musesum

Housemate is working on solar pod-cars - think of it package-switched trains (as opposed to circuit switched)

Takeaway from our conversations: highest pain point is floodplains. Like Jakarta, which is sinking. Like Houston, after Harvey.

audio of interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhw5vdH3rlo

Microfines was tested in Israel and backfired: https://priceonomics.com/effectiveness-of-fines-for-late-pic...

I put off trip to Bali until this update. Last time, the screen cracked due to lid closed and heat buildup with fan trying cool in a positive feedback loop. Had to fly to Singapore to replace. This time, carrying (soon to be) old MBP as backup.

Hmmm, there is a dislike (Song | Artist) feature on the Desktop version -- as least for the Discover Weekly channel.

My housemate's family grows wild rice in California. But, some land is now too dry. So, he is thinking of putting up solar panels.

Other farmers are experimenting with grazing animals like sheep. Intensive grazing (as per Allan Savory) may prevent, or even reverse, desertification. The shade helps mitigate the intense noonday sun in a warming climate.

Cannot understate how influential the OG Star Trek was for me. Never saw Shatner in anything else (was too busy reading Clark, Heinlein, Dick, et al). So, he is still Captain Kirk, to me. His words are profoundly moving.

One private study on a campus network found that the distribution of titles followed a power law. A handful of songs capturing most of the volume, and then hundreds of songs with only 1 or 2 shares.

It was perplexing to find a business model that could support independant artists.

My takeaway was that Concepts have Contexts. The problem is that the Context may vary from person to person. Kinda like an n-gram, where n can vary between people.

Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.

Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.

This used to be the case with NYTimes, several years ago. But, I think it has improved. Same horrible experience, a few years ago. Then, I resubbed after a couple years. A few months ago, NYTimes ran an article on "dark patterns." So, I attempted to unsub -- it was much easier.

But, that is only the NYTimes. My guess is that the original hypothesis holds true for others; I doubt JFax has improved.

Would love to offer NFTs of works that are both authored and offered on iOS/Android. Would this be a first step? I don't know how to do it otherwise.

Fun read. I wrote a DRM system in the early 90's for try-before-you-buy. Instead of a gateway, we would perchlorate portions of code APIs through a lattice. Somewhat like a one-way hash. I think there 512 keys -- one for each node. You couldn't disassemble static code, you had to set breakpoints. But, there was a bug. Instead of extracting 512 keys, you only had to extract 9. So, it got cracked sooner than expected.

I stopped work on a memo app. Was piggybacking on Apple's branding around privacy. Am going to wait a year to see how this shakes out. Super disappointed.

[Edit]

Here is/was the privacy statement https://www.deepmuse.com/privacy - I'm kinda embarrassed.

Ok, this is about Bonjour, which is pretty cool. David Abramson and I released a multiplayer Horse Racing game, called PocketJockey on iOS 2.1. During game play each device would play its local copy of the William Tell Overture. We used packet latency to synchronize tracks. You would then bounce up and down as though you were a jockey. If you bounced in time to the music your horse would go faster. There was an announcer that would announce the status of your horse, which was also in synch. Up to 4 players could be playing in the same room with the exact same music and announcer emanating from their pocket. All on the original iPhone. To use an overused term, the experience was "magical" That's what you can do with Bonjour.

So, what's the attack vector? A back door, perhaps? Bonjour requires a user approval dialog. A misleading title of the dialog may allow someone to connect. Maybe extract private data.

Imagine a peer-to-peer chat app. Say, in Hong Kong -- during a protest. Or in Kabul -- during an evacuation.

Going solo could fall into two different writer-style idioms: Stringer vs Novelist. A Stringer is a freelancer that writes a news story. The content is short term and quasi-anonymous. A Novelist spends months writing something a bit more epic, published under their own name.

On several occasions I've tried going the Novelist route. The problem is when the money runs out and you revert to becoming a Stringer to top-off the bank account. But, then you return back to your project and find the APIs have all changed. So, there is a lot of refactoring to do.

For iOS, there is also the aspect of APIs becoming more team oriented. I met an Apple engineer and asked him what he worked on. He mentioned a very narrow aspect of one API. I asked him what else he worked on and he said that was it! In contrast, I have to juggle hundreds of APIs. There seems to be a conflict of mindset.

A counter example was from an Uber driver in San Mateo. We struck up a conversation and I mentioned that I'm an iOS developer. He showed me an app that he wrote in Flutter to track all his rides. He was on the verge of marketing it. I was kinda blown away.

> another way of looking at the cancellation of OpenDoc is that its success would have completely upended the software industry.

Ironically, that was the main interest of Brad Cox who, with Tom Love, created Objective-C, which was acquired by NeXT, and became the way forward for Apple.

In my experience, it is very hard to build a business around software objects. I spent a couple years trying to build an App around the Apple Watch. But, Apple only allows 3rd party complications. It is essentially a component. Apple recommends focusing on doing only one thing.

Moreover, as a component, you the developer often have less control over the UX. On the Apple Watch, when a user opens -say- Spotify on the iPhone, your app is kicked out.

So, a couple weeks ago, I decided to put the Apple Watch development on hold and do something else on the iPad.

Same goes for MacOS, try deleting the News App on Big Sur.

What's the total addressable market for disrupting carbon footprint of banks? When every person is their own bank, there is less need for brick-and-mortar real estate, the employees commuting, and the like -- what the EPA calls "Scope 3" effects, as per: https://www.epa.gov/climateleadership/scope-3-inventory-guid....

The above carbon TAM is why I'm pro-crypto, as soon as we move past PoW.

The article wasn't very clear; I think it means the related footprint of internal operations, such as real estate, employee travel, and the like. At least, if you go by https://www.epa.gov/climateleadership/scope-3-inventory-guid...

