schmudde

Been getting into Rudy Rucker, who was funded by the AutoCAD folks to do cellular automata research: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/.

Autodesk funded some really interesting projects.

Trevor Paglen had a similar project for US military SIGINT. It's interesting how much more "serious" the Russian insignias are than the US patches. I have a few pictures here: https://schmud.de/books/i-could-tell-you-but-then.html

The web browser app paradigm changed everything. The Windows API isn't nearly as important as it once was.

I don't understand why this would be different than the Microsoft Office/LibreOffice situation. Adoption has been really slow in Europe (though it is happening - to the credit of European bureaucracies) even though the software packages essentially have feature parity.

This is also what landed with me.

The issues we experiment with are usually quite broad - improvements to logging, routing - but the implementation is always more narrow. Still, it seems like there is still more room for more refinement and focus now that you mention it.

Yeah - we're doing something like one-on-ones that drive these explorations. Maybe we need to make the "20%" more formal.

The real missing part is discussed in the "knowledge building" link. I'm on board with Peter Naur's idea of building software, but it's very difficult to share individual knowledge with a team as it is being formed.

For example, reading someone's implementation as a work in progress is a different than reading an implementation that is a complete idea.

A work in progress is a lot easier to read with a design document in hand, but that design document that is full of assumptions that might be better explored in short feedback loops on production.

I haven't enjoyed the ecosystem of text editors on the web as much as I have local apps. HackMD was really hitting the sweet spot of simplicity and shareability.

I'll give it a shot. At first glance it seems like it has the simplicity of a text editor and all the sophistication has gone into collaboration. Kinda what web apps should be about.

Ah nice tip. Will put it on the reading list!

Sharing this seems like an appropriate way of commemorating David Kahn's passing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39233855). <3

It's astonishing (and sad) how few opportunities exist for basic research.

Before folks jump on the business model aspect, one should keep in mind that many (all?) online communities go through a similar growth curve. Wikipedia included.

But this article goes into the details of what makes this feel different. Quora is aesthetically much worse than it ever was.

⃞ I have a salt deficiency.

The moderation is quite arbitrary. Here are three specific examples I've noted:

1. "Don't hate Jira, hate your manager." https://lobste.rs/s/n4v6a8/you_don_t_hate_jira_you_hate_your... is okay but "Making time for planning" https://lobste.rs/messages/h9z5ee is not (Management is off-topic.)

2. "A normal week (in tech)" https://blog.ignaciobrasca.com/work/2023/05/01/a-normal-week... is not okay (Article does not relate to computing.) but "What are you working on this week?" is okay.

3. "What Punch Cards Teach Us About AI Risk" https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/26/what-punch-cards-tea... is not okay (Business history is off-topic) even though specific implementations of punch card machines are discussed

There will always be sharp edges to moderation but I've generally found more permissive policies to be more fair.

Prefect combination with Article 45 (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-b...). You can roam around EU versions of websites that rely on government own certificate authorities and allow you to log in with your eIDAS id - which will be a requirement for all "very large online platforms."

The EU Parliament giveth and taketh away.

You might try Brave New Europe? They don't look at tech specifically like EFF, but tech touches their stories on economics, regulation, and the media: https://braveneweurope.com/?s=tech

The context of China destroying Tibet should not be overlooked here. Nepal shares much with Tibet culturally. Perhaps China isn't an immediate threat to their sovereignty, but it's certainly an existential threat.

It's nice to see, but it's backing Abelton into feature parity with Cubase on the Atari ST in 1989.

The data has many different ways to tell the story. For example, 50 years of fires: https://observablehq.com/@ktrudeau/2023-fire-weather-days

As always, this will be made open source and undergo continuous improvement.

Wait - the recommender algorithms will be made open source? I find that hard to believe.

For just $4 more you can buy the Atari ST version!

I really dig your portrait.

Mine: https://schmud.de/

A humanities take on tech. I'm always nervous how the sidenotes render on other webviews. But my favorite part is the automatically generated historical timeline (https://schmud.de/timeline.html). It is essentially a meaningfully different ordering of the same writing.

Interesting that you also track reading speed. My speed differential between different types of of books always surprises me a bit. Usually it's something like, "Wait, I'm only 20% through this book and I've been reading it for two months?"

I've already made my donation to IA this year but I might need to make another.

Somehow it's the IA's job to fix problems that we all know are problems, sadly.

They told us all about this during our first day or two of classes - the infernally-named "onboarding".

Curious - why is "onboarding" an infernal-name?

Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DRM, but an active cracking & piracy scene stymied that. So people were now blindly executing modified applications.

Interesting analysis. But free software is demonstrably more secure. Are you claiming that proprietary vendors intentionally mislead people with FUD?

Or was it a cultural zeitgeist in the era of shrinkwrap and slow telecom where free software was simply harder to find? i.e. it’s hard to experience more secure software if you can’t find it.

The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.

The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.

The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.

This is the most illustrative analogy. I suppose the answer is a little bit of both.

Python numeric performance is a really interesting case. Those folks would certainly drop down to C. But my casual observation is that they would build the bridge when they came back above water. A lot of work went into this because Python performance has historically been quite bad for a Data Science/ML language.

Part of this is the size of the community.

But what is we also consider the Common Lisp community? Common Lisp is incredibly performant. A lot of work went into the underlying C libraries. Perhaps most of that was when the community was more vibrant. But still, a casual observation is that CL folk live in CL.

This is absolutely brilliant. A) Notebooks are a great way to explore ideas. B) Serverless tech shouldn't be so damn difficult to experiment with. So it's checking two boxes.

Extra points for the emphasis on Live Coding in the docs. Bravo.