thingification

Would you care to compare this with for example @localfirst/state, automerge and automerge-rs (latter two provide the CRDTs, i.e. similar to Yjs)?

https://github.com/local-first-web/state

https://github.com/automerge/automerge

https://github.com/automerge/automerge-rs

By the way despite that particular repo (@localfirst/state) last being touched 6 months ago, Herb Caudill definitely seems still active in this space (I believe he's been working on other parts of this more recently -- e.g. ideas about authentication), and I think automerge development itself (Martin Kleppmann) is quite active right now leading up to a 1.0 release which seems fairly imminent, for which a lot of fundamental work has been done, also coordinating with automerge-rs.

The kernel OOM killer just isn't designed for desktop at all, it seems like. Back when I didn't have a ridiculous amount of RAM, I used this instead and was happy with it:

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

The boot thing you mention always seemed a very odd default to me. It doesn't happen to me any more on my work ubuntu machine, but maybe I configured something to fix that and forgot about it.

I use emacs to take notes, yes. I haven't seen any other tool that has similar features for that purpose.

But more to the point, I don't want to have to justify every tiny aspect of my development environment. Does gitpod provide a way out of that sort of authoritarian system?

> For taking notes I use the iPadOS15 notes feature by swiping from the bottom right hand hot corner.

Honest question: what does swiping have to do with how to not have all my personal notes in the cloud?

Hm, I think perhaps you're saying one can keep notes that are not in the dev environment at all? Of course that's true, but I'm incredibly accustomed to working entirely in a heavily customized emacs, switching between org-mode buffers and code. Sometimes that's via org links to specific tiny fragments of code content (a link to e.g. a filename + the text "def my_function(" will take me right there even if the code changes a bit).

Fundamentally according to what theory?

https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-even...

How does this work when I want to take personal notes on source code, not push them anywhere? For those who'd ask why anybody would want or should be allowed such a thing: There's little distinction to me between thoughts in my head and notes in a file on disk, fundamentally and practically. I don't think it's a good thing to push all my thoughts that happen to be on disk to the cloud.

Or mount my local emacs configuration, which I sometimes tweak and currently just save to disk and carry on with my work (I'm not asking how to run emacs in gitpod, I know there was some work on that)?

Am I out of luck, gitpod/insurer/employer knows best? Or are there ways provided accessible to individual developers to 1. do arbitrary customization and 2. "mount" writeable directories from a laptop filesystem (or something similar)?

> support negative means

What do you mean by this?

> different people have different abstract representations of ... abstract ideas

I'm not sure I've ever thought about this in precisely these terms. Thanks

https://github.com/thierry-martinez/pyml -- 2 days ago

Not sure when you tried it, but as a newcomer I have the impression packaging has got a lot better in the past few years.

I didn't have the experience you described (not yet anyway!).

> I think another important point is that the compiler is a fork of the OCaml compiler. That means that to contribute/maintain the compiler, you need to know OCaml. This is probably going to stay this way for a very long time, since the speed of the compiler is important.

Important to the maintainers, absolutely -- but not directly important to users of course: it's firmly the goal that you don't need to know any OCaml to use ReScript (and I think it's mostly true by now).

> What's not helping is that the people around Reason never really said "it's dead, move on to OCaml or Rescript". The pages for things like Reason Native, Esy, ReasonML are still up.

I assume they'd say they're not dead. I think Jord Walke, for example, didn't want to break his commitment to existing users using it for native projects, so put in effort to help people switch to a JSOO-based Reason (I haven't followed that story, so not sure how that turned out). I think that's good behaviour.

They certainly have a far smaller community than before though, because most people went to either ReScript or OCaml, or kept a foot in both communities for different uses (and no doubt some left entirely).

> Frontend there is that ReasonML/Reason/ReScript thing that Facebook it trying to do. It offers an alternative syntax but nearly nobody uses it because they changed the name and I think also the syntax three times already. So it is all a mess.

"Nobody" uses ReasonML / Reason.

