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celerity

366 karma · joined March 25, 2012

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celerity··on Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
The plugin actually does support spaced repetition, but only an "exponential" algorithm. That is, you have to manually choose whether to multiply the current repetition period with 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2.

This "exponential" repetition it's not as optimized as the kinds of algorithms you're describing, but I find it good enough and it comes with a few distinct advantages:

1) Spaced repetition algorithms are hard to get right with two buttons like remembered/forgot. Anki for example added more buttons (easy/normal/hard/forgot or something like that), but I could never really intuit what would happen if I clicked any of them. Having 4 explicit choices makes it easy to understand what will happen, and also lets you "manually" push back notes on axes like "how much do I still care about this" and not just "how well do I remember this".

2) I really wanted to keep the metadata fields stored in the note and easy for a human to edit and understand. Right now, you only need `repeat: spaced every N days` (and similar) and the plugin adds a `due_at` field that has an easy to read ISO timestamp. You can also add `hidden: true` but don't have to.

celerity··on Notes apps are where ideas go to die (2022)
Hey, this is exactly why I made obsidian-repeat-plugin [1]. The goal was to have most of my notes surface every now and then, which removes the need for me to do any digging at all.

With that said, my non-repeating notes are far from "dead". First, I have a lot of useful self-made references. Second, Obsidian really makes it easy to spontaneously group tags with its backlink system. Every now and then, I go down a rabbit hole and catch up to notes that would otherwise be dead. I only have to maintain a few "entry points" that mostly have other notes linking to them.

[1]: https://github.com/prncc/obsidian-repeat-plugin

celerity··on Musk’s Twitter purchase was a leveraged buyout
From the article here it looks like people will stay on payroll until early 2023. They won't work but have to abide by Twitter's internal agreements.

Does anyone know if part of these agreements includes not seeking other employment (a typical clause these days)?

celerity··on The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius
If you want to get a taste of some of what Ramanujan seems to have been occupied with, the mathematical physicist John Baez explained "Ramanujan's easiest formula" in an approachable way https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/ramanujans-e...
celerity··on The new browser-based puppeteer REPL, and how we built it
Nice! We built something like this 3 years ago while I was still at Intoli. Instead of Puppeteer we used our own Web Extensions API based framework called Remote Browser [1], the core of which was written by my cofounder.

The tour is still up at [2]. The servers that actually run the Remote Browser have since gone down, but interestingly you can still run the tour. That's because if you don't change the code in the REPL window, you get cached results (except step 7/7 which scrapes Hacker News and won't work). To get those results, we built a little tour "recorder" that would be run on every release. If I remember correctly, we allowed some dynamic ES6 imports through a custom Babel compiler for the code that's input, which also allows first level async stuff, which still works :)

[1]: https://github.com/intoli/remote-browser [2]: https://intoli.com/tour/

celerity··on The Galaksija computer was a craze in 1980s Yugoslavia
A few aphorisms about Voja Antonić:

1. He was involved as a skeptic and wrote a well-received (among my friends at least) book debunking psychics and various kinds of nonsense. As a teenage boy in Serbia (in the late 90s?), I asked him to translate a portion of the book to English and put the translation on my website. He graciously allowed me to do so. Part of why I wanted to go through that massive effort was to convince an English-speaking girlfriend (whom I've met online!) that astrology is nonsense. You could say that relationship did not last long.

The book is now available as a free PDF on his website. [1] I don't know what happened to my website.

2. He moved to the US at 65 to work SV, and had some emotional things to say about the move. [2] It stuck with me.

(Both links are in Serbian.)

[1]: http://www.voja.rs/dpdl.htm

[2]: https://noizz.rs/intervju/voja-antonic-za-noizz-o-odlasku-u-...

celerity··on Inside Wayback Machine, the internet’s time capsule
I wonder if the Wayback Machine people are using a (potentially more modern) version of the AOPIC algorithm to decide what to archive. I wrote an article about that algorithm (which is similar to the original PageRank, but simpler IMO), and stated that a service "like the Wayback Machine would probably use something like AOPIC." It would be nice to remove that first like from the sentence!

[1] https://intoli.com/blog/aopic-algorithm/

celerity··on Lobotomizing Gnome
To be fair, 200X was the Year of the Linux Desktop for us Linux users.
celerity··on Lobotomizing Gnome
A lot of the comments here are arguing for or against the author's specific choices, but I would like to point out how great it is that Linux desktop environments are this customizable in the first place.

I recently switched back to Linux after using a Mac for a couple of years, and was blown away with how far Gnome has gotten in terms of customizability -- even if most of it is done through extensions. Moreover, if you can't tweak it to your liking, perhaps xfce or i3 or KDE will prove more accommodating...

celerity··on Asciinema – Record and share your terminal sessions
My co-founder wrote a bit about Asciinema as part of a comprehensive comparison of terminal recorders [1]. There's a lot to love about it (wide availability, very nice JavaScript playback -- check out the Game of Life playback at [1]), but it's a bit of a chore to self host, if that's important for you.

[1]: https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/

celerity··on Running FFmpeg on AWS Lambda for 1.9% the Cost of AWS Elastic Transcoder
Traffic to Lambda from the internet and between Lambda and S3 is free. The only thing you pay for are the transfer costs from S3 (at cents per GB).
celerity··on How to write a spelling corrector (2016)
The article doesn't mention it explicitly, but this is a nice example of how using Bayes theorem helps you ignore the hard-to-compute normalization term of the input space. In the article, this is the P(w) term of

P(c|w) = P(c)P(w|c)/P(w),

where c is a correction, and w is the original word.

