shervinafshar

Herman Goldstine Lecture, American Philosophical Society, April 2024.

What happened to this project?

Also, I wish they would have defined a schema (or vocabulary) for this metadata or re-used some existing vocabulary like FOAF. That would have helped when the main devs move on from maintaining this.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606263

Very nice. Two points of feedback:

- I was not happy that I couldn't use any of the common punctuations of English language.

- job timeout on longer text inputs without a length limit existing for the input text box. I tried poetry with 839 chars/151 words got a job timeout error.

There is always a balance to be achieved between creating stuff oneself and mentoring others. The ideas which helped me on this have been:

(a) never offer mentoring/review/training if it's forced or otherwise unsolicited;

(b) reading Feynman talking about teaching: https://www.math.utah.edu/~yplee/teaching/feynman.html

I don't really hate NFTs but I'm very critical to (a) the way models of digital scarcity is introduced to digital artist by the blockchain (maximalist) tribes effectively making the whole thing very similar to pyramid schemes as you suggested, (b) carbon emission footprint of Proof of Work.

But to your question, I suppose any work in digital media which is fungible could be reluctantly considered as "polar opposite of an NFT". One could even do better than that and release the artworks under an open license like CC.

I wonder how dystopian sci-fi would read in such future? I mean...what would be their parable of The Matrix?

My guess was they are referring to one of these services that check the validity of any email address. A false signal from one of these services prevented me from signing up for some random website with a .name domain the other day.

*@myname.name

Fair. Still golden if this needs to be done for all contacts of all users?

Such an interesting context. Thanks for sharing this. I appreciate the nostalgia poetics of this today.

Not an expert on guerilla cyber-warfare, but isn't it the whole point of this sort of poisoning? If enough people do this the cost of those bouncing emails would become prohibitive. That's my speculation. Would be great to know more from someone who knows the domain better.

Wonderful take. Thanks for sharing.

Touché. Eno could be elevator music then.

Devo was a bunch of brilliant, genre-defying creatives. In my point of view they have been as influential as Kraftwerk, but don't get as much love and respect.

Corrected.

Thank you Captain Pedantic. HN threads won't be the same without nitpicking and pedantry. I think by "ambient" you mean piped music, elevator music, Muzak(tm). Because Eno ain't no elevator music.

Seems like the text is removed now and the link just goes to NIN store homepage. Here's the archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200916172127/https://www.nin.c...

Agreed. They wanted to include these texts as booklet, but there were some legal issues apparently. The print-ready files are available here (no CAPS): https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2486/0276/files/QUAKE_essa...

I tried to find an official response from the company to no success through their CS so I asked the community-driven forums. After receiving some pedantic let-me-copy-paste-a-sentence-from-article-you-just-posted, I found the closest thing that I could get to an official response: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Announcements/A-message-from-J...

Quoting my own message:

> EFF previously used to have a scorecard[1] for all the messaging applications, but they reconsidered the model of their recommendation

Depends on what you need. EFF previously used to have a scorecard[1] for all the messaging applications, but they reconsidered the model of their recommendation and put together a good set of articles on the topic which ask questions to consider and provide privacy and tech context. Here's one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/thinking-about-what-yo...

The rest are linked from here[2].

[1]: https://www.eff.org/pages/secure-messaging-scorecard

[2]: https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2018/03/secure-messaging-mo...

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23485182

You made your point very clear. Regretfully, I can not agree with your fervent enthusiasm for the law of the land in this case that this is an obvious and open-and-shut case of illegal conduct that one might very much want it to appear. This is based on the assessments of experts such as the Copyright Office on the case and the nuances reflected in it.

As I said, we'll have to wait and see. I do look forward to it. In the mean time these are the tiny actions I'll be taking in support of IA (1) I double my donations to the IA and match donations of any friends and acquaintances, (2) the four conglomerate publishers are boycotted until further notice.

And remember, the Internet always finds a way, if its short history has taught us anything.

I think the value is not in memorizing such trivia; for a 7 years old it might be discovering the pattern of data encoding and its why and how. It opens all sort of paths of discovery in future for understanding software.

You'd be surprised how often veteran developers fail to grasp intermediate Unicode concepts (surrogate pairs, for instance) probably since they skipped over (or was not curious enough about) implementation details of such abstractions.

"random .org"? IA? That concludes our fun conversation from my point of view. We'll just have to wait and see.

I beg to differ. I see at least two main arguments here:

Argument 1: Since these publishers are suing IA (premise), I find it justified for myself to boycott them (conclusion)

Argument 2: Well, you were not spending money there anyway (conclusion) if you were downloading your books from IA (premise).

Why did I feel that Argument 2 was unsubstantiated and ad hominem? I asked myself, how did the person making Argument 2 know that the OP...

(a) ...has used IA National Emergency Library at all? may be they are just unhappy with these publishers bullying an NGO?

(b) ...has used IA NEM to download books from these particular publishers? may be they are buying everything Penguin publishes, but enjoyed using NEM for reading other books from other publishers?

Assuming things about the characters and actions of the person you are discussing with and making your argument about those rather than the topic of discussion, is a sign of a logical fallacy to me.

I can imagine the answer to all those questions from IA wouldn't be "because we are a law unto ourselves" as you suggested, but it would be along the lines that following bureaucratic channels during a national emergency to be able to help the public with availability of books, would have been slow and hence counterproductive.

In this country, laws have a interesting way to bend during national crises. I'll keep my fingers cross for that in this case.

Copyright Office mostly agrees with you in their response to an inquiry about IA National Emergency Library by a senator[1].

But there are things in that response to distinguish IA actions and motives from other bête noires of Copyright law (The Pirate Bay, etc.) That would give IA and their supporters something to work with; intents, outcomes, and the limited nature of IA NEL would (hopefully) harness publishers opportunism in the view of the law.

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/laws/hearings/Sen-Udall-Response-N...

Not a IP lawyer here, but I speculate that when and if this lawsuit goes to higher courts, the fact that IA was acting in favour of the public in a national emergency would be in their favor.