markburns

Memory is the current spacetime location's fuzzy view when looking towards the past. Imagination is the fuzzy view when looking forwards to the future or with the many-worlds view, imagination is the looking out(?) towards multiple outcomes.

Consciousness is the step towards the next point in the many world multiverse.

Without the ability to be blind to the future, life as we know it wouldn't exist. Nothing conscious would take risks and so complexity couldn't evolve.

If you could glance to the future and see all of the laid out spacetime, there wouldn't be any interesting exploration of it.

So we have to be blinkered just to exist with this level of insight into the complexities of the universe.

Surely that's what it is though. As well as being literal.

This has always baffled me about these projects. I think the only thing I heard of that sounded like it may be feasible was Golem [0], as that's about renting out real world hardware. And I've no idea if it is, but I can imagine it could be something where it's all programmatic, distributed, transactional and verifiable, but I can also imagine it being full of real world holes.

Or I guess namecoin [1] sounds like it could work with a critical mass for adoption. But it seems to be a real subset of real world problems that are solvable. Things that inherently make sense being protocols and distributed I guess, I'm not sure if there are other classes of problems that could work well as 'web3' things

[0] https://www.golem.network/ [1] https://www.namecoin.org

I wonder if this could be used as a step towards explaining innate abilities. You're born with a human brain capable or language. A giraffe is born with a brain capable of walking.

There's just some predefined wiring that is a good bet, and the expression into a phenotype or some other mechanism for encoding some of this knowledge in future generations.

Future AI can just start off with a good baseline and build from there.

Perhaps every single utterance/communication of any intersubjective phenomena is already ship-of-theseus-sed by the time it leaves the mouth of the speaker.

Probably by the time the brain of the speaker has processed the thought.

The mere passage of time means that the original meme no longer exists in its original form. Communicating a single idea to another individual creates a wholly new slightly mutated copy of the original idea.

The vast majority of our waking hours are spent pondering things that are not in the least bit real like this. Just memes that only humans are aware of and believe in.

This airport is as real as a song, as santa, as a country, a law, the value of money, words.

In fact, an overwhelming majority of things that we generally perceive to be real are only things that exist in the shared consciousness of human beings. The only difference between santa and a law is just how strongly people believe in and how many people willingly support the latter.

But santa and laws are of the exact same category of made up ideas that we choose to believe in and that influence our group behaviour.

Some things do exist, like the combination of materials that make up buildings that we inhabit.

But their meaning and purpose and ownership and the reasons we enter them and the vast majority of what buildings mean to us aren't in the least bit real.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find out that ant and bee colonies also share their own memes that help structure their societies.

Just working more to afford necessities isn't the same thing as putting money back into the economy. Less disposable income across society means lower economic activity.

Low wages, high inflation, general financialization of everything resulting in more people working or working multiple jobs to keep their heads above water.

Much less expendable income means economic contraction.

The thinking behind it is based on the halving of rewards and the stock to flow model. https://bitblogger.org/demystifying-bitcoins-remarkably-accu...

If you follow that reason then it's rational that there are crashes after peaks (cashing out), and it's still rational that it will keep rising to a point that it reaches its true value (whatever that is).

The peaks and troughs will flatten out as that happens.

Could well all be wrong. But so far that seems to be the pattern.

With libraries that alter your path at runtime. I've encountered comments on issues that implied that this wasn't a complete hack. I have had the impression that this is all just overhead in getting an environment up and running, and not taken for granted that you should be able to achieve repeatable isolation relatively simply.

So I think even if one of those packaging tools worked really well, a library somewhere could undo your best efforts at isolation.

I also don't hate python itself, but I wish the one way of doing things ethos applied to managing dependencies and python versions.

The UK. Maybe you stress them out :)

Completely anecdotal but I seem to remember flies banging their heads on windows a lot more when I was younger.

Now they seem to be able to navigate their way out with comparative ease. Open a door or window and waft them in the general direction and they seem to be able to escape.

I've been wondering for a few years if this was evolution.

Couldn't agree more.

Maybe one slight variation, that I think still agrees in principle, is considering 'the cost of doing this now vs cost of doing it later'.

Sometimes technical debt is isolated and handling it can wait until the next time that code is touched. Often people may use this as an excuse.

But there are a few cases where you can just wait and it won't be harder to fix later. I suppose this is the real form of debt that people should be referring to when they typically think of technical debt. It's debt with a next to zero percent interest rate. Just borrowing a bit of time now from future engineering time.

A lot of technical debt that is left is the kind that carries a few thousand percent interest rates and can quickly tie an organisation in knots.

Was it this one? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/unta...

I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.

I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.

Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.

But surely the orders of magnitude thing factors in when you can have orders of magnitude more clients than servers? I think you'd need to run more specific numbers to lean either way on this.

I might be missing something, but wouldn't the point be that it's not the log writer's responsibility to do this, but rather some other service that consumes the unparsed output and sends the notification?

