talkingtab

I think many people fail to understand how many people choose to do things.

1. Most people are followers. We really don't want to choose, and don't care. So unless we meet some pain point we will choose the most common choice that requires no thinking.

2. People stick with what they know. Unless they meet some pain point. Windows anyone?

3. Sapir-Whorf modified to: "the language determines how easily you can think."

ANY language is an abstraction - with all that means. If one language enables you to think faster or with less effort it wins. Period. Elegance be damned. An interesting experiment: take a complex JSON file and convert it to JSX. Take a different JSX file and convert it to JSON. It is just much easier (for me) to JSX something. My point is how one way of expressing things can make a difference. Nothing about JSX or JSON as I love them both dearly, but about the difference between how easy/hard/effective they are to use.

Perhaps because (ahem) I am used to React, I can look at the code and reduce it to these things:

* a hook * an array * a return * the return has a nested return

And yes, I was forced to learn useSyncExternalStore, so not a fanboy.

I get your point and it is reasonable. We are paying today. However, I believe part of the problem is that when you could make money from email, it froze. The evolution stopped. We could easily evolve email if ...

The "if..." is one of the two VERY BIG INTERNET PROBLEMS. How do you pay for things? We have an answer which pollutes. Ads => enshitification. Like recipes for how to boil and egg that are three pages of ads, and then are wrong. But we now have AI, right?

The other problem is identities on the internet. This is hard. But email? Nope. Login with Apple? Nope. Login with Google? Double, Quadruple Nope.

In the real world we have both privacy AND accountability. And. It is very difficult to maintain two identities in real life.

Privacy on the internet? Nope. Accountability? Only if you are invested in your account. Privacy and Accountability together? Nope. Two identities? You can easily do 100's or more. freg@g*.com, greg33222@g*.com, janesex994@g*.com, dogs4humanity@g*.com etc.

OMG ASN.1.

For those of you who missed this, there was a very interesting thing that happened in the growth of the internet.

At the time people were evolving the protocols through the IETF. So all the things that you rely on now - for the most part - just came into being. One day there was email. There was ftp. There was TCP. There were the Van Jacobson TCP mods.

At this time corporate types paid no attention to the internet. Academic types and the IETF were from what I saw the main developers.

Then one day the corporate world realized they might make money. But the development process of the protocols was incomprehensible (and incompatible) with the corporate culture. TCP was clearly a mess, all these protocols like DNS were a mess. From the corporate perspective.

So began the protocol wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars.

Whether ASN.1 was a product of that war or just a product of the corporate mentality, it serves as a powerful instance of the what the corporate world looks like vs the academic world looks like. You can find the wreckage from the war littered around. If you see and X.something protocol it could well be one of the relics. There were a few X.things that were adopted and useful, but were others that would haunt your dreams.

Although this is ancient history, and pretty much now told from the corporate perspective, it suggests to us that the corporate process for thinking is not as effective as the alternative - the IETF and Academic.

One is a sort of recipe culture. You write a recipe, everyone follows it and you are happy. The other is a sort of functional culture. If you can make bread and eat it you are happy. When the bread doesn't taste good you fix it.

Given the kind of bread that is commonly available in the US now, we can draw some conclusions about recipe thinking, recipe culture, corporate culture etc. One could even extend this paradigm of thinking to new things like AI. Or not.

As for the coffee roasting part, that is something that is near and dear to my heart.

I have been roasting my own coffee for decades. The part about a tough time getting green beans is just plain, factually wrong. SweetMarias.com among many others has an outstanding selection, low cost shipping and good prices. A better selection of beans than any specialty roaster.

My current setup is a gas one butane stove with propane adapter. $56. A 4" section of stove pipe (for wood stoves) $?, and an 8 cup crank flour sifter $20-$30. I've been using this variation (instead of a cheap heat gun) for the last year. You have to deal with the smoke, with either a stove vent or outside.

My testament to the quality of the coffee I make is that I have consistently roasted in the snow and cold. I would not consistently do that if the cost/benefit was not far in the benefit column.

My experience contradicts each of the points you made about roasting beans. Maybe not #1, depending on what you like and how much you want to spend, but even that one is arguable.

The suggestion was just to try good cheese so you know what it is. $35 a pound is a bit pricey for cheese. Another option is to make your own. It is a skill, not a recipe, but most mistakes are extremely edible and tasty.

