467 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
    1. Douglas Engelbart, who published a vision of tools empowering humans in his pioneering 1962 paper Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.
    2. As the Victoria and Albert Museum present in A History of Computer Art,
    1. I got [[roller skates]] the other day. I'm stoked, they're white and have light up wheels

      I'm so glad for you! I've never used roller skates but I can imagine that feeling awesome.

    2. I'm sad that [[obsidian]] mobile has decided to go for a for-pay model for their beta android client. Oh well. I might end up buying a subscription, we'll see

      or we could develop etherpad-based agora node editing! ;)

      https://merveilles.town/web/statuses/105949849924261734

    3. Been playing with [[kde]] also known as [[plasma desktop]] nowadays. I've been using [[linux]] for over 20 years and never really gave it a proper chance, but with the right tweaks, I have faith it will work well

      same here! last time I used kde was around 2001. I liked many of the tools but back then kde felt very heavy; I settled on fluxbox and mostly gtk tools.

      have you tried wayland? I keep meaning to.

    4. Finally making a new note!

      welcome back, my friend! :D

    1. Whether a form-making process is selfconscious or unself­conscious, these misfit variables are always present, lingering in the background of the process, as thoughts in a designer's mind, or as actions, criticisms, failures, doubts

      This is a kind of synthesis and it feels suddenly like we're back on track after a disastrous detour :)

    2. adaptation

      So anti-Darwinist but rather [[Lamarckian]] :)

    3. But this explanation is vague hand-waving.25 It doesn't tell us what it is that prevents such adaptation from taking place successfully in the selfconscious culture, which is what we want to know most urgently

      A bit harsh perhaps :) Also the extra assumption (it isn't taking place successfully in "our" culture) is doing a lot of work.

    4. The teacher cannot refer ex­plicitly to each single mistake which can be made, for even if there were time to do so, such a list could not be learned.

      This is an interesting (perhaps) opposition to the earlier statement about listing misfits instead of fit.

      Underlying either is the problem of encoding information about useful models efficiently.

    5. specialization of any sort is rare, there are no archi­tects, and each man builds his own house.

      I wonder, then, why "specialized" and "unspecialized" aren't better terms.

    6. there are no general principles comparable to Alberti's treatises or Le Corbusier's.

      TODO: look up and link.

    7. we may distinguish between our own culture, which is very selfconscious about its architecture, art, and engineer­ing, and certain specimen cultures which are rather unself­conscious about theirs

      This seems to contradict the earlier statements about "the average developer", perhaps?

    8. The form has a dual co­herence. It is coherently related to its context. And it is physically coherent.

      Unsure how coherency is defined here, in particular in the second case.

    9. Mousgoum hut,
    10. Instead of orienting the house carefully for sun and wind, the builder conceives its organization without concern for orientation, and light, heat, and ventilation are taken care of by fans, lamps, and other kinds of peripheral devices.

      Reminds me of the cruft that arises around, and within, less well designed software libraries.

      Simple models vs epicycles.

    11. dymaxion house
    12. Mies Vander Rohe's Farnsworth house
    13. It is only through the form that we can create order in the ensemble.

      Unsure why/how the context is considered strictly unchangeable.

    14. We may summarize the state of each potential misfit by means of a binary variable.

      Not specified:

      1. How many variables there are. Can this be an infinite list?
      2. How do we model variables in conflict with each other.
      3. How do we model partial solutions? Are they interesting? Requiring strictly all zeroes seems to oppose this.
    15. such a list of require­ments is potentially endless

      Reminds me of requirements and tests; and the asymmetry between correct behavior and bugs.

      Also the problem of "inductive proofs".

    16. impossible

      Unclear to me this is the case.

    17. The context is that part of the world which puts demands on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context

      Context and form make demands of each other.

    18. D' Arcy Thompson

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Arcy_Wentworth_Thompson

      "Thompson is remembered as the author of the 1917 book On Growth and Form, which led the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns and body structures are formed in plants and animals."

