissez-faire capitalism is an ideal system" or something like that. That could even be true within some context, but I think it's out of place. It also relies on so many assumptions and is far from conclusively proven (the way capitalism is implemented also varies considerably today, and I don't agree that being maximally "laissez-faire" turned out to be better, at least not obviously)[1]. I would even understand she divulged her political ideas, but kept separate from the basis of a philosophy.

Also, like many philosophies, I don't think objectivism survives a closer scientific scrutiny. I suppose there was no firm grasp on what the mind was, or the nature of conscious (there is still some uncertainty, but much more clarity). I like how Dr Rachel Barr (a neuroscientist I follow on social networks) put it: old philosophies, specially about the human mind and soul, made great observations some of which unfortunately (such as that the 'Pineal gland is the principal seat of the soul' as regarded by René Descartes) can be "swept away" and basically definitely disproved by science from a better understanding of the nature of our brains and minds. Some assertions about perception and consciousness seem to be outdated.

I particularly object (no pun intended) to the basis of ethics as individuals. As I've argued previously[2], we now understand the nature of consciousness to, in my view, not justify an ethics that is based solely on the primacy of self-interest. We are part of a giant network of interactions, and although the self seems like a very important concept for our society, metaphysically it doesn't make much sense to prioritize the self at all costs (even when this prioritization includes some strategic concessions for altruism), though I think it's important that we take care of ourselves for pragmatic reasons, because we basically are the ones that understand ourselves the most and live with ourselves 24/7.

I think Objectivism (although again I am no specialist, I haven't studied it profoundly) has merits around notions of reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we should be able to in a certain sense understand everything (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly counterintuitive) -- because our brains and minds which form the basis of such questions are part of reality, as well as any internal processes within those that enable subjective perception and subjective reality.

I wrote more about this here[3]. Please take a look if you're interested.

[1] Not to mention, we hardly got to try out 2 (or maybe 3) political systems in any serious way: capitalism and socialism (also perhaps social democracy), although there are a myriad of variations to experiment with as well (forms of voting, systems of regulation, the design of various institutions) that aren't considered when talking about "political systems". Who knows if something else could be better? I think a more general view of society as a whole as a kind of giant system is necessary to understand how to design better societies in general.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43528352

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the... Please see the questions where I expanded a little upon those ideas :)

You also need to encode the painted areas somehow. They are not only intersections on K shapes, but sometimes exclusions as well (like (A^B)/C). Two ways come to mind:

(1) Listing closed curves by vertices. Each vertex of a painted area is an intersection of two or more circles, and delimits a section of a circle. So the section of circles that enclose a circle can be encoded each by the union of:

(1.1) A circle (index); (1.2) A 2nd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a first point; (1.3) A bit identifying the (first) intersection (because there may be 2 possible); (1.4) A 3rd circle (index) that intersects the 1st on a second point; (1.5) A bit identifying the (second) intersection.

Note the base circle would be the first intersection of a subsequent section of this closed curve, and the 3rd circle would be the subsequent base circle. So 1/2/3 won't be necessary for subsequent curves. So only (K+2) indices + (K+1) bits are necessary for this encoding.

Total ~K log2(K)+K bits. I hypothesize (left to the reader :)) a closed curve should contain at most 2x13 points. There can be at most 2^13 distinct regions however, so each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than that many curves per figure. So each figure (Animal) can be encoded with less than 2^13 x 26x(5+1) bits =~ 1.3Mbit.

But that's mostly pathological cases, if each Animal must be a fully connected area, then that might reduce (hypothesis above) to at most only 26x(5+1) bits = 156 bits, or 20 bytes!

I left out a problem which area shapes encoded within each other (like eyes). In that case you need at most another 156 bits per inner cutout shape.

(2) Alternatively, you could use boolean operations to encode each shape. Also left as a fun problem :)

I've repeatedly made the case for something similar. But I don't think the argument should be "Taking care of yourself, in any case, yields better outcome, even for others, than prioritizing the common good. So the fundamental principle should be putting yourself first.". First, it's not always true that taking care of yourself is always the best -- sacrifice does exist and is important.

If you as say a father always put your own wellbeing (or some other definition of self-interest) first, then you're going to be a pretty lousy father. But you shouldn't ignore yourself. It's all about striking a balance, and in the end this balance simply aims toward the common good.

It doesn't make sense to say that because sometimes a naive, "greedy" strive toward the common good doesn't work then the principle is false.