The biggest obstacle is that you need a cheese cave to age the cheese. This can be a small dorm refrigerator with something like an inkbird temperature controller.

I do know one family that makes cheese and then just eat it without the aging. Store it in the refrigerator. They think it is much better than store bought.

People in the US are so trained by the food industry, that they do not know what good food is. Yogurt for example. Here is an experiment you can do at home if you want to disbelieve my statement.

Step #1 Make good yogurt and eat it.

1. Go buy a quart of milk, full fat. 2. Buy some yogurt culture. Bulgarian preferred. 3. Follow the directions. You need to keep the temp at around 110F, warm water bath, heating pad, hot water bottles, put it in a cooler, whatever.

This is one of the best foods there is.

Step 2. Go to your grocery store or stores and try to find some yogurt that is as good.

You can repeat these steps for other foods. Coffee - roast your own. Cheese. Just go to a gourmet cheese store. Get something that does not come in a plastic bag.

Or go to Europe and try real croissants. Everyone in Paris can get real croissants almost anywhere every day. And not to mention real bread - again the plastic bag.

We are so used to what is available here that we have come believe it is "food" when really it is just adulterated to have a long shelf life. Sorry, but really just try it.

It is interesting how opinionated people are. Personally, I think we just don't know enough to do a reasonable assessment. If we had some example of where a knob might be good and then try to understand whether it was good and if not, why not?

One of the issues (in my opinion) is how much control per pixel you get from a control. Certainly a knob has more control factors than a button. If nothing else you can click it and turn it. In the same size, a knob has much more control effect.

The other issue is how easily and comfortable a person can be using the control. This is complicated. If you see something on a screen that looks like something from the real world, then you have an idea of how to use it. And many of us became very comfortable with the old goofy Windows controls. But initial comfort is not necessary. Learned comfort is. If initially we don't know what it can do and how to use it, can we learn and once we do will we be comfortable?

It is not straight forward. The challenge I face is using a very small form factor - a mobile phone screen - to inter operate with complex systems and vast amounts of data.

The fact that it embodies more control factors in a small package makes it interesting.

This!!

It is trivial to set up a VPS with a git remote. Access it with ssh. Done. Git clone fred@fooda.com:/hubs/frog gets you hopping instantly.

I think the issue behind the curtain (attempt at an obscure reference to the wizard of oz) is lock in. And why is lock in such an issue all around us? Why is github so completely focused on lock in rather than service? Behind the curtain of lockin is funding. Paying for it. A business model.

Maybe centralization => lockin => money? Like gmail. Like github. Etc.

If you have no business model for service => money (and we do not!) then this is what you get.

[Edit: "funding" => "is funding"]

Recently I went down the rabbit hole of recursive tree maps. Walk a file system directory and assign a weight (size) to each directory recursively. Then present a tree map of each level. Click on "Users" then "fred", then "clones" for example.

Looking at this and seeing "lens" and "prisms" is at once both familiar and extremely odd. These Mondrian shapes are just like my recursive tree maps. Familiar. But the concept of lens and prism is not at all how I thought of them as I was repeatedly generating them.

It was interesting to look at what I was doing from a more formal perspective. Thanks! Yet at the same time I wish I could understand a practical use for this. How would it make things any better in my visual representation to use these concepts?

Personally, I find the whole idea of presenting a visual representation of masses of data interesting. There was a challenge a while back about how to represent the entire catalog of ISBN for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838

I personally believe it is worth exploring the idea of a different email realm for communities. The concept is pretty simple. Don't accept email from gmail, microsoft, hotmail or any other non-community member. Community members don't spam, don't send email in bulk and have reputation.

It is funded by pay-per-transgression. If you are a community member and someone receives unwanted email your reputation suffers. If you are gmail, et al you have to pay for each email sent & received.

Someone once wrote (let me know if you know the source) that users are not the customer, because they don't pay. It is advertisers who are the real email customers. This has resulted in a business model where users are prey animals. This is upside down and probably cannot be fixed without a hard fork.

I don't mean this is a good idea, or implementation. But I think it is a good direction.

I do not think "old" helps a discussion and probably impedes it. A better conversation is perhaps about what features we call "old" are good and desirable. Then how we can build a new, sustainable system with those features.

