dvanduzer

Why do you think understanding math requires hard work?

Hail Eris

We must act now, and let the billionaire class play the Most Dangerous Game. It's our only chance of survival!

$ whois a1.6z.com

I intended that as a reference to an XKCD strip[0]. Folks often talk about public goods like scientific research, as if the "real stuff" couldn't possibly happen without private investment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[0] https://xkcd.com/2102/

(arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title. both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)

I found Spinoza and Wittgenstein comprehensible. I've found many other philosophers not so. My comment is not satire.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus is one of the most accessible pieces of philosophy ever written. I recommend it.

For an even more accessible view into Russell and Wittgenstein, and well, life the universe and everything: logicomix.com

On what basis can you compare a writer/editor from GMG with the private equity group that purchased his employer?

Are you saying that we can't trust his motives and competence, because he was fired?

Barstool is referenced more than once in the piece, but not directly by name. Deadspin did not fail, it was murdered.

And I know you aren't saying it directly, but this really shouldn't be about The Left and The Right. The problem is about punching up versus punching down.

A crawler has two high level options: parse the page, or render the page.

Most of our parser-based crawling is done by Heritrix (crawler.archive.org) and most of our render-based crawling is done by a proxy-based recorder similar to what you theorize (https://github.com/internetarchive/brozzler).

A five minute outage of the point-of-sale system during the lunch rush can easily cost even the smallest of restaurants several hundred dollars.

True, most websites do not have this problem, because most websites do not drive revenue like that. There are plenty of use cases where you need five nines, but only within limited not-24/7 time windows.

Website: Help me relate this to the Web of Trust

Yes, that is the core thesis of the article.

For the last 30 years, that tiny fraction (0.1%, correcting what I assume was a typo/misread) has seen their overall share grow.

Thirty years ago, that 90% possessed 35% of the wealth. Today, that 90% possesses 20% of the wealth.

The 9.9% near (but not at) the top has maintained their wealth over the last 30 years.

The culture problems of this tier of American society may not be as obvious to you, but I assure you, the answer to your question is yes.

Was the lesson that there's a fortune to be made in software maintenance?

Overall crime rate in the US (everywhere?) has decreased since the 1970s or so. There is speculation it had to do with lead paint.

There has not been a single "mass shooting" in Australia since the gun ban. In the US, mass shootings decreased after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, and then increased after it expired 2004.

I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS. Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable" specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing when talking about SaaS.

In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model... Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.

I recommend this recent nested Twitter ("new crowd") thread amongst Stewart Butterfield and many other early web folk, about whether Slack is a web app: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/961704310613491712

Indeed, Federation was only a part of their Enterprise offering. :rimshot: It is only Slack-to-Slack, so it is not interoperable in that way. Shared channels are a thing now too, and danged if I can keep up with all the new bells and whistles.

Slack is very much an organizational groupware product, with chat done well. Not the utopia federated XMPP promises, but frankly, XML just needs to die. (Which, not coincidentally, is part of what attracted me to work on the telehash specification.)

Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an acquisition target for those companies.

edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones, WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.

AOL bought them. Slow burn.

Slack has the saving grace of optionally supporting an XMPP gateway, for those still committed to that dream. For now.

(I sincerely hope this comment isn't too prescient.)

The article says it's about shopping experience, but I would be surprised if they aren't also looking at warehouse logistics. Put the clipboard into a HUD, etc.

Some societies seem to focus more on individual success than community survival.

I want to live in a society that is obsessed with creating a future where every member can thrive. Canada seems to be working a little harder at this than the United States, but both countries still have frontier culture heavily baked in.

You're not generally wrong about tone. But:

He has stressed, for over half a century, the importance of the treatment and access of information, which turns out to be the top priority of the human race in the contemporary sphere.

Jason was being as polite as he could to someone coming after Ted. It's not unreasonable to emphasize. More politely: Please catch up.

I would love to see more of the interview, with however much polish you feel appropriate!

I will mildly argue the case for posting raw footage with a link I posted elsewhere, the raw footage of an interview with him almost 30 years ago: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_4D37F2D8E1054BA49999027B...

Not every interview situation works this way, but I very much appreciated that behind the scenes look. Sound bites that can seem incredibly arrogant come off a lot more measured in the context of him repeating some things he's said before, and deciding he'd rather emphasize a different aspect.