You can carve real basis for the common good and other metaphysical principles. One such basis is that, metaphysically, the supreme valuation of the self is on very shaky ground. The self, although very important conceptually, doesn't stand up as an ultimate metaphysical basis, because we are really dynamic results of a whole network of interactions that includes not only whatever happens in our brains, but the whole cosmos -- there's no absolute boundary between yourself and others, and everything is always fundamentally changing. You from today is different from yesterday, and significantly different from many years ago. The common good is much more metaphysically defensible. That's why most metaphysical traditions (religions, usually) almost universally put the common good (sometimes enacted by God) above all else -- it really makes the most sense imo[1]. Again, you shouldn't be naive about it, and in practice and in most cases it makes sense to first take basic care of yourself, "keeping your house", and then go help others, but this is more a guideline, heuristic and reminder (specially important to give for radical altruists, but common sense for most people I think).

But really if yourself is your actual fundamental priority, I think you will act very poorly. Although even in that case there are good strategic reasons to be cooperative (people thinking you are evil or egoistical will already turn around many people and compromise relationships and cooperation opportunities).

[1] If you don't buy this metaphysical formulation, there's an (I believe) ultimately equivalent formulation that may be easier to accept: the fact that you "Could exist/could have been born as another person". If in some metaphysical sense you could have been born as that poor person that needs assistance, doesn't it make sense to help her, which logically implies that if you were in their shoes you would be helped?

I think it's a valid viewpoint (I'm not sure I'd go as far as claiming it is the secret to happiness), but have other interpretations.

I think the examples can be cases of "checkbox-ticking", and not considering enough the whole experience of your life. Like, being fit for being fit seems quite pointless. Being healthy is a nice goal. But the point of being fit or healthy should be so you can explore the world and do and see all the things that are worth doing and seeing and feeling enabled by your fitness. It's not just to be fit or get a girl/boyfriend.

I think the, almost tautological, assertion should be: Meaning is the secret to Meaning. If you spend your life checking boxes, you will miss on experiences and associated meaning. Having a meal just to satiate your hunger is probably the worse reason to have a meal. Better to have a meal so you can do things and stay healthy (and satiate your hunger). Better yet, if you so enjoy, to have a meal to enjoy the amazing world of tastes and textures of good food (and satiate your hunger and stay healthy to do stuff in the process). It's not just about glueing stuff together ("de-atomization"), but about actually valuing meaning and experiences, and not just checkboxes. I think better said: you should treat your life (and really the whole cosmos that includes the lives of others and assisting others) as a canvas to be filled with fulfilling, rich, deep, etc. experiences -- curate your inner world.

Who cares if you did check off that box, be fit, have X amount of money in the bank, etc..

Now, de-atomization seems like a decent heuristic simply because "box-ticking" and doing things for reasons other than them contributing to make your life meaningful is likely to make them atomized (like, box-ticking weakly implies atomization). But just because a task is single-purpose does not mean it does not contribute to meaning in your life: maybe you really need to focus on your job, go to the gym to stay healthy, etc. (atomization doesn't imply meaninglessness). And I applaud making things that are otherwise dull enjoyable, by say listening to music while you do it, or other imaginative ways.

Sometimes you just have to chop wood and carry water though, and that's fine.

Nice! As someone who has never used an espresso machine, I was a bit intimidated by the presentation. I think part of your show should be to teach, even if in a simplified fashion, how to use the machine, so any customer is less intimidated :)

> Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse

I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).

I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.

Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scout_Mindset

> Utopias are always fantasies. All of them.

Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.

I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).

Very touching ;)

In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.

And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.

An undo button would be nice :) (for when I need to backtrack)

I really think there are quite a few reforms and new ideas that could help Unixes. Also it's not only about introducing features/new ways, but also the right culture and instruction around the new ways.

For example, the Android(/iOS?) permission based model at kernel level where apps (that could be processes in general?) can only access some private storage (which presumably has its own isolated tmp/ directory) really should be default, and permissions should be opt-in (of course, there should be a 'legacy permission' that makes things work as before).

(I believe most of permission functionality is technically possible through SELinux (??), or you could use containers, but is not easy to use or default)

I think containers arose partially to provide some of this isolation? But they have their own overhead and redundancy issues.

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It seems some of this work is being done in SELinux project? Is it going to be enough? (and easy enough to use by default?)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SELinux

I think a simple permission model might have been more elegant than the SELinux model ?

I've been thinking there should actually be more useful (or at least more interesting? :P) crowd computing stuff.

How about something like Superoptimizing (with correctness proofs) open source code?