Unfortunately sustainable is somewhat equivalent to money. Whatever work you do, and even if you love it, in general it needs to have a functional business model. Businesses that can financially support the people who provide them, tend to continue.

Personally, I believe this is the fundamental problem with many of the things that we now fondly think of as "old". Google groups? What was the business model? Did it make money? How could you make money from doing something like that?

The fundamental business model IRL used to be "fee for service". Not lock in. Not subscription. It works, because if people want the service they can pay for it. Okay, so hint: what are the issues of implementing fee-for-service on the internet?

hint number 2: someone mentioned banner ads in a comment. Is that fee for service? If not, for extra credit, what would be the side effects of a banner ad type business model? Are there useful services that could be provided with an alternative business model. Etc.

What I was trying to get at was the concept of mutual benefit in thinking. For example, my thinking is better because of your comment. If we want to think together - create some good thought then the focus is on understanding, not influencing or manipulating.

But yes, you can and did influence me. Or perhaps more accurately, your thinking about this helped me think about it better and more clearly. Thanks!

The form of the question has assumptions that are broken.

The action of manipulating people is fairly obvious. It means you have a predetermined outcome that you want other people to accept The same assumption is implicit in the "How can I influence others..." Again there is the same predetermined outcome.

The answer then is obvious. You cannot. Perhaps what you are looking for is instead a way to join with other people in a participatory/collaborative fashion. You can ask what other people think, you can talk about what you think.

But as long as you have a predetermined outcome in mind, I suspect your only choices is manipulation.

You might also want to reassess what the question is. We talk about so much, but we do so little. Imagine that my car won't start and I want to fix it. The idea of influencing people here is silliness. We care very little about who thinks what, as long as the car starts. The thinking is in service of an action that produces a result.

In my opinion! :-)

[edit: fix wording, typos]

Meta is a corporation that is anti-democracy. In the US we have this thing called free speech. Requiring non-disclosure in order to get a severance (or to get a settlement for abuse) is not an excuse for doing this.

More and more corporations are resorting to the predatory practice of abusing the court system to protect their hide their actions. You may accept this kind of thing, I do not.

Is anyone interested in starting a community software development system?

Ownership, royalties, voting would be embedded in a block chain. Proof of work would be by vote. And votes given for proof of work. Or something like that. In music they have "royalties" and it seems like that could be used for contributors.

If you would like to be part of a discussion send an email to my firefox relay 3tdm026f9@mozmail.com

Feel free to use a relaly.

Except look at it from a phone. (Developer tools if you don't have a phone).

All I can think of is Microsoft === blue screen of death. Coming soon to your neighborhood.

Ads are propaganda. Propaganda is Ads. Ads = propaganda. Propaganda is a tool to persuade people. Are ads an attempt to persuade people?

So is it news that people are using ads/propaganda to persuade people? No. Will Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple do anything that will harm their revenue as propaganda platform? No.

Do Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple use propaganda? Yes.

This is like reading an article about how weapons from weapon companies are being weaponized.

Life is for living silly bear. I cannot imagine anything worse than getting to the end of your life and finally realizing you never lived it. That you wasted this once in a live time experience. But that is just me.

To give credit where it is due, the codepen is not mine, but from this page: https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/getting-started/examples from @react-three/fiber.

My guess, and only a guess, is that 3D is especially (only?) useful for navigation. As in moving around documents, panes, windows, etc.

As for "I wonder what it would feel like to use a whole note-taking app ..." The note taking is in some ways already done pretty well. So my current guess is that it is more the navigation that would benefit.

I don't really have answers, but I often feel like I live in 'flatland' these days.

The "what you think of them" part. I've been thinking hard about web site user interfaces, so not quite the same ballpark even. But, it struck me that we have all these 3D games where the navigation is ... well like adding another dimension. So why are we stuck in 2D so many places?

Here is a codepen example

https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/yup2o

of a word cloud using @react-three/fiber for example. Imagine if I could have a little cloud floating for navigating tmux. A cloud not of words but sessions, windows, panes or whatever. If I could then I move around the 3d cloud from the keyboard .... Just an idea

I wonder if DRM is useful for this. The problem: I want people to access my site, but not Google, not bots, not crawlers and certainly not for use by AI.