I wouldn't make this argument generally; it's a journalist's job to not just let a subject present their own views unchallenged. In that 1990 interview, I enjoyed hearing some of the back-and-forth like when the interviewer wanted Ted to sound less like an advertisement at one point.

Hmm, HyperCard in the same list as Zope and node? Interesting. :-)

The idea that JavaScript "won" is a little controversial to me. I think it's huge and important, but the world is still changing. Embedded Python goes places that Node still can't. I absolutely see the value you describe in sticking to one ecosystem, but I don't think JavaScript/TypeScript/Node is the only way to get those benefits. (See also: Transcrypt) I really enjoyed the PyCon 2014 talk on the general subject: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

The most recent conversation I had with Ted was after someone had just demonstrated the HoloLens for him and a few others. Ted had some feedback for the UI developer, and it didn't have anything to do with JavaScript or that level of implementation detail at all. It was all about the user experience. I don't want to put words into his mouth, but like he says in this recent interview, this is all hard to talk about because it really has changed so quickly.

I do think you're right that a lot of what Ted wanted to see could be implemented today in JavaScript and Git. But I think about the technical meat of that vision to be about data-driven interfaces. I am simply not old enough to really understand how notions of "scripting" changed between the 60s and the 80s. But the fact that Xanadu was started in SmallTalk suggests to me that scripting was part of the vision, even if a notion like "browser extensions" might not have been in mind.

Completely agree that there are other voices to learn from, and other important mistakes that have been made since Xanadu! (I think Ted would agree, too.)

I don't think Don meant that JS was the critical success factor for the Web. But that extensible scripting is crucial to the kind of Web Ted Nelson wanted in the first place.

From my lived experience, the Web craze would be better termed the Modem craze. And the critical success factor that turned it into the Web, was NSF removing the restrictions on commerce in 1995.

JavaScript is just what got HTML closer to some ideals of Xanadu. Not close enough for Ted's vision, but that is a broad sociopolitical vision.

Your preface to the UserLand thread was fantastic. "We haven't even INVENTED twitter yet, but I promise y'all will ENJOY the hell out of this series of comments-with-character-limits, but you're gonna do it IRONICALLY."

It's been about a year since I talked to Ted Nelson, and I suspect the talk you saw at Almaden would've been close to the height of his bitterness about HTTP. He also speaks frankly about the deeper aspect of his bitterness, retrospecting on the 70s back in 1990:

http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_4D37F2D8E1054BA49999027B...

I am curious about your current assessment that he refuses to collaborate with other people. Obviously he worked with other people to get Xanadu to where it got. And I don't have enough inside knowledge about the competitive strategy of Netscape or other commercial hypertext vendors, but I'm sure there was a lot more going on around the open sourcing decision. At least with nearly 20 years of hindsight since the open sourcing, he seems perfectly clear-eyed about the failure of the Xanadu project.

I would love to hear that postmortem more than I want to read the released code, too. But when I asked him about it, Ted just seemed a lot more interested in talking about the good ideas from Xanadu. Sure, he strikes me as a little grumpy, but I don't know anyone my age or older that isn't a little bit grumpy about computing. After I watched that WGBH interview, I developed an enormous amount of empathy for the fact that he had to live through the 70s.

As long as a person doesn't pretend they've never been cruel to another person, it isn't hypocritical to call for more kindness. There is also a huge difference between using salty language to emphasize when something is massively complicated versus emphasis when calling someone a huge idiot.

As far as this particular Torvalds screed goes, it strikes me as measured for him. He is very clear about what he wants more of and what he wants less of. It's the code that is garbage, and he doesn't get overly personal other than to chide Woodhouse for glossing over the quality of Woodhouse's own contributions.

edit: ahh right, "mis-designed by morons" which is pretty inflammatory, and he should do better than that. I suspect he is trying to provoke someone at Intel into explaining their intent. Insult their intelligence, and they'll reveal something about their (possibly sinister) motive.

No, I understand the conversion factor is constant.

The subthread started when someone thought it was necessary to point out that the log everyone was talking about was the natural log.

Independent of what the actual problem is, say someone tells you that something is log(n). It is a safe assumption that they mean ln(n), but if you are are speaking out loud, that is still pronounced "log n".

What I'm looking for is better intuitions on F/ln(n) versus F/log_x(n) for some completely arbitrary function F. The intuitions for x > e are very different than the intuitions for x < e. (This is just the nature of exponents. Maybe there is no further intuition for me to develop here, other than to just practice more.)