The author does implicitly talk about this when he explains that P(c|w) conflates the two factors, but it's also not that hard to see that getting a handle on P(w) -- the probability space of misspellings -- is harder than getting a hold of P(c) -- the probability space of actual words, and Bayes lets us get rid of the former during optimization.

celerity··on Remote-Browser – A browser automation framework based on the Web Extensions API
Selenium is just a tool built on top of the WebDriver API. One of its main disadvantages is needing to run a complicated proxy program (like geckodriver, ChromeDriver, etc.) built individually for each browser in order to drive your instance. As a result, users sometimes suffer from hard to debug edge cases and other pain points.

They also make interacting with JavaScript on the page a bit painful. For example, injecting JavaScript into the browser with Selenium can be quite an ordeal [1], so you're somewhat limited in what you can do by what Selenium's developers decided to focus on. It also complicates deployments by adding another moving part to the overall equation.

In contrast, the Web Extension API is now part of all major browsers, and makes interacting with different page contexts effortless. To give a sense of the project, we wrote an interactive tour of Remote Browser which runs browser instances on our backend.

[1]: https://intoli.com/blog/javascript-injection/

[2]: https://intoli.com/tour/1

celerity··on A Crude Personal Package Manager
It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but Exodus is really great for this use case. You can just run

  exodus htop | ssh my-server-name
and your local machine's copy of htop will be installed in your home directory on the remote machine (along with all of the dependencies).
celerity··on Ask HN: For a dependable desktop Linux, is there anything other than Ubuntu?
If you are interested in Arch but not the overhead it entails, you may wish to consider Antergos https://antergos.com/

It's basically a fully set up Arch with sane defaults. Lets you have the rolling updates and other benefits, without requiring as much energy to set up.

celerity··on How are PCA and SVD related?
I actually touch on the relation to whitening toward the bottom of the article. You can whiten your dataset from the left singular matrix U which is directly related to PCs. Thanks for reading!
celerity··on Firefox 56 supports headless mode on Windows
Thanks! That was guess as well, since running the command you posted from cmd does work. I dug around selenium's source code a bit, but decided to take the pragmatic path and use the MOZ_HEADLESS environment variable instead.
celerity··on Firefox 56 supports headless mode on Windows
I just finished writing an article that explains how to connect WebDriver to Firefox running in the new headless mode on Windows if anybody's interested: https://intoli.com/blog/running-selenium-with-headless-firef...

It should be pretty similar on Linux, and probably macOS when it comes around.

celerity··on Fallout 1.5: Resurrection
It's funny that New Vegas stands out from the lot; turns out it had some of the original Interplay/Black Isle people working on it. I learned this from a Tyranny AMA on Reddit...
celerity··on iPad Pro – 9.7-inch
Is anybody else deeply disappointed by the camera bulge? If you use the tablet on a tabletop, that basically forces you to buy a ~$100 case that adds unnecessary thickness and weight to the tablet. Cheap move, IMO.
celerity··on They're Made out of Meat
I first heard this performed on a podcast called, "The Truth: Movies for Your Ears." Very good podcast for dramatic stories, sometimes artsy like this one.
celerity··on Surface Pro 3
I have a 4s. While iOS 7 is laggier than iOS 6 when doing things like switching apps using a home key double tap etc., it is a much faster interface. That is, there might be (not too heavy) laginess for a small set of tasks, but iOS 7 unlike iOS 6 can keep up with my natural speed for doing things much better.
celerity··on Amazon to acquire Comixology
Publishing on Amazon is currently quite horrible, so I am sorry to say that if you use history as a guide, then you are in bad luck. For example, current publishers get less money if they use bigger data. The result is blurry pictures on hi-res screens. Awful policy.
celerity··on Shutting down Ubuntu One file services
Thank you! Ubuntu One is a buggy, laggy mess and frankly an embarrassment to Canonical. What would be neat is if they made a GUI for BTSync, and sold pre-configured hard drive space for it!
celerity··on Gog.com Soon On More Platforms
Well, running the old LucasArts adventures would be easy with ScummVM integrated, but I wonder if they can secure the rights. A promising sign is that Tim Schafer (made a lot of the early adventures) recently went to LucasArts on a mysterious mission (perhaps just a tour!).
celerity··on iPad onscreen keyboard designed for LaTeX [video]
You're correct. It's not ONLY good for consumption, it's just a low-fidelity, low-bandwidth input device. Touch does have the advantage of feeling natural, so that probably lends itself to a better input device in specific scenarios. Still, I can't help but pine for a future iPad on which I can use a pen. Whoa!
celerity··on iPad onscreen keyboard designed for LaTeX [video]
This is simply a great example of using the wrong tool for the job. No matter how "smooth" an iOS LaTeX tool is, it's still much less efficient than any computer. People are trying to force things into the iPad, which I understand, but I sincerely think that a radical change is needed to make it more than a consumption device.
celerity··on Linux laptops: should you avoid buying Windows?
People like him are why you are using a slow crappy computer all the while you have a $1200 fast, well built computer in your closet? What?
celerity··on Pencil
I like the whole idea of well-crafted products, but in the end this is nothing but a crappy, laggy, low fidelity finger-simulator/crayon. Writing any text with it is probably clumsy, and certainly impossible to do as well as with any other pencil on paper.

Pass. Apple needs to get out something with a proper active digitizer so that all these satellite companies start making nice pens that also work well.

celerity··on Why Android SSL was downgraded from AES256-SHA to RC4-MD5 in late 2010
This beautifully illustrates the power of open source. One guy was worried enough about security to start checking the crypto source, and was able to alert the community. I hope this leads to a more secure platform.
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