anateus

An easter egg of sorts is that the agents get a chat channel that they mostly use to complain about bugs in the tools and prompt system, sometimes very dramatically: https://playground.opennotes.ai/simulations/019d0311-f155-79...

I use rtings.com as base and triangulate with Consumer Reports and Wirecutter, and looks like I'm not the only one.

If you're interested to hear what both Middle English and bits of French and other languages from the time sounded like, here's a reading of John Skelton's "Speke Parott" poem from 1521: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCckcTHWqKw

It's a very learned parrot!

This page links to a physically unremarkable Soviet slide rule used for calculating things like the volumetric flow rate in irrigation canals used in Uzbek SSR for growing cotton, their primary cash crop [1].

Unfortunately, there are no scales on it for "evaporation" and "shitty construction", or the Aral Sea[2] might still be there.

[1] https://osgalleries.org/collectors/davis/info_and_image.cgi?...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

Was hoping a message like this would be more prominent here.

Although the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets come from the same area, they are discontinuous. However, the ordering being roughly the same, and following an earlier Egyptian ordering, is the big hint that they share at least inspirational descent from the same source.

Why that area of Lebanon? Byblos has been an Egyptian colony in that region for a very long time (~4600 years ago), ensuring continuous scribal presence. Scribes of that region are noted for intense multi-lingualism (as perusal of Ugaritic tablets is evidence of), so cross-pollination of scripts makes a lot of sense.

I haven't read through Goldwassers papers, but a lot of what they quote in the article seems to be unnecessary to explain the transmission of the abjad.

If you define "containment" as "provable non-harm" then sure. But there are essentially no complex physical systems that we can put such computational bounds on. Since "harm" comes in some form of physical actuation, I would argue that we can only ever get to something like the sort of confidence we can have that a particular manufactured part would succeed under load. The map is not the territory, and any computation that does not include computing the whole universe is necessarily but a map.

Seven Years' War would beg to differ :)

A huge portion of the "Herbert never explain/explores X" issues that the author of this post has are addressed in the subsequent books... It's like going "Well, we're only going to watch A New Hope for this review of Star Wars, and Lucas never explains who Darth Vader is!"

Useful to keep in mind that wheels confined to toys was due some combination of a lack of animals that are good at pulling (llamas aren't great as that) and metal use being primarily confined to decorative purposes (so durable axles unlikely) :)

This immediately made me think of the C2 Wiki. It has a style similar to Taaalk in the sense that entries are often a mix of conversation and "exposition". It allows for that sort of linking by being a ("the") wiki. Perhaps that's a good model? A wiki where authors are visually marked as on Taaalk but otherwise all the accouterments of a wiki.

The not-quite-vaporware C2 followup implements some aspect of what you're describing via a sort of columnar layout.

Better horses than people, as was the case in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlak

Inspiring a famous painting by Repin and The Song of the Volga Boatmen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNb54rwDQJM

I made a proof of concept chrome extension a bit ago: https://github.com/anateus/amphisonic

Currently re-writing it to be actually decent code. Basically, it takes up streams on the page and arranges speakers in a semi-circle in front of you, letting you adjust the radius (I've found for particular numbers of speakers there's an optimal radius for speaker separation).

Related: Onfim is a 13th century Novgorodian kid whose writing exercises and drawings survived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim

I love these windows into the past. Student exercises also help preserve a lot of cuneiform writings as semi-standardized exercise texts can then be found in fragments all over Mesopotamia. Here's an example of such a thing from Sumeria around 4000 years ago, involving a kid being made to go to school, being late, being punished, and admonished to study diligently: http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/primary-sources/408

Folks who enjoyed this may appreciate Simon Winchester's recent book The Perfectionists, where he covers this method amongst other things. Core to the idea of perfection are machine tools, what we in software often refer to as a toolchain. The way the toolchain revolution allowed us to go from intricate one off clockwork to reliable longitude measurement, better locks, and industrialized machinery parallels compilers, operation systems, etc.

Here's video on this by Cook's Illustrated editor in chief Dan Souza. It goes a little bit into the science behind the technique and offers a microwave-based variation:

"How to Transform Flour and Water into the Fluffiest Dinner Rolls| What's Eating Dan?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2GWOHcEBcM

There are a lot of interesting societal effects caused by the internet and social media, many of them very problematic. But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.

Neal Stephenson had a hand in sparking my interest in cuneiform and I've read many tablets myself (mostly Ugaritic and some Akkadian). The same effects are evident all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and likely predate it. The Miasma is the result of any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities. There is a certain scale and swiftness that is novel, but it's not yet a brand new thing: much as flash crashes on the stock market are a new side-effect of high frequency trading, the crash of 1929 happened just fine without it.

The Miasma is us, not the tech we use to connect us.

The encrypted file can be bigger than the decrypted version for a bunch of different reasons, that's like what's going on here.

Looking at that list, the biggest threat to Uber is good (and not overcrowded) public transportation.

They identify themselves as an Amazon affiliate pretty clearly on the bottom of the page, but I guess they don't know the rule forbidding redirection/shortening :/

The Ltd or LLC after many company names refer to the Limited Liability that those forms of companies confer, that protect individuals within them from personal liability. Corporations were intentionally a lot like people even before Citizens United. There's also a concept called Piercing the Corporate Veil that is intended specifically for penetrating through these legal protections in certain cases.

Seaborn has a colorblind-specific color palette: https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#qual...

Although the French Revolution started the first concerted effort at suppression, L’Academie Francaise was created over 100 years earlier by Richelieu. I feel like the only reason the monarchy didn't impose its edicts is that they just didn't care about the common people that much one way or the other :)

Principal Component Analysis

When those words first became common the people for whom they are painful were not as plentiful in the field. The painful meaning of those words far predates the existence of computers.

The lack of foresight of the coiners is not an excuse for current callousness.

It may be absent, but tests on food prep surfaces show wood performs surprisingly well. Better than plastic.

And is a YC founder (post-books)

I remember that scene, and I remember in my own childhood reading a similar scene in an Efremov novel (Andromeda or its sequels I can't recall which).

I appreciate the visualizations, but the explanatory approaches follow the same ones I've seen in basically every textbook. The following particularly epitomizes that: "...it is worth defining what a subspace is in terms of its formal properties, then what it is in laymans terms, then the visual definition, showing why it is that those properties need to be satisfied."

Why not... show it visually, manipulate it visually, explain in layman's terms and THEN explain the formal properties? That is the approach 3Blue1Brown takes to great success.

So, definitely useful renderings, but I'm not sure it's any more "intuitive"* than the mainstream approaches.

* In quotes to indicate that there is quite a bit of subjectivity in that term.

The way I've described scuttlebutt to folks is that it's "what if Facebook felt like Usenet in the 90s".

It looks like a bacteria of some sort without a flaggelum, maybe gram positive.

If I had to bet, I'd bet on some kind of lactobacillus :)