Plenty of people use ReScript.

I wasn't a big fan of the ReScript split, but I think by now it's unfair to speak of these as if they're one community with a confusing story. I think it's very fair to say it's now two separate communities: ReScript and OCaml. It was very confusing for a while, but by now it actually is much easier to understand than before the ReScript split:

ReScript is really its own language now. The compiler for that language just happens to still understand OCaml syntax, for now. The ReScript language and community is focused on the JS ecosystem, with readable JS output.

OCaml has js_of_ocaml. JSOO compiles OCaml to JS, so it's focused on the OCaml ecosystem. The JS output is not readable but you can build "any" OCaml program.

Really that's the main story -- not so hard to grasp?

There is also melange, but that's a relatively new effort in the OCaml community (attracting OCaml-y refugees from ReScript) whose status I haven't formed a view on yet. The idea is to compile OCaml programs to readable JS. Reason used to do that, but Reason now only has a tiny community (and I believe it now uses JSOO?). ReScript still does that, but using it for that purpose is no longer supported.

> I don't think there's a way out any more.

Whenever you estimate something bad to be inevitable like this, please consider the many terrible inevitable things in the past. Those in the past thought they were inevitable, but they weren't.

- everyday violence on a much higher level than today

- inability to correct mistakes of government in the long run (voting, free speech)

- lack of power of women

- vulnerability to many diseases

- protection of law

I think any one of these is composed of many traditions that when I think about them seem almost impossible to come about, in the same way that an evolved animal seems remarkable: how did that ever happen? They do happen! People worked hard and incrementally to make them happen.

Estimating them to be inevitable I think can be a discouragement to that hard work.

Only if we let them.

There are all kinds of feedback cycles going on. Neither of these two are rational:

1. There are no ways to correct the problem you describe

2. The problem will correct itself without individuals and institutions making it happen

The risk of long COVID sticking around in immiserating form long-term once you have it is unknown, but the risk of getting long COVID (defined along the lines of at least a few COVID symptoms sticking around for a few months) is much higher than the risk of death from Flu (starting from the assumption of not yet having caught either in a given year). I hesitate to post anything here on this subject that's not carefully worked out, so all I'll say is my personal back-of-the-envelope order of magitude calculation based on public data, comparing with other per-year risks such as cancer, didn't give me any confidence at all.

One point is that the consequences of getting COVID are likely to become less serious over time as prevalence is controlled (via better vaccines, we hope, masks etc., if we're not fatalistic), better drugs are found.

Another important point is that currently, the risks of long COVID seem not at all well understood. "Unknown risk" is quite a different thing than "low risk" or "high risk". The lengths to which it makes sense for people to go to avoid it right now depend on those risks, so lying low seems quite sane to me.

A worse problem still is, I think, that "we're all going to get it" is a self-fulfilling prophecy: viruses have been unconquerable in the recent past, but this is 2021, we have incredible understanding of the mechanisms (no, not most of the details: they're not all worth knowing) that should give us incredible power over them at some point in the relatively near future (as in the next few decades). If the next few decades, why not the next few years? If we believe it's "inevitable", we'll make it so. (not to mention abandoning effective measures like masks)

Curious why the downvote?

Perhaps because "always worried me more than the risk of death"? If so: this is because the evidence always seems to have said that the risk of long COVID has been at least an order of magnitude higher than the risk of death. Also, if you have no dependents, death involves less suffering: in the unlikely event it happens, you're out of the picture already after a short period of misery. On the other hand, chronic illness can come with a lifetime of suffering.

Long COVID exists. Personally, it's always worried me more than the risk of death from COVID.

I think people who haven't had a chronic condition (including doctors) tend to underestimate the impact they can have on your life. Long COVID symptoms may not be "severe" or "serious" in a medical coding dictionary, but those terms in a medical dictionary are quite distinct from their everyday meanings.