As far as I can recall, I had never encountered this kind of usage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic) in the word cooperative.

I was going to ask you about it but Wikipedia gave a sufficient explanation, so commenting for the benefit of other readers.

There are a significant number (probably a slight majority by now) of British people who are as saddened by this as you are. And not just the predictable econmoic fallout.

I very much enjoyed the multiculturalism and there are plenty like me. The period from around 2005 onwards was for me a great time. European housemates, colleagues and cultural influence. It felt good to be part of something that crossed cultural boundaries. We've lost a lot.

I think sometimes the unwelcoming voices are the loudest and are what sticks with us. We'll miss having people like you.

Understandable for you to feel offended by the situation though.

Could be random. I've seen this behaviour when enabling puma and using non thread-safe code. Just entirely depends on the timing of the requests.

I suppose that maybe comes down to your definition of what 'random' is.

I’ve had some success with non technical people and a warehouse metaphor.

Can you keep shipping products if you never tidy up? Yes it’s possible but eventually it catches up to you.

There’s no specific point in time at which tidying up a warehouse is going to make or break a business but the untidy ones are more likely to be hard to hire for and more likely to catch fire.

And they’ll definitely slow down ability to ship products.

Warehouses that stay tidy have a predictable rate of shipping and reduced risks of accidents and fires.

Do you need to put that one single item in the right place every time to continue to ship anything? Well the answer is always no, but permanent short term thinking like that without ever tidying will always eventually cost you in the end.

Much easier to keep on top of it. Workers and new hires are also more effective.

I find that this metaphor doesn’t feel forced or stretched and it’s pretty intuitive and nicely harmonises with products and shipping terms that people use for software anyway.

It’s getting closer to its true value. Volatility gradually decreases the higher its value. If you filter out the crashes of early adopters cashing out.

Once the final cycle of 10-100x followed by a crash has complete then I think a more interesting period for Bitcoin can begin.

That’s where mass adoption starts to become more viable.

Bitcoin is the tcp/ip stack, lightning is http, the exciting part is really yet to come.

If the web and all the innovation that arose came about because of programmatic decentralised information transfer, then I’m interested to see what can occur with programmatic value transfer.

In the 90s a lot of people couldn’t be convinced of the benefit of communicating with people on the internet but many of these same people are convinced enough to use social media now. But it couldn’t occur until the network effects were present.

I’m excited to find out what that equivalent paradigm shift looks like.

Of course mass adoption may never happen, and I won’t spend my time trying to convince people that it will or how it could.

But I do see price approaching a true valuation and reaching stability as a prerequisite for it being truly useful.

I had the same reading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

It's the annoyances section. I checked all of these and haven't been bothered since.

ublock origin has a setting that rejects cookies in the GDPR notices instead of accepting them

Well perhaps we’re 10 years since ARPANET. And the World Wide Web hasn’t been invented just yet.

What you tend to see, is the difficulty of crossing these network boundaries (which happens anyway) _and_ all the coupling and complexity of a distributed ball of mud.

Getting engineers who don't intuitively understand or maybe even care how to avoid coupling in monoliths to work on a distributed application can result in all the same class of problems plus chains of network calls and all the extra overhead you should be avoiding.

It seems like you tell people to respect the boundaries, and if that fails you can make the wall difficult to climb. The group of people that respect the boundaries whether virtual or not, will continue to respect the boundaries. The others will spend huge amounts of effort and energy getting really good at finding gaps in the wall and/or really good at climbing.

As a layperson I read “prevent” to mean a 100% reduction. Not sure if there’s a slightly different interpretation than that but I’d presume that’s what they mean?

I’d imagine that the number of charging points would increase somewhat to accommodate that. Presumably the number of pumps at a station is a function of required throughput.

I also think there will be a lot more roadside individual charging stations rather than specialised large locations that are convenient because of the centralised storage of a physical liquid.

I’ve used it quite a bit and you make a valid point.

The appeal it had to me was watching one of the videos in which he talks about inherent versus accidental complexity.

I’d say eliminating all the extraneous accidental complexity you see in the entire process of building software is what it aims to do. That really resonated with me.

Deployment, code versioning, IDEs, infrastructure. So many of these things can be replaced by a simpler holistic toolset.

I’d say for simple use cases they’re well past the 80% mark. And it really is enjoyable building something in this paradigm.

The challenges are obviously the next 20% which will be where all the really hard edge case parts come.

I’m really looking forward to seeing it evolve.

It’s worth watching the introductory talk, even if you never intend to build something with it.

Accidental complexity is something I’m sure all engineers battle with. It’s nice seeing a genuine attempt to eliminate it. Even if it has ironically come along with some of its own accidental complexity. (E.g. not having enough libraries)

I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to battle all the right parts of accidental complexity and stay aware (as they are) of where they’re introducing it

I agree, I just think capital feels more tangible and riskier to lose than opportunity cost. Also easier to put a specific number to so easier to quantify the risk.