    19. Francesco Algarotti

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Algarotti

      "a Venetian polymath, philosopher, poet, essayist, anglophile, art critic and art collector."

    20. Carlo Lodoli
    21. Vignola
    22. Jacques Fran�ois Blondel
    23. It is a way of reducing the gap between the designer's small ca­pacity and the great size of his task.

      Patterns as [[cognitive artifacts]]

    24. Two minutes with a pencil on the back of an envelope lets us solve problems which we could not do in our heads if we tried for a hundred years. But at present we have no corresponding way of simplifying design problems for ourselves.

      Paper and pencil yield expanded working memory and the means to run more complex algorithms.

    25. There are limits to the difficulty of a laboratory problem which he can solve; 5 to the number of issues he can consider simultaneously; 6 to the complexity of a decision he can handle wisely.7

      [[do]] review references

    26. But the burden of a thousand years falls heavily on one man's shoulders, and this burden has not yet materially been lightened.

      [[Complex systems]] without the right frameworks -> [[cognitive overload]] for the individual.

    27. the complexity of the problem will defeat us unless we find a simple way of writing it down, which lets us break it into smaller problems.
    28. functional diversity of materials makes for expensive and complicated joints between components,

      Very true in computer systems as well, obviously.

    29. he

      Predates neutral forms?

    30. If you understand the need to create independent diagrams, which re-

      I wonder if this applies to every person or only to the Christopher Alexanders of the world :)

      It could be an instance of the expert problem.

    31. Because the diagrams are .independent of one another, you can study them and improve them one at a time, so that their evolution can be gradual and cumulative. More important still, because they are abstract and independent, you can use them to create not just one design, but an infinite variety of designs, all of them free combinations of the same set of patterns.

      This also applies to [[modules]] in computer systems; and to [[functions]] in programming languages in the functional paradigm (as these are self-contained and side-effect-free).

    1. First time journaling in awhile. I took a break to gather my thoughts. I think I'll start writing here again for [[mental health]] purposes. I feel like there is a certain degree of [[self care]] in this

      I'm so glad you're back! It warms my heart. I missed your posts.

      Can I help you with anything?

  2. Feb 2021
    1. Really, Emacs (and EXWM) are partial solutions to a more systemic issue -- the way in which the Unix philosophy has lost its way on the modern Linux system.

      [[unix philosophy]]

    1. What are things that I want/wish/dream for? What am I (dis)satisfied with in life, on a personal, interpersonal, and societal level? What are the possibilities that I can imagine, for the near future or the present, of how “reality” could be different? What factors condition and inform my relationship to these questions? What are processes by which I can shape my interaction with these questions? In particular, what kinds of processes are there beyond a self-reflective, discursive approach -- e.g. through actionable experiments and interpersonal interactions?

      [[protopoi]]

    1. how do we store data? if we push data to the agora more than once for same user for same wikilink does it override the note?
      1. Could be dumped by the bridge in format one .md per tweet by default and stored in an agora-managed repo, or volunteered by the user in this format if they run the [[siphon]] themselves.

      2. By default each tweet is a separate subnode, all pushed; you can push many times to a subnode. We could aggregate and present in one dedicated subnode though.

    1. The Timeless Way of Building is the first in a series of books which describe an entirely new attitude to architec- ture and planning. The books are intended to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about ar- chitecture, building, and planning—~an alternative which will, we hope, gradually replace current ideas and practices,

      [[the timeless way of building]]

    1. No Yoga Robots

      So called because [[adriene mishler]] utters these words.

    1. No Yoga Robots

      So called because [[adriene mishler]] utters these words.

    1. in spite of logging thousands of hours, having a strong reading habit and being almost driven to books, I realised that I’m still really bad at the process of learning from books. What I excel at is the very efficient consumption of text content. And tragically, that is what we are all trained to optimise for. 

      I feel you, and I think recognizing this is definitely a step in the right direction. I think social media like formats and dynamics for non-fiction might be a great space to explore.

