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sj4nz

371 karma · joined November 29, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/simonjanes; my proof: https://keybase.io/simonjanes/sigs/i0_a_zLxsHaWKkJmW-82l2Er49Q1HwbzkKioDpCOkcg ]
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sj4nz··on Verbatim: A free, open-source platform for paperless debate
Nothing on this site explains what exactly is "paperless debate."
sj4nz··on Deciyear Calendar
Calendars are a prime example of Metcalf's Law. (The influence of a network is the square of the number of elements participating.)

https://hankehenryontime.com is another alternative calendar, but doesn't attempt to also "decimalize" time units shorter than the day.

sj4nz··on Show HN: Open-source digital stylus with six degrees of freedom
Fantastic. I love that this is brand-independent, like buying a mechanical keyboard.
sj4nz··on Flux Keyboard
This is interesting... but I can't help but think how much better it might be if instead of a video background just had a simpler e-ink display for indicating what the transparent key caps were for. The animation/videos are very distracting.

I never liked the Apple TouchBar or anything that required "active" attention away from the main screen.

sj4nz··on Confluence on-premise is dead, what now?
Even though it's obvious from the examples, SSG=Static Site Generator, for those who are unfamiliar with the acronym.
sj4nz··on Will Floating Point 8 Solve AI/ML Overhead?
Could be 8-bit posits may be enough. Has that been done? At scale. I do not know.
sj4nz··on The 12-bit rainbow palette
I agree that trying to use hue for encoding magnatude information is not great, but man, how many times have I given up on someone's infographic that decided to use four different shades of blue and purple you can't tell apart when the markers are only eight or sixteen pixels on the screen.

I should hope the 12-bit rainbow palette would be adopted for those kinds of visualizations.

sj4nz··on Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021)
https://logseq.com/
sj4nz··on Microsoft sued for open-source piracy through GitHub Copilot
This isn't my experience with Co-pilot's suggestions. I've literally been able to have Co-pilot suggest a complete unit test based on a novel structure I hand-coded myself and a few words describing the unit test. The constants are often wrong, but it saves minutes of fidgeting with the syntax for unit tests and assertions.

These are not quotations from other people's code but something about the deep structures of language and programming language semantics. However, I suspect if you knew enough of a snippet from other source you could coax Co-pilot to suggest code learned from that source, but it would likely be washed over by other code in the corpus where it coincided with meanings.

sj4nz··on An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
When I was in school reading coaches encouraged the awareness of subvocalization (where you mimic the text as if you were speaking it, but not aloud). If you find yourself doing that while reading, stop/suppress that.
sj4nz··on Show HN: Common Lisp running natively over WebAssembly for the first time
PureScript always sets the bar high for this in my mind, here's an example documentation page: https://pursuit.purescript.org/packages/purescript-effect/4....
sj4nz··on Haribo Goldbears, the world’s first gummy bears
Oddly enough, the first time I ever had gummy bears was at the Smithsonian.
sj4nz··on Investing in lighting did great things for my mental and physical health
SEIKO Vision by their website does not appear to be available in the United States (no providers are listed in their directory)-- do you happen to know anything equivalent available there?
sj4nz··on Ask HN: Anyone else find Bluetooth to be frustrating?
Bluetooth audio is a burning dumpster of monkeypoxed clown corpses.

I have two sets of BT headphones, and I avoid using them b/c of the unpredictable pairing behaviors.

It needs to be replaced with something dedicated to audio-- because I think the attempt at generality (object data transfers, mice, keyboards, etc.) and backward compatibility has made for a standard that isn't capable in a multi-device world. When buying hardware, I look at Bluetooth as a feature, but at best, just for input devices. Audio is a lost cause.

sj4nz··on Fasting boosts stem cells’ regenerative capacity (2018)
Also interesting, is a "fasting-mimicking diet" that is low in methionine:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6816332/

sj4nz··on The Modos Paper Laptop
Usable in direct sunlight?

When will this product ship?

sj4nz··on For FedEx Founder Fred Smith, the Sky Is Still the Limit
This is pretty much why 1/5 of packages I'm getting via FedEx Ground are smashed or damaged. They aren't even supposed to be "overnight" and mishandling is rife.
sj4nz··on U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow
I'll propose that it could be the glyph to represent "cutting corners":

> To skip certain steps in order to do something as easily or cheaply as possible, usually to the detriment of the finished product or end result.

sj4nz··on There’s no need to change passwords if they're robust, unique and not breached
If anything it should be the "red herring" password that locks the account if retried too many times.
sj4nz··on Kakoune Code Editor
I got curious about this and found https://github.com/danr/kakoune-easymotion which I'm going to give a try.

