Vivtek

I live in a rain forest, so this post confused me for a minute. I was expecting some kind of on-screen optical illusion, but it turned to be asking about actual physical trees outside my window.

Yeah, I can see trees. I can see about fifty trees without standing up from my desk. I cut down more than three trees a month, probably. The weirdest ones are yagrumo - in about five years they can be fifty feet tall and the wood is so soft you can cut them down with a butter knife, just about. Before moving here, I'd never really considered that the Venn circles of "tree" and "weed" can overlap.

Depends on what part of Budapest. One of the reasons people like Zugló (14th district) is the many trees. And farther out it's even better, of course.

But a lot of the trees in Hungary just don't grow that big, maybe the most marked difference when I first saw it after growing up in Indiana. When we lived in the 16th district of Budapest, there was one neighborhood I used to walk the dog in that had these massive old American sycamores. Those things were beautiful.

Oh man. My wife's biscotti business will benefit from this. Nice work!

One of the funniest moments I remember from that class is he suddenly noticed the parens didn't match in the snippet he'd written on the board - so he counted through the trailing ))))) and inserted a close paren at the right place.

I took his Compilers class about 30 years ago. I really wish I still had those notes.

Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

Similarly, every European city turns out to be Budapest. Especially if there's an urban car chase of any kind.

Who would report it?

Threaten people with a 49% national sales tax, and suddenly they celebrate when it's only 10%.

There's a shocker.

Why would anyone fly to a country that's proud of shackling them and keeping them in detention without notifying their families? With the added bonus that next week they might be rendered to a slave gulag in El Salvador?

Lord knows there are ample opportunities to learn this lesson in the industry today.

Same - the funny thing is that right now my 3-foot prescription is zero (plus a bunch of astigmatic correction). Apparently my mortal frame has accepted its purpose.

I think they might be rolling out here in rural Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, which to be absolutely honest I would not have expected in a million years.

Certainly a guy came by this week measuring for, he said, laying fiber optic cable. Just to put this into perspective, our barrio is the least populous in Adjuntas, which is the least populous municipio on the island. For my own perception, as a displaced rural Hoosier, it's still really densely populated, which means it's probably a reasonable cable investment, all else equal, but still. Astonishing to see it.

Astonishing.

This is so cool!

I wish there was a way to know when an attack was charged up, or maybe show its progress in charging.

Stay out of my head!

There are one or two.

https://github.com/shleeable/Big-List-of-ActivityPub

"Today, traveling to the same Caribbean islands can be tricky, as anyone caught with contraband can face serious repercussions."

That is a very odd take on the Caribbean, and it's the third paragraph in the article. I've seen text spinners, but this feels AI-driven. Surely a human couldn't be this inane.

Why don't we start with some in his house and office?

Because when I think of content-addressability, I mean you can find things intensionally and not just extensionally, that is, you can know the shape of what you're after and find something that matches that shape. More or less what vector databases are doing these days. But in this context, it seems to mean that all the transactions (? maybe?) are stored and indexed by a unique key - but that still means I need that key to get something, right?

This might be a stupid question, but by "content-addressable" do you mean that namespaces are eliminated? This thing where you store each individual version of a function indexed by hash, that's content addressability?

Over enough years, they will be forgotten, just like the names of the people you went to school with, unless you've got a way to rehearse them.

So a million years ago (the mid-90's), I was working with Doug Hofstadter and I had some ideas I wanted to follow up. Over the intervening years of raising a family, none of which do I regret, I never had the opportunity to actually do that - but I've done a lot of pieces of it, sometimes forgetting exactly where it fit into that original big picture.

Unfortunately, a lot of those pieces were logged on paper, but I've got electronic notes from about 2011 on, and a good content index has come in really handy for pulling out earlier ideas on various topics.

I've been working on that for the past year, and also scanning in a lot of the paper notes and starting to transcribe some of them. Looking back, there are some ideas I have every five or ten years, every time thinking I'm quite innovative.

Now that I've had the time to collate all that (and to read an absolute metric ton of literature I missed, an ongoing process), I've started to make consistent progress towards my original goals.

But just as a for instance - I have my readings and research bibliography from 1995 in machine translation. Most of that is dead as Carthage from a technical standpoint, obviously, but the philosophy has been invaluable as a starting point for recalibrating where I'm going.

But I've also got a lot of notes on related projects and just noodling thoughts I've had over thirty years of driving kids around in cars. I think the most important aspect of this is just keeping your mind active and focused on the things you find interesting, even if you don't have anything like the time you'd need to pursue them properly. Because sooner or later, the stars will align and you will. And when you do, your notes will be absolutely vital.

But I'm kind of obsessive about notes, so your mileage may vary.

She got her PhD in 1999, shortly after the birth of the kid who just finished his first year of grad school.

Sure, you're working, I totally get that. But you're also sometimes reading about stuff relevant to your eventual academic interests, if only articles you see on HNN or whatever. Sometimes you'll have a thought in the car. Develop the habit of journaling them when they come, in some place you won't lose over the intervening years.

You will be astonished at what you both do and don't retain over those years. It's mostly still down in there somewhere, but if you've got a few clues to unravel the threads, it'll help more than you think now.

My wife and I are 57 years old, so I think I can address this. We finally got the younger child through to grad school and paid off all our debt, and now we can devote our time to what we want to do. Mostly, anyway - I'd like to be doing coding for pay, but instead I do technical translation.

But in terms of study - academic work - we're free. She's got a PhD in theoretical physics and has finally had the time to start publishing, including picking up quantum chromodynamics.

I've picked up my original doctoral work, too, which was on hold for thirty years while I supported the family. I've had no problems whatsoever tackling difficult topics - in fact, I've had less difficulty. I'm calmer, partly because I have to be in order to keep my blood pressure under control. I think I can do less in any given day, but I'm not even sure about that, because when I look back at items checked off over a week or a month, it's about what I wanted to get done.

So putting off study until you're 55 is not a bad plan. Keep reading about things in the meantime, of course. Take good notes. Keep things where you can find them in ten or twenty years. Write down your daily thoughts. You'll thank yourself later, trust me on this.

That was my first thought, too. Nice, tiny language with generators? Neat!

I've recently resumed research I initially started with Indiana University (and stopped for life reasons). I've been out of academia since 1995.

Back then, I had the resources of Indiana University for support. Today, lacking institutional affiliation, I couldn't do research at all - the typical price per paper is $35 from publishers, which is on average something like $2 per page. And why not? They don't have competitors for any given paper, and papers are not fungible.

I'm not independently (or even dependently) wealthy, so I can only do this research using the shadow archives. And the irony of the situation is that the access I get through shadow archives is far, far better than what I had at Indiana University in 1995, where I had to physically go to the library and hope nobody had checked out their copy of a given book, and where I paid 10 cents a page for Xerox copies. (I recently went through my files and found every single article there in PDF online - and burned all the 10-cent pages I'd copied in the 90's. It was ... weird.)

Knuth's right (well, of course; he's Don Knuth, what did I expect?) - the commercial academic publishing industry is holding us all back.

That's real. There are whole years of my email archives I have troubles looking into.

I've been doing this since 2016 and I'm frustrated on the regular that I never did it before. It's incredibly useful to know when things happened.

ebook-convert is Calibre. But you're right that you can use it from command line (which is what I do as well).