knowledge-clay

Any ideas for Calender alternatives?

> It's looking increasingly possible that, at some point in the not-too-far future machines will be so good at creating software that humans won't be competitive in any way, and won't be in the loop at all.

This is an enormous extrapolation from what the LLMs are currently capable of. There has been enormous progress, but the horizon seems pretty clear here: these models are incapable of abstract reasoning, they are incapable of producing anything novel, and they are often confidently wrong. These problems are not incidental, they are inherent. It cannot really abstractly because its "brain" is just connections between language, which human thought is not reducible to. It can't reason produce anything really novel because it requires whatever question you ask to resemble something already in its training set in some way, and it will be confidently wrong because it doesn't understand what it is saying, it relies on trusting that the language in its training set is factual, plus manual human verification.

Given these limits, I really fail to see how this is going to replace intellectual labor in any meaningful sense.

I am extremely excited about and invested in this project, but I don't necessarily agree with the author's predictions. Rather, I see the way Virgil's design constraints have led to a very cool, novel and interesting approach to operating systems -- something so simple that you could reasonably comprehend every aspect of it starting from bare metal, yet powerful enough that you could use it to do useful computing work. I think there is value in having a system that you can comprehend fully -- something that is totally impossible with something like modern Linux. It doesn't have the same advantages as a modern operating system, but it has advantages that those systems lack: the ability to do a more independent, self-sufficient, sustainable kind of computing.

I’ve relied on public transit for 7 years in 3 different cities and never once have I encountered a “violent junkie”. It’s far safer to take transit than to drive. Cars kill 40,000 people a year in the US. Cars are the leading cause of death for Americans age 15-24. These are deaths we just normalize and wave away because it’s the living cost of car-dependent infrastructure. But it’s not and shouldn’t be normal or acceptable.

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> Like some dystopian future where people are trying to cobble found hardware together to make something.

https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos

http://collapseos.org/

Here are some great resources on Forth:

http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/forth...

https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/fs/doc/design/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TJuOwy4aGA

Let me quote the first essay at length:

> Writing "good" Forth code is very hard, or at least what I consider good Forth code, which may be different from what others consider good. Forth has been called a "write only language", but only because it requires an additional effort to simplify your code to a point where everything becomes obvious. This is an art, it is a moment of transcendence, which I don't claim to have ever reached, but sometimes I get a glimpse of it, an inkling of the fact that if I would work very hard on this, it will become so simple, so heavily factored, using such obvious and clear names that everything just falls into place. It is this moment that programmers experience every once in a while, where a short, simple piece of code just does what it is supposed to do, without any extra baggage, easily understandable. To achieve it in Forth is much harder, it may require more time, many rewrites, but the results are even more satisfying, as the result is smaller, much simpler, fully self-contained and not burdened by code that you can not trust. When you forget about that urge of productivity, which has become the moloch we sacrifice our children to, you may be able to achieve that particular thing that is called quality, elegance, art. It may take a lifetime, you may never reach that far, but still you should strive for it.

> Or you remain a cog in the machine, developing on absurdly convoluted "software stacks", using inadequate and brittle languages, connect barely matching interfaces to only small parts of too many bloated libraries, using insanely sophisticated tools of incomprehensble complexity and trot on, asking yourself why everything sucks and why the last time you actually enjoyed programming and were you could be genuinely and deservedly proud on what you accomplished, was when you were a kid...

It seems to me that a lot of ideas in mainstream computing are pointing towards dead ends, and the practice of software engineering is either stagnating or in decay. Maybe it's time for a more radical reconsideration of how we build software, and time to give Forth (or something like it) a more serious look.

It’s not a product. It’s a utility and a service

> people work far less than they ever did before

Sure, if you look at the last 150 years, but the data you linked is basically flat since 1980: over the last 30 years in the United States, working hours are down 2%.

There was a discussion on sourcehut about making this change to their TOS, not sure what happened with it though

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CC32T7UNXIK7O....

Sure, they can make 220k if they only take 4 days off in an entire year:

https://abc7news.com/bart-news-building-a-better-bay-area-ov...

