musesum

> Seems like your approach would require 3rd party developers to build a completely new UI

Nope; no changes to existing UIs. Instead a driver, which has its own problems of deployment, as that requires convincing the hardware OEMs.

> It’s also the case that existing designs take into account Fitt’s law. Apple and Google are well aware of these.

Hmmmm ... I don't think so. I remember Bruce Tognazzini wrote about how Apple messed up Fitt's law in a version of OSX, where it was one pixel away from supporting an infinite target.

More recently was Apple's addition of "reachability" which is an incredible kludge.

Apple and Google may have usability research, but that is nothing compared to the deep research done at Xerox Parc. I recall seeing studies on the D* machines which measured the efficiency of several text editors, broken down by select, cut, paste, etc. Xerox first tested and measured alternatives before deciding on the best one.

At the first WWDC for the iPhone (2007?), I went a design lab to review our first app. The designer suggest I put navigation at the top, out of reach. I asked him "What about Fitt's Law?" His reply was "who's that?"

> I’m skeptical you’ll find particularly easy to achieve

I agree; this is incredibly hard to achieve. It involves integrating several moving parts, leveraging: TPUs, crypto, and negotiating with OEMs like Apple. I believe the payoff is worth it.

Have been discussing with a visually impaired friend how to rethink Accessibility. Over the last 20 years, I've seen him use Accessibility on Windows and then moving over to the Mac and finally the iPhone. The main problem is that VoiceOver is a speech+touch interface slapped onto a visual+touch interface. So, roughly 1/3rd speed. Moreover, 3rd party developers need to label elements, which they rarely do.

I remember walking out of an Accessibility meetup at SalesForce waiting for a ride and seeing an attendee struggling with hailing an Uber. She was an experienced user but still struggling with her new iPhone. It had a larger screen, so all her muscle memory was foiled; the buttons had shifted.

So, my friend and I are looking into rethinking the interface starting with 1st principles, like Fitt's Law. My guess is maybe a 9X improvement for visually impaired and 3X for folks with regular vision. Reserved the name touch.ai for that purpose.

I once wrote an l-system to generate class trees to explore where the next version of Turbo Pascal 5.5 would break. It was inspired by this book.

I wonder how you'd write a deep net with one?

Dunno. The cost of mining approaches market price. The hypothesis is: will the inverse be true?

Ironically, lowering the cost of mining may also lower the value of the asset.

Interesting idea. Dividing England into 3m^2 blocks requires about 34 bits of address space. But, then again, given the propensity of surveillance, just say "hey, this is <your name here> coming home from work" -- should be enough clues to let Big Brother figure it out. CCTV is your friend.

I wrote a hypertext system in Turbo Pascal - this was before NCSA Mosaic. What sold me was that it was one of the first IDEs. A friend mentioned that, when the compiler found an error, it would bring up the editor and position you at the error. This was huge! Plus, it selling for maybe 1/10th the price of other compilers.

A shift in perspective for BTC is underway, from transaction platform (Yellen on the Con side) to a trans-national asset class (Saylor & Musk on the Pro side). So, now the discussion is on the energy spent on mining: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencewintermeyer/2021/03/10/...

IMO, currency is a belief system backed by Joules.

Live music exceeds the revenue of the top 2 music publishers, Universal and Sony, as per: http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-b...

[Addendum] For a perspective on independent musicians, here's Steve Albini: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-...

Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project.

IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.

Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.

And yet here we are. It appears that all roads lead to hacker news.

> "Four Yorkshiremen"

Zero computers? Ok, you win.

This is a later version of our computer https://youtu.be/NtAF-WfWyGU

To load the OS, you first had to hand key in a bootstrap loader in octal (base 8) on the front panel. The loader would then read the OS from paper tape into magnetic core.

Our computer was a PDP-8/i. Someone mentioned that the PDP-8/i was about as powerful as a Raspberry Pi. So, imagine a half dozen schools timesharing a Raspberry Pi.

Currently, I'm writing for the Apple Watch, which is more powerful than a Cray-2 -- a supercomputer that cost $16 Million in 1984.

I was lucky. Our high school system shared a DEC PDP-8. This was in 1974. Each year, Digital equipment would publish a manual. Some years were better than others. Somewhat like a vintage wine. The choice of languages for the PDP-8 were Basic, Fortran, and Focal. It also had a user group called Decus, which shared code - somewhat akin to GitHub. But, I didn't use much of that code, as it usually meant hand entering the source into a teletype. The storage medium was paper tape.

An alternative to the PDP-8 was the one class in writing Cobol on a mainframe. You had to hand write code on a huge ledger sheet, translate that into punched cards, submit a job, and wait a couple days for the result. Most of my coder buddies thought that was a joke.

Instead we stuck with PDP-8. Because the computer was shared by several schools, there was a huge inter-school rivalry. We would hack accounts, and write incendiary messages in the other school's directory, which could only be erased by writing assembly code.

When I went to university, the first computer science courses still used punched cards. The classes were incredibly boring: with PL-1 examples of how to move pieces around a chess board. No AI. In high school, we were already writing chess player programs, multi-user star wars, compression, social engineering, and infinite precision math packages.

So, I was a bit judgmental about the quality of the University courses and missed out on some important lessons. My first language was Basic. So, my code was a meandering mess of spaghetti. It took a years to unlearn that self-inflicted pedagogical brain damage.

Now, with SO + Git, coding feels like assembling flat-packed Ikea furniture.