The best evidence we have seems to be that somewhere very roughly around 20% of people who get infected (vaccinated or not) get it -- more if you're older, less if you're younger. Experts don't seem to be willing to say much about what fraction of those people will have symptoms forever, or to what extent (very happy to hear otherwise if somebody knows better!).

While case numbers are high again (in the UK) and with the more infectious and virulent Delta variant having replaced others, it's not totally clear to me that the risks from long COVID are even all that much changed since before the vaccines.

Starting: often true (or at least a big part of it).

But how to change your ways so you do start, more reliably? I think there are ideas that are more effective than the message "just do it" (sorry if that mischaracterizes your position -- in fact I agree "commit to 10 minutes" is not a bad place to start, but not the only useful idea to be had by a long way).

In this general area of focus/productivity etc, I'm not sure procrastination is a big problem for me these days. But I'm by nature a procrastinator, and in the past I've found occasional small tweaks so unreasonably useful in this sort of area that I'll definitely have a look at the free stuff (tonight! no really). The picture with the frowns turning into numbered points made me smile.

Time for this again: https://xkcd.com/463/

What's the alternative?

http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/

for example (outdated but shows the principle): http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~seaborn/plash/html/

"your friends can assign to you their own nickname for you" is "petnames":

http://skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html

Quote:

Though no single name can have all three properties, the petname system does indeed embody all three properties.

Can somebody who has worked in this industry of user tracking/advertising please explain why this is still considered a technical issue as opposed to one about law/politics/social expectations/ideas, etc.? It seems that it is hard to technically prevent tracking because of things like browser and behavioural fingerprinting.

I don't intend to suggest that technical things are completely irrelevant: I'm simplifying drastically (for example, I have faith that providing software that makes decentralisation easier, and does security better will help the problem as I see it). But from my quick scan of the proposed changes from Google, I'm curious why the trackers won't just switch tactics to the next easiest thing? Don't they already do that for people who block third party cookies in fact?

I hope that to current Google employees "Don't be evil" does not entail damaging traditions of criticism, either inside or outside the company.

I think David Deutsch argued somewhere that damaging traditions of criticism is the thing most deserving of the word "evil" that he could think of (because all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and all knowledge is created by conjecture and criticism, if you go along with Popper's epistemology).

> There is nothing to report until there is an experiment that people can hold up saying "see! we found it! This part is deterministic not probabilistic!".

To add a bit more on top of my earlier comment: I believe Deutsch would point out that all experiments that have ever been done do corroborate the determinism of quantum phenomena. Experimental tests are only ever understood in terms of theory, and quantum theory, which Deutsch identifies with the many worlds "interpretation", says that the world evolves according to Schrodinger's equation. Other "interpretations" of quantum theory are actually rival theories that fall at the first hurdle of being worse theories. To Deutsch, a bad theory is one that is easy to vary -- in this case, for example, the "Copenhagen interpretation" says that QM -- i.e. Schrodinger's equation -- is true, except when you measure something -- and then it says that you're not allowed to ask what that means. Why not? You're just not, OK?

This may sound like sophistry, but it isn't. Consider a closely analogous case:

Denying that experimental tests of QM have corroborated that theory -- which is a deterministic theory -- is like saying that dinosaur bones are not evidence of dinosaurs because none of the experimental tests distinguish the theory that dinosaurs really existed from the one that says that God put the bones there: true, but that theory is ruled out because it's a bad explanation (easy to vary: why God, for example?).

From memory of listening to this a few times some time ago (caveat: I certainly didn't study the content of this video carefully, but I do understand some significant context of his work as he sees it reasonably well I think):

Deutsch here isn't trying to modify quantum mechanics, he's trying to "interpret" it. He wouldn't use the term "interpret" of course, for excellent and fascinating reasons that I can't quickly cram into an HN post, but you can find them in his book The Beginning of Infinity (I was convinced about this area of what he says in the book, not about everything else he says there -- there's a LOT of stuff in there!).

