Currently I use Obsidian to make note of a few key things, but what I'm more excited about is that the way tech is evolving is going to allow us much more expansive solutions for personal knowledge-bases. Eg: See what Perkeep tried to do.
Here's an idea: We should be able to record the full experience stream (or just the laptop screen, let's say) for a person -- digitize it suitably (eg. pull out all the text, or tokenize it with a VLM, etc), attach some metadata, and have the whole database ready for a person to query / play with, using powerful LLMs.
To the extent that you can store everything and perform effective recall/search, it obviates the need to carefully "pre-process" bits by noting them down in the right file, tagging them appropriately, adding metadata, etc. All of which should make for a much nicer UX.
Given the Jevons' paradox though -- I wouldn't be surprised if our experience stream becomes so dense/rich that storing everything and querying from it eventually becomes prohibitively expensive. We would then have to construct pre-processing rules to prune the stream, and amortize the cost of certain deductions by performing them at data ingestion time instead of repeating it for each query. It's all just the basic principles of system design at the end of the day, and how systems need to be rearranged as various component capabilities (and user needs) scale.
> Side musing follows: I dont know what the solution to identity is on the Internet.
I was fond of how Keybase brought to life [1] identity proofs (linking and validating your different online identities) in a very easy to use platform. Pity it went away; feels like a loss for the internet.
Right, but I want to validate my identity for cases where it is important to me. I also want to prevent others from assuming my identity in cases where it doesn't really matter (until it does). My identity here is not the same identity use on Reddit. At the same time being erroneously linked to someone else's posts on Reddit because they use this username could be a real problem. At he same time, I don't necessarily want my posts here to be linked to posts at Reddit or X or wherever. Rinse and repeat across thousands of web sites.
It's a problem with no easy solutions. In part, because no two users want exactly the same solution.
In Norway we have multiple national id providers. The banks have one called BankID which is what I mostly use, but there are other alternatives. These can be used somewhat interchangeably across different applications like my online bank, tax website, healthcare website, investment platforms, pretty much everything. I can also use it to sign contracts.
For example, I always use email login, never a phone number or Github or Facebag, and I barely have a presence on Google's panopticon, so never with my Google account. If a site demands it I just don't use it.
I also pay Fastmail to host my domain email, so that really helped get off Google. Yeah I gotta remember to renew every 10 years or whatever, plus $15/yr for fastmail; but what's the other option, I learn some SMTP package? No thanks.
Thanks for the helpful summary. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine what the courts could do differently in this case.
Regardless of whether Proton mail is a useful service with a principled stance, their refusal to engage under a sovereign legal system makes them simply “ungovernable” from the perspective of any sovereign government (lacking any relevant arbitration treaties). The only natural reaction seems to be to unperson them from engaging in transactions within the land. What other options does any sovereign government have when an entity simply refuses to engage?
It would be a different situation if Proton mail appeared in Indian court and argued why these details must be protected (within the contours of Indian law).
We take for granted the freedom to send bits anywhere in the world, and forget that we have an intricate system of decentralized governance (countries with local sovereignty, treaties, etc) in the physical world to regulate our ability to ship atoms around the world. As much as we all like our freedom, (and maybe exactly for that reason) decentralized self-governance feels like a value we ought to uphold.
And what about when `bar` takes several inputs? Postfix seems like an ugly hack that hyper-fixates on functions of a single argument to the detriment of everything else.
It's not like postfix replaces everything else. You can still do foo(bar, baz) where that makes the most sense.
However, experience shows that functions having one "special" argument that basically corresponds to grammatical subject in natural languages is such a common case that it makes sense for PLs to have syntactic sugar for it.
Look at the last line in the example, where I show a method being called on a tuple. Postfix syntax isn't limited to methods that take a single argument.
I think moldable development needs a few tutorials demonstrating concrete use cases. Without those it feels promising in the abstract, but I doubt many developers are able to connect with it and figure out how to actually use it.
It feels so open ended that I wouldn’t know where to start. And I’ve actually spent several hours exploring Glamorous Toolkit!
Thank you for the interest and for taking the time to explore the environment!
There are quite a number of videos and explanations now, but we are still struggling to package them in a way that seems more approachable.
We would need help with this. If you are interested, I would offer to have a session with you that we record and in which we go through your questions and I provide live explanations. Join us on Discord and we take it from there: https://discord.gg/FTJr9gP
This shouldn’t have been the least bit surprising — since this is what happened to every mass communication technology over the past few centuries: print, then radio, then television. The OG computing folks at Xerox PARC indeed foresaw all this, and McLuhan wrote about this in the 50s/60s.