[UPDATE] grammar

> ... sucralose

Funny how that information buried on the site. I've re-ordered a few times based on its (prominently featured) use of Isomaltulose, thinking that is where the sweetness came from. Some evidence that sucralose will spike insulin. Seems to jibe with personal experience. Will probably hold off until they eliminate sucralose. Perhaps trehalose?

For eduction I put down "Various" - that seemed to work.

That was a joke. Some people would laugh. Others down vote.

Maybe car tunnels are a gateway to terraforming small moons.

So, LIDAR is best solution for an autonomous vehicle when it is not moving?

Put obliquely: I suspect that Washington or California would have yielded better outcomes.

A friend grew an engineering company in Oregon from 200 employees to > 1000 employees. He took the company public and is an industry standard. His reward: getting charged with not following the letter of the law. He spent most of his life savings fighting back.

Moral: do business in a different state.

A friend sold a company to a Dot Com for stock at its peak. S/he factored the strike price. During the waiting period, the stock tanked. So, s/he got significantly more than what the stock was worth.

I wonder if a variation of cut-and-choose would work? Choose your own timeframe. 5 years, 17 year, whatever makes sense to release the escrow.

Lets say the USPTO uses Deep Learning to discover prior art and/or result disputes. A shorter time frame may be less risky for the inventor. After the escrow is released, there is no recourse for the licensee.

> Would this drive to more or larger IP holding firms (One of the complaints of Trolls is they don't actually make anything)?

Perhaps a variation on "Petition to Make Special" ?? We used this to expedite a patent application. The premise is that you need a patent in order to secure financing to build the product. And it was factored into our Series A and B. Downside, is that if you don't use it, you lose it. Am lucky that none of my patents have been used by Trolls.

> people creating the "inventions" patents are tied to probably getting a worse deal then they are now as there is a 17 year wait for "payday".

I wonder how many pure inventors there are versus makers? We made a product. I was a co-founder that assigned my inventions to the company.

When I first got into this, I read that the Government incentive behind patents is to increase US commerce. So, the question is: do Trolls increase or decrease US commerce? (Or any other nation state, for that matter).

Unfortunately, litigation is a part of US commerce. Plus, laws are made by lawyers. So, the modest proposal was somewhat cynical. Restated: how to offer up an opportunity for lawyers to sue trolls? Hopefully, while making it easier for small startups to make stuff.

Modest proposal: put all patent license fees into a 17 year escrow. Fees returned if patent overturned. Publish a list of patent #'s and escrow amounts. Allow for class action suits to represent the licensees. Sever and nullify any clauses in existing agreements that would prevent a licensee from participating in a class action suit. IANAL; merely a defensive patent holder.

User surly UX. Was going to book an impromptu multi-legged trip between San Francisco, Iowa and Arizona.

American Airlines quoted a price, but the only available seats cost (around) $33 - $58 extra for each flight -- total was $200 extra. Bait and switch? So, I switched to Delta.

But Delta's antique web design wouldn't allow a change. So, I attempted to talk to a Human. Voice menu was a bit schizoid: transitioning from voice to a touch-only menu. Love the response: "your selection was invalid" Who designs these things? A Lost in Space fan? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwOJlOI1nU

Then I get to the part where it says: "You may choose to have us call you back ... or stay on hold ... wait time is over 3 hours". So, I cancelled.

I had the same attitude. What changed my mind were two documentaries: 1) Pandora's promise 2) Thorium remix

My last company was a acquired by a company based in California. Under CA law, you are entitled to your own IP if done on your own equipment. So, I had a separate laptop. The employment agreement had a clause where you were to list all of the IP that you had owned. But, it was ambiguous about whether I was retaining ownership or turning it over to the new company. So, I asked their legal: am I listing what's mine or what's yours? The reply was an ambiguous "yes". I quit after 1 day. A colleague, with the same issue lasted for a month.

Yes, I noticed my friend using voiceover in situations that would normally warrant silent operation. White cane allows him some slack. Am attempting a universal product. So, a two part workaround:

1) use voiceover when headphones are connected

2) use tapic engine for clues about marked events

This year, pervasive Bluetooth headsets make 1) a lot more viable.

Because sighted users may use headsets a bit less, have also included graphic cues.

"VUI" - first time I've heard of a VUI. Like it.

I'm developing a productivity app on an Apple WatchOS3, using STT, TTS, and taptic engine. Turns out that applying the same limited interaction area on the iPhone eliminates the need for "reachability".

How about you?

A friend is blind. The iPhone+voiceover is his primary means of conducting business. We've often talked about UX. Here's what I've learned:

Voiceover is currently an extra layer over a visual interface. So, it amplifies the gesture cost of a visual+touch UI.

After writing a NLP interface for a productivity app, I learned that most of the verbal interaction took less time the visual alternative. It didn't matter if you were sighted or blind. Fitt's law meant that navigating a visual+touch UI was too slow.

So, I'm now working on a verbal+touch UI. In that regard, voiceover users are power users.

I used Antlr v3 to create a NLP parser for calendar events for iOS and Android. It took longer than expected. iOS + C runtime was opaque, so had to write a tool for debugging. Android + Java runtime overran memory, so had to break into separate grammars. Of course, NLP is not a natural fit. Don't know what problems are fixed by v4.

> The most obvious is the lack of recursion: you can’t find a (regular) expression inside another one ...

PCRE has some recursion. Here is an example for parsing anything between { }, with counting of inner brackets:

'(?>\{(?:[^{}]|(?R))\})|\w+'

A C++11 constexpr can make hand coded parsers a lot more readible, allowing token names in case statements. For example , search on "str2int" in the following island parser: https://github.com/musesum/par