lukasb

Does the idea of a single cosmological time even make sense? I thought one of the key parts of relativity is that which events happen simultaneously depends on your perspective.

I've gotten good Kenyan recently from Flower Child.

Let's say I grant (though I don't believe it) that a startup is also a lottery ticket. What are the factors that make an indie app a lottery ticket? That's my question. Is it just that, absent the funding gate startups have, that there's a lot of competition?

Well, no, winning a lottery is one in a million. A successful startup - assuming you get funding - is more like one in ten (that's not exact but no more than an order of magnitude off.)

He mentions that making a living from an indie app is like winning the lottery - that would make it much more unlikely than having a reasonably successful startup. Why is a successful indie app harder?

If you RTFA, they said that old growth forests managed to recover from the eruption.

I have a simple script I run before merging into the main branch that just tells Claude to look for obvious bugs, and to err on the side of saying it looks fine. Has stopped me from merging two or three bugs, 95% of the time it says things look fine so hasn't wasted my time.

- Markdown based note-taking app

- Notational Velocity-style omnibar

- Wikilinks, backreferences, etc.

- Excel-type formulas: find nodes in documents that meet criteria and transclude them, feed content to AI with instructions and insert output in doc (since this is a live formula, you can edit the instructions and re-run), have conversations with AI in doc with context ...

email is in profile if this sounds interesting to anyone

Cool! I'm working on a note-taking app with a similar (but not identical) feature based on Excel-type formulas - except, semantic formulas, not mathematical. Chaining AI formulas together (combined with non-AI stuff like "get the contents of this web page / find my notes that mention X") can be really powerful.

I haven't had much luck with architecture stuff. Maybe I'm holding it wrong.

Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.)

I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)

I'm reading more blogs than ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I bet one person could probably build a pretty good synthetic NL->Prolog dataset. ROI for paying that person would be high if you were building a foundation model (ie benefits beyond being able to output Prolog.)

Odd. I wouldn't expect these buildings to be an above average fire risk ...

Are there any studies that look at body fat % instead of weight? I don't care how much I weigh.

This makes a good argument that the block universe can't exist: https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einst...

(search "block")

Absolutely worth reading, even if you have no intention of reading Homer.

“There’s another solution, but it’s on shaky ground. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves historic copies of websites as a public service, but the organization is in a constant battle to stay solvent. Google’s Sullivan floated the idea of a partnership with the Internet Archive, though that’s nothing close to an official plan.”

Too lazy to find a link, but this is now public and live, although pretty well hidden. Three dots menu for a search result -> More about this page.

This is helpful even if you don't need a full-on hearing aid. My hearing is worse in the left ear than the right, so with headphones audio will sometimes sound panned right. The audiogram helps correct for that.

Yeah I'm curious if the Markdown form syntax here is totally new or if other people have done something similar. I'm building an app that extends Markdown with Excel-like formulas (think function calls, not arithmetic) and have considered having formulas that instantiate form elements.

There are even quicker hot sauces;

1. Chop up bird's eye chilis, add fish sauce and lime juice - boom, prik nam pla. If you don't have fish sauce, bird's eye chilis and white vinegar.

2. White vinegar, sugar and salt, garlic and/or ginger, bird's eye or jalepeno, some bell pepper to cut the heat - stick it in a blender, done. Super delicious.

I wonder if this helps explain WeChat’s popularity for payments

Not loading right now, but if it doesn't already include it, would love to see this data normalized by the amount of vehicle traffic each location has, to get a better sense for which locations are dangerous vs just busy.

What is this for? The examples given could be handled deterministically. Is this for situations where you don't know JSON schemas in advance? What situations are those?

China doesn't like to acknowledge that Gandhara wasn't historically part of China?

Minksy's The Society of Mind is a must-read

I keep saying that if nothing else, we are in a golden age of actually finishing side projects. All those “it’s easy, I’ll just glue this API to this API” projects really are easy now.

I mean according to the suttas there's no directed thought after the second jhana, right? That seems different from what she's describing.

The rationale that a certain amount of logging to thin forests is beneficial is correct. I don't know the details, or how they'll administer it to avoid excesdive logging, but at least in California we have almost 3x as many trees per acre compared to pre-white settlement: https://story.californiasunday.com/gone-paradise-fire

Complaint not targeted at you personally but - why does thought have to take place in language at all? I sometimes reason using physical or kinesthetic metaphors that would be impossible to capture perfectly in language.