As a compromise, I have a key bound to open a web browser to read any html-only emails. I find it to be the best of both worlds.

These are open source apps, copycats are great and should be encouraged. That’s the nature of open source!

A lot of people in New York get by with a lot less. $800k for a family of 5 is nearly six times the median income for that family size in NYC. If that's your idea of "getting by", your perspective is wildly distorted from the average New Yorker, much less the average American.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/area-...

The median individual income in NYC is $34k. In Manhattan, it's $52k. Making 200k puts you in the top 5% of earners in New York City.

> Governments can barely manage a website

"Governments" built most of the technology that the web relies upon today.

> and some other innovative projects, like Gemini

Drew has built some great gemini software, but he didn't make Gemini, it is a community project led by Solderpunk.

> Shouldn't good HTML markup be enough to retrieve the information automatically?

Microformats?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformat

I missed this. Cool!

> they are ethical, or altruistic, but certainly can't claim they are financially responsible.

I would hardly describe taking a salary that puts you in the top 5% of earners instead of the top 2% to be financially irresponsible.

Seems very similar to https://bearblog.dev — another cool project

I think Go has a reasonable approach:

  time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)

> It isn't a protocol carefully designed by a committee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

Oh hey, I wrote this. It's pretty out of date, but it reflected the ideas that motivated me to get into Gemini in the first place. Hope it encourages you all to get involved too!

0BSD?

https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD

I tried this, but it (understandably) caused a delay whenever I typed j alone in insert mode

I don't want to speak for any individual, but it's pretty clear if you just go through the blogs/social media feeds of any of the major figures in the community. I didn't say it's the only perspective, but it's obviously prevalent

Not entirely sure what specific claim you’re looking for a source for

> I don't think the analogy is super bizarre. The Left-anarchist milieu, building its own separate spaces, unschooling their kids, living in their Californian suburb and going to Burning Man has always been more thoroughly bourgeois than even the worst cutthroat entrepreneur.

I would not describe myself as a left anarchist, but I think that this is an extremely uncharitable analysis of a much more diverse and serious group of people that don't really have anything to do with the things you listed.

> people who care deeply about content are doing everything except bikeshedding about internet protocols.

> Gemini is a protocol for techies who want to bikeshed about tech!

I don't agree with this on the matter of fact -- the spec has not meaningfully changed in at least a year, no major companion specs have been added since "gemlog", and the mailing list is currently down. While I may have agreed with you in late 2020, The only thing being produced on Gemini now is "content", and there's more of it than ever!

> It feels like the people working on/running Gemini infrastructure don’t want to actually solve the issues with the modern day web and instead just wanted to be different,

Many of Gemini's adherents can be described broadly as left-anarchists or left-libertarians. Their assessment of the problem is that the web has been captured by large, centralized corporations. Their alternative is human-scale technology and human-scale communities: a protocol so brain-dead simple that anyone with a bit of technical know-how can write or run a client or server, and anyone can write gemtext. It's a philosophy that users should have a close relationship with and understanding of the tools and platforms they use, which should be built and run for free (one can think of many real-world organizations analogous to this). Could you build these tools and communities on HTTP? Sure (and there is a wide overlap between "small web" communities on HTTP and gemini), but it's a more radical separation to build an entirely separate "place" for them.

> Bottom line is, if you agree that the modern web has become an awful place, let’s work on changing that for everyone, instead of abandoning it like a bunch of billionaires trying to escape to a different place

This is a bizarre analogy, because, unlike the other alternatives that the author presents (e.g. blockchain), there is no money or corporate interest in Gemini. But I do agree that Gemini is, to some degree, escapism, it does not confront the institutional problems of the web. But those problems won't be solved by any protocol -- not Gemini, not Dat, IPFS, not some future imagined perfect protocol, and certainly not blockchain. They are solved by politics: challenging the institutions that control the web and its infrastructure and the policies that they make. Gemini is, to me, at least a nice reprieve from the web as it is, and a demonstration of what it could be, unsullied by the drive for profit and domination that fuels it today.