tgflynn

I suspect a lot of it is historical. If you go back a few years there were lots of browser incompatibilities and many limitations in Javascript, CSS and HTML. To work around those difficulties and limitations many frameworks were created. Today many of the limitations of the basic technologies have been fixed but the frameworks are still here, though probably less necessary than ever. But once people have gotten used to doing things a certain way (for example using jquery instead of querySelector) they tend not to change.

This isn't unique to web development. The same thing happened with C++ and Boost, for example, where gradually the language and standard library evolved to include functionality that previously required 3rd party libraries.

But I think far more work and money has been invested in web development than other areas, hence creating a bigger mess.

My impression is that the actual user experience of most web sites, including the big ones like Amazon, has improved very little over the last decade, so it feels like all the effort put into web technologies has, so far at least, not produced a lot of value.

It's really not that hard to learn the Greek alphabet. It's just 24 letters almost all of which represent sounds common in English. I'm currently learning the devanagari script for Sanskrit, which isn't exactly an alphabet, and it's a much steeper climb, though I think I'm making progress.

Thanks, I've actually looked at that a bit (though there seem to be some recent additions I hadn't seen). It seems like a somewhat different experience. With the Latin version there seems to be enough vocabulary overlap that I, knowing only English and French, could pretty much follow along with very little help. I guess there's less vocabulary overlap between English and Sanskrit so it's a bit harder. It's very good to have the web interface where you can click on a word to get the translation. One thing that would be nice to have, since I'm also learning devanagari, would be to have the popup include the romanized text when the main script is set to devanagari.

My vote would be for Sanskrit, though I'm very pleased a Greek version exists.

> Just curious, how do you reference the source material in the notes?

It hasn't been much of a problem. With PDF's you can either copy/rewrite the actual content or note page numbers and/or chapter and section headings.

Usually I'm able to find good enough source materials that those become my primary references anyway and the notes are just for some specific points that aren't so well explained.

Nonetheless I find that taking some notes helps focus the learning process.

It also depends on the type of material you are learning. For many subjects there will be some kind exercise or other work product that captures most of the skill based knowledge. For example if you're learning a programming language you'll usually be writing a lot of small programs. For math, if you're studying it fairly seriously, you'll probably have worked exercises, which I like to do in latex, either in the org file or in separate files.

I've never tried to learn how to design a CPU but I think designing one on an FPGA is enough like programming that I would treat it the same as learning any other programming language or software technology. I would probably jump right into to doing practical circuits in VHDL or Verilog as soon as I had the basic knowledge needed. I wouldn't spend a lot of time on learning the theory since that will probably become much easier to understand once you get into actual projects.

I've been spending some time studying several different subjects so I'll try to describe my approach. This is mostly just a hobby for me so I don't have any real criteria for evaluating how well it works but so far I feel reasonably satisfied with it.

For every subject I create a subdirectory for downloaded resources and an emacs org mode file for my notes. Unlike you I much prefer typing notes to handwriting. For math you can use latex and display previews inline in your org buffer. The only disadvantage is for drawings. I don't currently have a good way to capture those.

Generally my first step with a new subject is to try to find good online resources for it. That usually ends up being a collection of websites, PDF files that I download and YouTube videos. I often include links to websites and videos in my org file.

Next I try to get an overview of the subject and what particular topics I think I'll need to get an understanding of to reach my goals. I typically create sections or subsections in the org file for those areas.

When watching or reading content questions usually come up about things I don't fully understand. I try to write those down in the org file and at some point find information that helps to answer those questions, which of course I also note.

I don't try to take lots of notes or copy everything in the resources I read. I'll just note points that seem interesting, surprising, important, difficult and/or easily forgotten.

I'm not sure any of this will help you but that's my basic methodology.

One other thing you might want to look into are spaced repetition apps like Anki. I haven't personally made much use of them yet but I think they should help with subjects where there's a lot of material that needs to be memorized.

Keeping the same safe houses or reporting structures in place for 60 years seems like it would be terrible OPSEC. The IC is very good at coming up with plausible sounding explanations for why they have to keep secrets that the masses will believe without question but that don't stand up to deeper reflection.

I suspect the remaining redactions are because they're waiting for certain people to pass away. Probably not major players but there could be people who were in their 20's or 30's in 1963 who had some knowledge of what happened. Once they've all died off it will be forever impossible to prove anything because anything really damning would never have been written down or the records would have been destroyed years ago.

With respect to advaita vedanta I would recommend the YT videos of Swami Sarvapriyananda. All of his longer talks on advaita say more or less the same thing so recommending a single video is more difficult, but this may be a particularly good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EijmfagFw20. The main figure of classical advaita is Adi Shankara. You can probably find some translated/commented texts of his in book form.

If you mean more generally the whole of classical Indian philosophical thought it is really a vast subject of which I have barely begun to scrape the surface, so there's not a lot I can recommend there. I'm mostly still at the stage of reading related wikipedia articles.

EDIT: One more thing I should add is that there were also heterodox schools which explicitly rejected some or all of the assumptions of Hinduism (such as reincarnation). For example Charvaka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka) was a materialist school.

I don't know anything about the situation in India but I can give you a few reasons why I, as a westerner, am fascinated by the language.