I haven't tried helix in a while, sometimes they have chosen not-quite default-kakoune like bindings which trips me up for certain kinds of selections.

sj4nz··on Kakoune Code Editor
kak is my daily driver. About the only customization I do for it is the integration of fzf for file picking-- althought its window management with kitty seems to be broken, I have to run it inside tmux for this to work. Recently I more often than not use broot as the launcher for kak instead of directing kak to open files from inside kak.

Multiple selections with the visual preview before action was the key feature for me-- it is a nice affordance compared to having to mentally model what an operation would do with a vim movement.

sj4nz··on Antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapy resolves long covid in 24 patients
The news media is kind of fickle about coverage about anything that doesn't get more ad revenue/impressions. Everyone's filter-bubble affects what they see. At least last July it got a minor boost of awareness from the White House:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-ada-long-covid...

Medically it just seems to fall outside the flowcharts of modern medicine where an "easy fix" or "procedure" is not prescribed. Going outside of the "acceptable medicine" of what insurance will cover is practically a unicorn event. So you'll see a lot of doctors just calling it "anxiety." Functionally, Long Haul Covid has become a huge cash bonus to medicine as sufferers get referred (passed around) from specialist to specialist for more testing and diagnostics that nearly always comes up as "normal."

About the only good news about this situation is very likely once they really get the studies done (and they're going to have to do it, because there will be millions of people suffering from this) they are likely also going to find how to help people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) since all the long hauling symptoms appear to over lap. CFS sufferers already have had the feeling of being ignored/ridiculed by medicine for decades.

sj4nz··on If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter
The notifications come back in just about the same way the Algorithm scrambles timelines on the social media apps--its just like they're trying to keep you engaged in using the phone.

Ideally, the notifications should have two very simple views: a linear list by time, a grouped-by-application list and the ability to mark and sweep them away.

Or maybe at the most, an archive all notifications sweep that you can re-open if you remember that you wanted to see an old notification.

sj4nz··on LudoTune, a 3D music sequencer in the browser
That was cool. It reminded me of Orca, but in 3D.

https://metasyn.github.io/learn-orca/

sj4nz··on Simulating worlds on the GPU: Four billion years in four minutes
Dwarf Fortress was the first thing I thought of when I saw this. It does do a geology sim for map setup.
sj4nz··on USA Today is getting a paywall. Who’s the audience for it?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... is one that I have found useful.
sj4nz··on Underlying Medical Conditions Among 540,667 Adults Hospitalized with Covid-19
More and more, I'm finding its all about the homocysteine. It's correlated with all kinds of neurological problems with different names.

Something about it gets out of regulation by the body and the sufferer falls into the incident pit. Can be something as innocuous as antibiotics wrecking your digestion or a bad diet from being poor that begins the decline.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16102882/#:~:text=Homocystei....

sj4nz··on Autopilot on Cars for $999
Recent interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcYp-XT7UI&list=PLrAXtmErZg...
sj4nz··on Context switching costs more than we give it credit for
I think this confuses manufacturing/operations and problem solving/analysis. In manufacturing and operations, the thinking has already been "baked" into the activity and you make it faster by adding more people, materials and equipment. (More cashiers, more assembly lines, more factories, more CI compute/memory/storage/bandwidth) With problem solving/analysis context switching would exhaust concentration from the thrashing of unrelated patterns/predictions. If you add more people to a problem solving/analysis context you increase the amount of coordination work for everyone to achieve "shared understanding".

If you add a _lot_ of people to a problem solving/analysis context (e.g. open source/crowd sourcing) you throw out the constraint of "shared understanding" and win by probability with many different minds partially thinking about the problem. This takes longer of course-- because the project maintainers then have to sift through the crowd's input.

The goal has to be understand the form of work, and adjust the levers accordingly.

sj4nz··on macOS Big Sur
I think that's related. I think also for a lot of web pages, they have ephemeral state that would not be captured by a bookmark, so they get left open and accumulate. One can never know sometimes which page will succeed as a bookmark or just fail.
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