Those 'slat awnings' look like a really good idea! (Less maintenance, air flow, letting a little bit of sunlight through)

I am no specialist, but carbon credits seem like they can work to me. The problem is they need to be very carefully analyzed. Here in Brazil there have been cases of people illegally seizing protected forests (far off in Amazon regions) and making huge amounts of money selling off carbon credits simply for 'not taking the forest down' (it could be even worse: taking down the forest for even more 'reforestation credits'). Usually most of those 'pay someone not to pollute' can be very problematic, because in principle anyone can declare (misleading) intent to pollute any amount and thus could get infinite credits.

So this kind of scenario has to be carefully taken into account in favor of scenarios which lead to actual emission reductions. It's not a simple fungible asset or commodity as some (naively) assume.

Yes, but in any case the data is already public, or at least most of it is. I think if we truly desire for privacy of posts then the SWF/Fediverse should be looking at a different access model, and maybe some encryption methods (for example you could whitelist who can decrypt your data).

There's also the legal approach: keep data public but forbid usage for unauthorized purposes. Then at least the big public companies might not put their hands in it (at least not directly). But it could still be leaked and widely used by nefarious or shady actors.

In any case I think a more well thought out or just better informed distinction between public posts and private ones would be very useful (it appears currently in Mastodon you need to have a 'locked account' to post followers-only posts; I don't know if data goes to other servers for private posts?). If you post something anyone can see on the internet, there's a significant limit to how much the law or any technical solution could protect you. The right solution for sensitive data on the internet is to make sure only a select few can see it, for now.

(I believe this problem is can actually be solved using something like a Web of Trust (but more formalized/automated than WoT is currently): you'd trust accounts and then you can build a graph where trust is a function of distance (trusted node distance). This web of trust could be useful for a number of distributed protocols. The only catch is it requires much more user interaction and education.)

I don't see why right to be forgotten is fundamentally incompatible with Fediverse (or other social web 4.0, idk the name)? For example, there could be a central server where you publish some credentials along with a request to be forgotten, and all instances must (if they want to comply with the law) check there from time to time (this would happen automatically of course) and erase associated content. Or you could ask to be forgotten to your instances and it would message all relevant instances of your wish to be forgotten, which then is their own duty to comply. It doesn't seem like an insurmountable issue.

Perhaps he was observing the layer making sure it had integrity? Oil layers famously have an optical effect (iridescence from interference of reflections). This effect would transition as the layer goes from >= 1 molecule thick to <= 1 molecule thick (on average). It's likely possible to pinpoint this transition experimentally and then using the oil volume obtain the molecular layer thickness.

We don't need a very strong world government to meet our challenges, I think, including climate change and AI. We can do it with agreements and accords.

(I also don't think a world government might be as dystopic as people imply or fear, for the record, because it can follow democratic principles just as we currently have; and its effects might not be as great as we already have today with the globalizing effects of internet and specially social media. Just given the resistence against the concept, I think the tools we already have and simply coordinating as countries, if may be less effective, probably can work)

The key thing about them is that accords must be enforceable and enforced. There must be consequences for violating them (with escalating gravity, sanctions and measures).

I actually think disarmament of governments worldwide should be one of those goals I believe (and I think very urgent). We know that war is essentially the worst possible form of diplomacy or two nations resolving a disagreement (when it isn't just a power grab or senseless destruction). We shouldn't have that option readily available at all. As for the danger that one nation rapidly industrializes and acquires weapons, against defenseless opponents, we would have very stringent and effective vigilance at all countries industrial capacity against production of significant quantities of military weapons. We can actually extinguish war forever like we extinguish diseases, I really believe. For anyone thinking about existential risks to humanity, I think this should be near the top of the list beside climate change I think.

Of course, there will still be conflicts coming from a myriad of reasons, but those conflicts can be managed and resolved in other ways. And practicing mutual agreements and conflict resolution will be as important as ever -- simply military disarming doesn't magically resolve all issues. For lasting stability worldwide promotion of fundamental human values and rights as well as peace is extremely important (a wise population will not wage war on fellow humans). I think there could be some international work in this area as well. The UN is usually great at it too.

Having N paddles would be cool as well, perhaps with a cost for paddles getting too close (to avoid trivialities), and optimizing which note each paddle represents/beats, maybe imposing a cost on drastic pitch changes so that each specializes in a pitch range.

I don't know if I would want to live in a digital world without knowing what I'm signing up for. But I know that, today, some games are really captivating, and make me glad of them existing (although I don't want and don't think you should engage irresponsibly or unsustainably with hobbies or entertainment), and were important for me since my childhood.