Why is it a jab at physics? It's honest and beautiful -- I imagine this is exactly what an experience on the cutting edge of experiment is like! :D
Making this measurement (an ancient discovery) with latest equipment is easy, but imagine what it might have been like for the people who actually discovered this property of germanium. Our tools/probes cannot advance much faster than our understanding of a (related) subject -- we are constantly inventing/improvising tools using cutting edge scientific knowledge from a related field.
I mean if you didn't already know how to solder to Germanium crystals you would have had to spend months experimenting with the material before you could get leads to stick.
Soldering a lead to a germanium crystal typically involves using a gold-germanium solder alloy (like 88% gold, 12% germanium) due to its compatibility and good bonding properties
Plus you'd need to decide how to get a good thermal connection to set the temperature of the crystal - maybe via one big lead?
Being in the future makes some things simpler?
The little experience I've had with lab physicists showed they needed a good ability to build, debug and maintain their own equipment. You can't always rely on technicians.
In most but the very richest physics research groups there are no such thing called technicians.
Except for shared equipment in centralized managed facilities like the nanofabs, even there you need to tune your own recipe...
To elaborate — the task definition itself is vague enough that any evaluation will necessarily be vibes based. There is fundamentally no precise definition of correctness/reliability.
Why is it a good model to allow some software engineer "at a distance" to enforce whether some downstream user must drop every other priority and upgrade?
I agree that attitudes towards security are generally very poor, but breaking working infrastructure sounds like a crazy practice. Like any sensible system, a good/robust design should allow staged upgrades / hot reloading for anything but a very tiny core of critical functionality. Erlang/BEAM is a great example; it just requires software engineering to adopt a different mindset.
> Why is it a good model to allow some software engineer "at a distance" to enforce whether some downstream user must drop every other priority and upgrade?
It's not a good model, and that's why this only forced in commercial software or in particularly obnoxious projects, like earlier versions of Ubuntu Snap. Every other case is user's choice - package managers have lock files; automated updates can be disabled; docker images can be referenced by SHA; etc...
That's not to say that infrastructure does not break - there plenty of horrible setups out there... but if you discover you "must drop every other priority and upgrade", then maybe spend some time making your infra more stable? Commit that lockfile (or start saving dev docker containers, if you can't), stop auto-deploying latest changes and make sure you keep previous builds around, instead of blaming software ecosystem and upstream authors.
> I agree that attitudes towards security are generally very poor, but breaking working infrastructure sounds like a crazy practice.
Yes, breaking infrastructure is bad. But letting already broken infrastructure continue can be worse.
The point is that we want a better way to detect when breaking changes happen so that security fixes can be applied without breaking anything, while permitting optional upgrades on our own schedule for other features. There doesn't seem to be a great solution yet, it's either "it never breaks but you're possibly vulnerable to security issues that can't be easily patched", or "things can break at any time due to updates so we have to manually verify this doesn't happen".
Yeah, though 'jcelerier brought up a case where "insecure" behavior is a feature, and the more "secure" design is directly incompatible with it. These cases of breakage can't easily be solved though better coding, and are not random mistakes - there's a fundamental incompatibility that needs to be resolved.
> Yeah, though 'jcelerier brought up a case where "insecure" behavior is a feature, and the more "secure" design is directly incompatible with it
I don't think it's fundamentally incompatible with a secure design though, you just need to reify the authority to do those things so you can explicitly grant them to specific programs as appropriate.
That seems a little melodramatic, particularly since your only other options are that every untrusted program can access every authority like capturing every keystroke, or all programs are effectively neutered.
"World ending" is not the only valid security metric. Lots of viruses, worms and security vulnerabilities have. This is increasingly untenable as more of people's lives are in data.
Here's an idea: We should be able to record the full experience stream (or just the laptop screen, let's say) for a person -- digitize it suitably (eg. pull out all the text, or tokenize it with a VLM, etc), attach some metadata, and have the whole database ready for a person to query / play with, using powerful LLMs.
To the extent that you can store everything and perform effective recall/search, it obviates the need to carefully "pre-process" bits by noting them down in the right file, tagging them appropriately, adding metadata, etc. All of which should make for a much nicer UX.
Given the Jevons' paradox though -- I wouldn't be surprised if our experience stream becomes so dense/rich that storing everything and querying from it eventually becomes prohibitively expensive. We would then have to construct pre-processing rules to prune the stream, and amortize the cost of certain deductions by performing them at data ingestion time instead of repeating it for each query. It's all just the basic principles of system design at the end of the day, and how systems need to be rearranged as various component capabilities (and user needs) scale.
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