  3. Jan 2021
    1. Under John, the empire's population recovered to about 10 million people.[2] The quarter-century of John II's reign is less well recorded by contemporary or near-contemporary writers than the reigns of either his father, Alexios I, or his son, Manuel I. In particular little is known of the history of John's domestic rule or policies.[a]

      10 million people in Byzantium in the 12th Century.

    1. Oura Ring: the most accurate sleep and activity tracker

      I know someone that works there.

    1. Evaluate how I want to deal with the 'TODOs' in my wiki

      I'm trying to define a 'root' for all my TODOs. In my case it's anagora.org/node/do.

      A work in progress though.

    2. Set up matrix, hosting both the web app and the server, on my VPS configuration

      Nice! I currently use matrix.org, was thinking of setting up a matrix server for anagora.org though.

    1. Morges.

      Esta es una idea a la que quiero volver. Es un poco tonta quizás pero me parece graciosa.

  4. Nov 2020
    1. The recipes inside are less like GPS directions and more like a hand-drawn map that only gives the scenic route from A to B.

      A bit beside the point, but note that maps as tools are superior to GPS when it comes to building skills that are not dependent on the presence of the tool proper for a particular purpose. In other words, you can reason about maps, memorize them through use, and then navigate better in an area without them. Maps are complementary cognitive artifacts, whereas GPS are competitive.

  5. May 2020
    1. John II Komnenos or Comnenus (Greek: Ίωάννης Βʹ Κομνηνός, Iōannēs II Komnēnos; 13 September 1087 – 8 April 1143) was Byzantine emperor from 1118 to 1143. Also known as "John the Beautiful" or "John the Good" (Kaloïōannēs), he was the eldest son of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and Irene Doukaina and the second emperor to rule during the Komnenian restoration of the Byzantine Empire. John was a pious and dedicated monarch who was determined to undo the damage his empire had suffered following the battle of Manzikert, half a century earlier.

      Testing note writing.

    1. I became fascinated by Michel Foucault’s notion of working on the self as a work of art.

      Nice, I was not aware of this facet in Foucult.

    2. Designing and hosting as many world variations as the number users of an interactive platform would be beyond impractical.

      It's unclear to me if this is the case; or at least it might not longer be the case after discovering the right generation/composition techniques?

    1. Recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory [12] and gated recurrent [7] neural networksin particular,

      Trying PDF annotations.

    1. https://vvvvalvalval.github.io/posts/what-makes-a-good-repl.html

      TODO: watch this.

    2. Datomic

      TODO: look this up.

    3. If your dinky little JS bundle is scraped by Google or the Internet Archive, it’s going to be remembered forever.

      Very true; often unappreciated insight that makes it so that a lot of what we do online has effectively unbounded potential for impact.

    4. guys

      This is gendered language -- this piece would be improved, IMO, by using "people" or some other neutral alternative.

    1. Got here via @codexeditor, who mentioned him as at odds with Wittgenstein.

    1. The Wittgenstein Protocol is a convention for lightweight distributed cognition. Flancia (talk) Any block of text within any text can be marked as following the Wittgenstein protocol by its mention or use within some particular scoping. Each line in a body of text following the Wittgenstein protocol is an assertion in the style of the writings of wikipedia:Ludwig Wittgenstein. Flancia (talk) Each top level assertion shall be signed. Signature implies not ownership, but endorsement of the assertion. Flancia (talk) Each assertion may be signed. Note that in Wiki systems you can sign by writing three tildes: ~~~ More than one user may sign any assertion. Assertions at the same level may contradict each other if they are marked as at odds explicitly in prose or by convention. Flancia (talk) Assertions cannot contradict their parent assertions. The Wittgenstein protocol can be used with an optional Garbage Collection rule. Assertions without signatures are removed after some length of time. Flancia (talk) This allows for unsupported claims (mistaken or deprecated) to expire and be phased out of the system. Flancia (talk)

      It'd be great if highlights included numbers -- this format does not include most of the information in this block.