By the way, I don't know whether or not you meant to imply that Deutsch is not a physicist, but he is -- and well known for his work on the fundamentals of quantum physics.

Summary of the history on that here:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/embrace-extend-extinguish-how-...

They use the "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" line that apparently came out of internal MS emails, but as they say, not quite the same in the Google Reader case: no intent to extinguish presumably -- but the same effect.

I'm not sure I'd have put this quite as emphatically as you, but there's a very important point here about the principle of free speech as compared with government suppression of speech.

While nodding towards quite real problems involving, let's say for example vaccines, I don't think any of that troubles the principle of free speech in the slightest. Practically applying it is difficult and as error-prone as is anything else, but the principle is enlightening in that task.

There does exist a principle of free speech that is not the same thing as the various legal principles, constitutional rules, laws, or rules of thumb that say government suppression of speech is worse than other kinds. Crucially important though those have been, it's still true that suppression of speech itself is uniquely bad: Fundamentally, knowledge is not infallible, all problems are caused by lack of knowledge, and speech is the means of correcting all other mistakes. Practically, we find it all too easy to socially suppress good ideas. It's hard to see the true extent of that because it's impossible to see the upside that hasn't happened as a result of that suppression.

I hardly need to refer explicitly to some of the specific ideas of the not-distant past about social control that we have since learned, though they were certainly obviously good, were not good.

Practically, it's hard to escape the idea that taking seriously the millennia-long stream of historical failures of ideas -- and their replacement with better ones -- does entail treating ideas that are obviously wrong with considerably more flexibility and humility than is tempting.

I recommend David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity to shake up anybody's ideas about this, no matter where you start from.

> I wonder if this can be addressed for now at the application level, on top of automerge?

On reflection, I think the answer to this is very likely "no". I had in mind storing the deltas in a log-structured database -- which I believe is what hypermerge does -- and detecting invalidity at application level and then rolling back to old log records in case of trouble -- but of course that doesn't help with losing sync, or effective loss of data from rolling back or corruption that leaves the data valid, and it's just not very practical.

So, even though I suspect the problems in practice are rare (Martin's clearly a very able programmer), I guess that until he gets around to the integrity work he has in mind, it's limited to apps where the data is very transient for now. Those do exist: say, off the top of my head, a tool for collaborating on sketching simple diagrams -- in fact their pixelpusher demo is quite similar to that idea! I think he's currently focusing on performance improvements.

Hope to see it grow into that!

An interesting approach: https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Academic project, but from an experienced implementer. Though there are things missing, I suspect for some applications this might be usable already. The "Caveats" section seems like it may be needlessly scary:

> No integrity checking: if a buggy (or malicious) device makes corrupted edits, it can cause the application state on other devices to become corrupted or go out of sync.

I wonder if this can be addressed for now at the application level, on top of automerge?

> No security: there is currently no encryption, authentication, or access control.

This puzzles me: why would a data structure have encryption, authentication, or access control? Perhaps this refers specifically to Automerge.Connection? But I assume any gossip protocol could be substituted fairly straightforwardly?

Otherwise I can only presume that by this he's just saying that the TRVE research program is incomplete -- but as far as I know, almost no software meets that sort of high standard!

Also, it doesn't mention in that section that currently automerge never truncates data. That's a constraint I believe Kleppmann would like to relax in the future.

If we know that corruption varies a lot between states (as in countries) and, worldwide, has reduced over time, why would we think it's inevitable?

I see a lot of estimating-as-inevitable in many problem areas - for example: the environment, race and sex relations, security / "privacy". I'm not sure whether it has increased, or I'm just more aware of it these days.

When we think that a problem is inevitable, we may conclude that various reponses that otherwise have little to recommend them might be a good thing: populisms, zero-sum thinking, authoritarianism, radical transparency. This idea of inevitability is in conflict with optimism in David Deutsch's sense: optimism as the principle that all problems are caused by lack of knowledge (and therefore that all problems are either solvable, or truly inevitable because of some law of physics - no examples of the latter being known).