So the argument against games because social media is bad seemed to me invalid or very weak. It's true there are predatory practices in the digital world and including games very significantly. So there are predatory practices anywhere you look, including in beautiful beaches and paradisaical places -- and we have to remain watchful against them. I think that would be throwing the baby with the bathwater to discredit this entirely. The digital world does afford adventures and I think that's a distinct advantage of it (and adventures that don't require us killing ourselves, stealing from each other or from other people, suffering terribly on occasion, etc.). I think this is a point only younger generations which got to know the extent to which digital worlds can be compelling first hand get. Again, there are compelling things to do IRL also[1], and spending too much time doing anything unsustainable is again a bad idea. But as we have more material resources available, that seems in the direction of a good future of adventure we dreamed, but adventures consistent with peace and sustainability, and adventures intrinsically well designed with the principles of meaning, fun, joy, etc..

I honestly understand there may be an allure to the assumption that you have to "bear torture and suffer IRL" for life to have meaning (that kind of evokes being an Idea Of The Devil :P regardless of being religious or not). Which for me just obviously isn't true; my most cherished moments were peaceful, moments of awe, wonder, occasionally exciting and engaging, never intense suffering struck me as particularly meaningful for my life (if occasionally unfortunately necessary).

I think we can have adventures that isn't just la-la land, because challenges are intrinsically interesting, but also where we design things carefully so that adventures, both IRL (which include things we might have to/should do, like work, community management, political activity) and importantly the ones we design, don't have just meaningless suffering but are really meaningful, engaging (a challenge compatible[2] with our capabilities), beautiful, etc..

[1] I particularly defend getting to know nature, and having safe adventures in nature. I don't even think you have to go very far, to appreciate local flora and animals. But there are limitations (including damaging where you visit, if everyone decided to visit a certain region) and logistical difficulties. I don't think any exclusionary attitude is warranted -- let's see how each thing we can do is and how it aligns with our principles and fundamental principles of a good life.

[2] I think the term compatibility is very applicable, designing activities that are compatible with our cognitive characteristics and features of our cognition.

I use Void Linux, and find it reasonably simple :) (the reason I like the distro essentially)

Nothing against complex things, if that's your thing though. (usually complex things are made to be 'easier'/more convenient to operate too, for some definition of easier)

There are many indigenous tribes in Brazil for example (still surviving in more or less pre-colonial territory). I'm very far from a specialist (and specialists do exist), but I know there are many different attitudes. Some tribes have known technology but don't like it. Some use smartphones and wear clothes (usually those have some economic activity I guess). Some have an inbetween approach, and the leaders are reluctant to let technology in (it's interesting in Brazil usually the role of spiritual leader is different from the "executive leader" afaik, it's the Paje (more spiritual) and the Cacique (more executive)).

So it's a reality many actually don't want to mix with civilization.

I haven't gotten to read it yet, but I highly recommend Ailton Krenak's book "A vida não é Util"[1] (Life is Not Useful) and his other ones, he discusses some of those questions as an indigenous person.

Also, really most tribes in Brazil are in existential danger from many activities, specially illegal logging and mining. One significant role they perform is defend the forest since it's their territory and traditional livelihood.[2] Differently from elsewhere, tribes in Brazil are quite unique because many have been agricultural in pre-colonization times (I believe cassava is the staple crop generally), and have unique cultures like music, languages, garments and dishes.

But generally each tribes has its own unique culture and history and we cannot generalize much (some are more violent, some much less, etc. too).

[1] Seems to be available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Life-Not-Useful-Ailton-Krenak-ebook/d... (This time Amazon's name is fitting :) )

[2] Brazil has quite generous indigenous reservations I think and we generally quite value indigenous people culturally, but we are struggling to defend most forests from criminals and, what other word to use, evil business interests in the region.

(One significant cultural movement is Brazil from the early 20th century was the idea of "Anthropophagy", which is to value all cultures and learn what we can from them, absorb ("eat") what's good they have to teach us)

Debian has 2/3 stages of software deployment that I know of: Unstable, Testing and Stable. By the time it comes to stable it has been quite extensively tested. The exceptions are only security updates which you may want to get very quickly anyway. I really recommend Debian (in particular with unattended security upgrades) for severs.

Other distros have this as well (Thumbleweed, Void, etc.), and I really think most people should not be using recently-deployed software. A small community using them however helps testing so the rest of us can have more stability. Which is why I don't recommend using Arch (or Debian unstable) for general users, unless you specifically want to help testing and accept the risk.

Also randomizing update schedules by at least a few hours does seem very wise (I don't think even the most urgent updates would make or break in say 6 hours of randomization?)