I don't really know anything about DRM except it is used to take down sites that violate it. Perhaps it is possible for cloudflare (or anyone else) to file a take down notice with Perplexity. That might at least confuse them.

Corporations use this to protect their content. I should be able to protect mine as well. What's good for the goose.

A very good example of SDF thinking, using signed distance fields in shaders. Both shaders and SDF are new to me and very interesting. Another example of what is being done is MSDF here: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen.

There is a real problem using canvas to replace HTML.

Not all but most HTML. I have not found a good solution for the issue of doing something like MDX in canvas. I have tried SDF, looked at 2D canvas Text, Troika, MSDF. You can get text, it is just that laying it out is very difficult. React three drei has the ability to put HTML into the threejs ecosystem, but there are issues about CSS and text that make that impractical.

For me the use case is very simple. I would like to take an MDX file and show it in a mesh. Laid out. Maybe I am missing something because I am new to the whole threejs thing, but I really tried.

A good article about text https://css-tricks.com/techniques-for-rendering-text-with-we...

And an example from the above article: https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/css-tricks-msdf-text-fks8w

This shows it can be done, I gave up trying to reproduce it in React-three-fiber.

Why? Personally, I think the use of 3D graphics produces an interface for users that is an order or magnitude better for users. The real question (and an interesting one to consider) is why are we still building HTML first websites?

Fish Tank Thinking is where your thinking is so constrained by some artificial walls that you cannot actually ... well actually think. It is the wages stupid. Let me repeat that. It is the wages stupid. What happens when a society is so brain washed that it cannot even consider that if you don't pay people they can't afford housing. Or cars. Or medical care. Or food.

If you actually have some desire to consider the problem rather than discuss how many angels can dance on a pin head, start with considering why "Inflation" is not a measure of anything thing, but rather the sound of one hand clapping. What is the other hand? Wages.

In this country rather than fixing wages we are discussing solutions that make things worse. Let us add tariffs so that people can buy less. Let's create tax incentives that create more housing people cannot afford, with the tax incentives coming out of the pockets of the people who cannot afford that housing.

The propaganda name for it is AI. I am not opposed to AI, I think it will have far reaching benefits for all of us. However, people are trying to make as much money from it as possible and so would like to influence how we think of it. If we consider it Intelligence then more people will throw more money at it. But it is not.

When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.

The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.

As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.

I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.

If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.

But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)

An alternative: http://imagequilts.com/

The link comes from Edward Tufte's web site.

These are at least related to Edward Tufte. If you scroll to the bottom there is information about installing a Chrome Extension (disclaimer: I do not use Chrome) that will generate an image quilt.

The author of the Extension is given as Adam Schwartz.

[edit: Chrome store link is https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/imagequilts/ceebcpb... ]

The answer is yes. The answer about how bad is really bad. We humans have never before understood how essential our innate collaboration is nor. Nor have we ever understood how fragile it is. Here are some thought experiments for you.

Take a colony of ants and destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. What happens?

Take a colony of ants and use the pheromone trail to generate "profit" for some of the ants at the cost of others.

Ants probably have little self consciousness. But add that awareness to them - essentially tell them they are being manipulated - and then perform the above two experiments again.

A good way to understand complex adaptive systems, like the ones we humans use, is to try to build some. See John Holland's "Hidden Order" for some hints on how to go about this.

An accurate diagnosis of a problem is crucial. The problem addressed here is real. The diagnosis is wrong. Big Tech enables the problem and certainly is associated with it. Societies rely on "messaging" to adapt. When messaging is broken, so is the society. The messaging in our social societies is now driven by targeted "advertising". Or more accurately propaganda: "communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade".

And certainly the big tech (here's looking at you Google and FaceBook et al) business model is propaganda. As is the business model of the Washington Post (here's looking at you Jeff Bezos) and the New York Times.

If the messaging in a society is used to persuade rather than listen things break. A simplistic model of is social insects. If ants can't leave a pheromone trail, or if some ants lead misleading trails, the colony will die. It will not be able to adapt.

Breaking up big tech is appealing, but it does not change the fact that we now "live" in the internet and that the current internet is a gigantic propaganda machine.

The force from curved folds can be used in other ways. If you score a sheet of copper in a curved line, then fold it along the score you get a twisted form. If you have some poster board handy you can use the same technique as well. Vessels!