First the depth and clarity of thinking by ancient and medieval Indian scholars writing in Sanskrit in relation to key philosophical and existential questions is extraordinary. Personally I am currently inclined to think that the advaita vedanta tradition may have the most accurate understanding of the nature of consciousness I have yet seen. Moreover this tradition is largely based on purely logical arguments, which, while perhaps not 100% convincing to a modern reader, are I think definitely worth exploring.

The above points are perhaps not unrelated to certain features of the Sanskrit language itself, which seems to have a logical structure that is rare or unheard of in other natural languages. The existence of such structure is in large part due to the work of Panini 2500 years ago, as mentioned in the article, but also to later followers who developed a register of Sanskrit that can be compared to modern frameworks for knowledge representation, as discussed in this paper: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466.

The question is whether once ignition is achieved there could be a way to design the target/geometry in such a way that the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining/self-propagating.

The history of thermonuclear weapons leads me to think that the answer may be yes. There does not seem to be any real upper limit to how large a thermonuclear weapon can be made. In the 50's and/or 60's there were proposals to build GT devices. I don't think the fission trigger for such a weapon could have scaled by nearly as much.

So by analogy if a relatively small fission trigger can cause a fusion explosion that is many orders of magnitudes larger maybe one or more tiny laser induced fusion reactions could be used to trigger a much larger one.

If that were the case the efficiency of the laser trigger would be of little importance.

I think it's mainly because using a laser the size of a football stadium was never seen as a practical way to make a bomb.

Yes but, as far as I know, research into achieving laser induced fusion hasn't itself run into many classification hurdles. I suspect that may not be the case with the scaling phase.

The advantage would be that you wouldn't need tightly controlled and hard to make materials like U-235 or Pu to make one.

I'm not in any way saying that using lasers would be a plausible route to such a weapon, since the NIF facility is huge, but if it turns out that the research needs to focus on how to get more output per shot, which I think it inevitably would since a typical conventional or nuclear power plant generates on the order of 1 GW thermal power (To match that with a 1 Hz repetition rate, likely a stretch for a MJ class laser, you would need to generate 1 GJ per shot, comparable to the energy in a ton of TNT.), it would probably be touching on areas that are highly classified.

I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones.

I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may encounter national security related obstacles. Obviously a pure fusion bomb would be a game changer for nuclear (non-)proliferation.

> No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered.

That seems like a rather bold claim to make. I don't think anyone could really do that without having studied those subjects deeply. Did you study mathematics at a University and just didn't complete a degree or are you completely self-taught ?

"had a duty to bring the idea to market within the time frame that US patent law required, which they then did"

Do you have a reference for that ? I've never heard of any such "duty". There are many patents that have never been implemented yet remain valid.

Beyond that my point is not that they didn't show the "how" but that the "how" in that case was absolutely trivial and completely undeserving of patent protection.

Yes, but that's the opposite situation to many software patents. If air conditioners didn't yet exist you shouldn't be able to patent just the idea of an air conditioner without coming up with an effective design for one.

The One Click patent would be like patenting just the idea of an air conditioner because once you have that idea any software developer worth his salt could implement it.

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with patents is that it has become possible to patent the "what" instead of the "how". In most cases the "what" is obvious, it's the "how" that's hard.

An example would be the Amazon One-Click patent. That should never have been granted because the "what", ie. the basic idea, is obvious and once you have that the implementation is trivial.

To get a patent you should at least have to describe a method for solving a non-trivial problem and prove that it actually works.

The real lunatics are the ones claiming you can shut down production of internal combustion engines and the use of fossil fuels overnight and long before equivalent alternatives are available without causing societal collapse and the humanitarian disasters that will entail.

Stuff has been injected into the atmosphere by both humans and non-human processes since the beginning. I don't think this is likely to cause irreparable damage. What man has broken man can fix.

The anti-human ideology of environmentalism needs to end or mankind probably will.

The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans.

Yes, I you're right. I misinterpreted "pure quantum states" as "basis states" (I'm not much in the habit of thinking about QM these days). I believe the "(i.e. as a density matrix)", which makes my mistake more obvious, was added after I commented.

You may well be right. I haven't read that book, though I have found much of Aaronson's writing to be quite approachable. But I think your previous comment was an inaccurate way of phrasing those critiques.

No, the fact that what you said is not true is basically the core concept of quantum mechanics.

EDIT: As another comment pointed out I was wrong about this, please ignore.

> assuming you meant a general audience without a background in high school mathematics

Why assume that ? Isn't the whole point of high school to provide a basic foundation of knowledge that everyone should have ?

The parent comment said “quite approachable for the non-expert” not “quite approachable for the uneducated”.

> You could much more precise captors

What do you mean by that ? There are only so many particles of ionizing radiation traversing a given surface per unit time (fortunately for us).

I don't know much about "modern philosophy" but traditionally philosophy has focused on questions that are beyond or "prior to" scientific questions. For example modern science (which used to be called Natural Philosophy) is based on empiricism. The question of the extent to which empiricism is a valid means of gaining knowledge is a philosophical question, as is the question "what is knowledge". Both belong to the philosophical specialty of epistemology, which means the study of knowledge.

Another major area is the philosophy of mind which includes questions such as "what is consciousness" and "does consciousness arise from matter".

All the studies cited were performed on psychology students. Would the results be the same for physics or CS students ?

I'm guessing No/Low-Code platforms and PWA's. AI and robotics will make a real showing at some point but I'm not sure when.

I doubt they'd get along and I think the fault would be more on the monkeys side than the cats.

All biological life feeds on death. It's a self-devouring hell.