The military is a separate article. A sankey diagram would be less ambiguous: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/

> So banks actually produce about 1.5M tons of emissions then according to your link.

Wrong; Gigatons.

citations:

USMilitary 59 M Tons 2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...

BTC: 37M M tons - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor...

BTC: 130 M tons China - https://cacm.acm.org/news/251829-bitcoin-mining-emissions-in....

Banks: 1040 M tons - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/banks-pro...

Was intrigued, yet somewhat disappointed, after reading Stross's post as I've read Accelerando several times. Some thoughts:

> It's also horribly energy-inefficient

Yep, here are some comparative carbon costs:

US Military: 59 M Tons 2017. BTC: 22 M tons 2018, 37 M tons 2021, 130 M tons by 2024 predicted in China before shutdown, Banks: 1040 M tons

IMO, the idea of a $1,000,000 BTC would be a huge hit on reducing CO2, as cost of mining approaches BTC price.

> Hork up a bunch of space probes

Here is a variation on that idea: One of the claimed advantages to satellite is lower latency (see https://www.groundcontrol.com/Satellite_Low_Latency.htm) Solana is claiming layer 1 blocktime of 400ms by synchronizing clocks. For Global coverage, I think satellite is a requirement to achieve that throughput as consumer latency is at least double that. This isn't proof of work; Solana calls its method proof of history.

IMO, PoW is the like the Cray Supercomputer of the 80's. My Apple Watch is lot more powerful at -let's see- 1/64,000,000th the cost.

The ability to sue is not the same as suing. Simply the threat of a lawsuit is enough to discourage some transactions. That's the point.

In my case, I used a hybrid approach: I studied the law, drew up a response, and then hired a lawyer at $900/hour (as he was a law professor) to put out a response though his firm. By understanding the basics, I could hypothesize a response, on my own time, and then verify that hypothesis with an expert.

[update]

Actually, I just re-read my above post, and didn't make the point very well. Thanks for pointing that out.

You can sue in Pro Per(son) -- essential act as your own lawyer. I know someone who studied the Law so he could sue his former business partners. Most of it was a reverse deep pockets kinda game: "It will cost you $300K in legal fees to defend yourself ... or settle for a fraction of the cost." As a result, I and colleagues ignore this troll. But, there are intriguing implications ...

For example: register the site patent<patent#>.com and use the site to link to the facts. Maybe add the legal definition of "In Pro Person." Thus, when someone does a search on the Patent #, your disclosure site will appear.

Another example: Claim copyright on the expression of the idea. Thus, anyone attempting to express the patent would infringe on the copyright.

Disclaimer: IANAL. I could be off-base here. Get a valid legal opinion to save yourself some grief. And good luck!

Health and climate mitigation. Trace elements of Glyphosate in food supply. Intensive grazing to reverse desertification (as per Alan Savory) and carbon sequestration.

A 2015 USDA study shows organic corn fetching 3X conventional. But, higher variable costs. What if lowering costs with new techniques changes the roughly equal profit margins to a 2X? That's the sort of questions I and folks like me like to ask.

Aside from that, my housemate sold a cattle ranch in Montana and his family is one of the largest wild rice growers in California before the drought. Now, converting some of that parched land to Solar. Seems like a terrible waste. What if you could do both?

Actually quite nice; still using some of that code.

By 2001, three companies I co-founded went under. One was going public in April 2000 (oops), plus a couple others failed after 911. I wound up living in my car and writing code in a cafe. There were quite a few of us. The owner was sympathetic. You could buy a tea and share a table for hours. Refills were free. One web developer said he was changing careers to house cleaning. Oddly, it was quite liberating.

I wonder if an Aptera would qualify as the Geo Metro of EVs? I haven't owned a car since 2008 - living in SF helped. Was commuting to Mt View with the SF2G group. There is one member of the group who's Twitter handle is "Electric cars are still cars" Be that as it may, I reserved an Aptera with a 1000 mile range. Feels less like a car and more like a flightless airplane.

My Dad owned a GM dealership in the 70's. I grew up working in the parts department. Part of the business model were "genuine Delco parts" plus a very busy service department. So, low fixed cost with high variable cost. Somewhat akin to that cheap printer with expensive ink.

Then I read the March 1973 "Bicycle" issue of Scientific American, which measured efficiency in terms of Kilograms/Kilometers/KCalories. Back then bikes were about 28x more efficient than cars. Steve Jobs referred to that article when he declared computers to be a "bicycle for the mind". As for me: I dropped cars and bought a bike.

> I infer from this and your domain name that you plan on using ML ... Yep

> I’m curious if you remember the example. Also - Tog worked at Apple for 14 years

I couldn't find it, although he has another post on Fitt's Law. The phrase he used was "pulling defeat from the jaws of victory" - maybe it's on Archive.org

> it’s kludge but it has nothing to do with them not knowing fitts law.

Yeah, my characterization is a bit unfair

> Did you know that many of those folks went front Parc to Apple and continued their research?

I did have a chance to meet Jef Raskin a few times. He was between Apple stints, working on the Canon Cat. He's the one who turn me onto Card, Moran, Newell 1983 -- and thus Fitt's Law.

I don't doubt there is a lot of thought that goes into refining the UI. However, there's the quandary of breaking the current idiom, which limits change. However, for low vision folks, there is less of a switching cost. Same holds for newer devices, like glasses.

> Do you have the core technology proven out yet?

Tis incomplete. Some parts of the interaction model. Am a bit weak on the ML part. May license GPT-n. Looking to form a team. Just convinced my blind friend to join. He kinda pioneered AR in the 90's.