hyperthesis

In math textbooks, the exercises contain much of the exposition. Some is in the answers. And some of facts you are expected to learn only appear in your own workings.

So "reading" a math textbook misses most of it.

Good point about teamware, though I think sun was a very unusual company, and particularly network focussed. Also, the internet itself had a decentralized design (for military robustness, IIRC).

Maybe making the core data structure be a merkle tree (not a separate data structure for validation) was new... at least, for version control? It seems monotone used merkle trees as an overlay https://decomposition.al/blog/2019/05/31/how-i-learned-about...

I'm mainly going by larry, who told me that git's data structure wasn't from bitkeeper (but was "all his", IIRC). The significance is that this data structure can't model renames (of course, could do them as an overlay or decoration - though git doesn't)

I'm reading fmajid as meaning that decentralization is antithetical to the control that companies require - so it must grow elsewhere.

By "dominant social practices" I think you mean cathedral as opposed to bazaar? (esr)

So it looks to me like: internet adoption made decentralization possible; a decentralization practice arose, exemplified by linus and publicised by esr, thus creating decentralization-tool demand; and then, all the technical progress you mention was harnessed, including application of ideas from other fields, like merkle trees that were originally for encryption, created decentralizatiom supply.

Thanks for laying all that out!

It may be difficult to find settlements older than 16,000 years ago, because sea levels were lower then, so their coastal settlements would now be underwater. Perhaps completely obliterated... or perhaps there is a coming age of discovery of their remnants?

So-called "land bridges", connecting places, were huge places in their own right, not narrow "bridges", and (probably) prime land.

Right, bitkeeper doesn't name files with hashes like git does. But it uses sha1 (or similar) for decentralization: to tell if two remote files are the same.

Another player is tridge's rsync, which also uses hashes like that.

Thanks; maybe critical mass for the internet triggered it?

oh yeah, I recall merkle now; but maybe git first applied to decentralization?

maybe bitkeeper doesn't use sha1 specifically, but some similar hash?

Historically, bitkeeper directly led to git.

But you're saying arch, then monotone, came before bitkeeper? What innovations did each provide?

(git's innovation was content-based addressing, so the data structure does the heavy lifting. bitkeeper used sha1 hashes for decentralization - was that its main contribution?)

Probably the internet enabled the decentralized version control Cambrian explosion (or, at least, a Cambrian explosion)

BTW: funfact re "merging": bitkeeper had first-class renaming, which git lost. A process of subtraction as well as addition.

It's not falsifiable.

Some things, e.g. id/ego/super-ego seem truish, but only because they package up already accepted things. It's like a "theory" in the Arts: a way of thinking, of analysing, a framework. It's neither true nor false, but may be convenient terminology.

Not literally a singularity, just incomprehensible from the past. Arguably all points on a technological exponential have this property.

Pushback on parsers. It's very difficult to provide useful diagnostic error messages with yacc/bison. So most languages end up with a hand-written recursive descent parser.

The only exception I personally know of is jq (uses bison). So it's difficult to produce helpful syntax error messages in the implementation of jq.

I had a similar experience with replaceable batteries (1) expensive on the one hand, but at the same time (2) unavailable.

I think batteries are the main consumable of a phone. It seems to me there should be an after-market of smaller batteries, and a set of universal power adapters (like you get with power supplies), and shims to fit it securely within the phone.

But I haven't seen this, so either people prefer to upgrade (demand) or manufacturers successfully made it too hard (supply).

"Story" covers a lot. But "x causes y" is the barest story, and also literally how we understand the world.

Also antibiotics. Even the name is sinister.

Could a jq have a more C-like syntax?

JSON is already C-like https://www.json.org/json-en.html and jq uses dot-separated paths for chaining name/value accesses.

Not missing, retaining something: the details of jq. Many developers find this difficult for usual and rarely used tools. See also bash.

Flattening facilitates arbitrary ad hoc transformation.

True. But the quality of an abstraction is also significant.

A poor abstraction is costly in complexity. In a chain of tools, even modest complexity multiplies, and quickly becomes unmanagable. Whereas a clean abstraction (ideally) resets complexity to zero.

Maybe like SQL for relational algebra? Codd made two query languages that were "too difficult for mortals to use". (B-trees for performance was a separate issue)

But jq's strength is its syntax - the difficulty is the semantics.

Yes. All communication is miscommunication. "[Y]ou just fix it as best you can" includes you getting help to fix it. Getting help is one of your abilities.

So, for example, it's up to you to oppose discrimination via the legal system - it's your fault you're letting them get away with it. It's up to you to organize a union to counter exploitative practices - it's your fault you haven't done that yet.

It's up to somebody to do something - it's up to you. If you're neglected what you can do, it's your fault.

Munger isn't saying it's literally true, but that it is an effective way to face life (this "attitude... works" in the quote).

It's Dunning-Krugers all the way down - including this self-referential smugness.

If unskilled and skilled self-assessed themselves the same on average, then unskilled overestimate, and skilled underestimate.

That would be a significant result alone - that no one had any idea. (but as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38416100 notes, there is a correlation).

He relates a case where workers paid by the piece worked themselves into the ground.

Interesting take. Compulsive perfectionism or meaningful quest? Compulsion seems intrinsically unhealthy; yet meaning is also compelling.

Of course something can both energize and eventually cause burnout.

Perhaps moderation by scope and one's ability and agency is an answer? Scope: never being happy with anything seems miserable; but being unhappy with one thing is maybe good. Ability: demanding performance beyond your abilities seems discouraging, but realistic subgoals that you can make progress on is encouraging (of course, for the unknown, we can't know if it's possible or not). Agency: insisting on the actually impossible is frustrating; but again, acting within your agency is self-affirming.

i.e. just match difficulty to ability - accounting for the fact that we can know neither.

PS "successful" entrepreneurs is a small subset. Those who win a grueling competition are often, though not always, happy about it.

If he made the most accurate clock in the world, how would he know?

The prize here was for most accurate at sea, so compare with more accurate land clocks. But in general?

If salt should lose its savour, with what shall it be salted?

... tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting.a

The oldest writing is numbers... for accounting. I'm pretty sure Pythagoras' theorem was for property boundaries.

Yay John von Neumann, genius of geniuses, also said Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Stolen from previous discussion https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

The gif of Great Britain looks like it freezes at the end, but zoom in... it's just adding in finer detail.

Motorcycle licence tests cover counter-steering, as an obstacle avoidance technique.

I think gyroscopic effects are also in play, and more pronounced on a motorcycle, with its wheels having greater mass and angular velocity.

No matter how closely you look, there is always more to it. However you think things are, good or bad, you are "wrong". But you may have sufficient precision to make some specific technique operate. (The technique is predicated on an implicit theory simplifying how things are. Both the technique and theory are "wrong".)

In finding correlations between two things, a tricky bit is finding which two things (a thing can be an arbitrary composites of other things). When we do find a correlation, that becomes how we see it, and we think in terms of this particular simplifying theory of reality.

i.e. there are two issues: (1) reality is complex. (2) we simplify it.