sunday_serif's comments

I don’t have any numbers on hand, but I have to imagine this would also reduce a lot of waste.

I didn’t realize until recently that almost all billboards are made of a thick plastic vinyl material.

I recently saw one of these billboards folded up on the ground before it went up. It’s just a giant chunk of plastic that I imagine ends up in some landfill somewhere.

Not so long ago, I was traveling around Switzerland. During my time in the country, there was always something just a little off, and I couldn’t place what it was.

Was it cleaner? Was the architecture just very modernist? Did it have something to do with the season?

Eventually, I realized that the difference I was noticing between Switzerland and California (my home state) was that there was simply much less advertising in the physical spaces of cities.

I am not sure if this is a result of some legislature there or if it is just a result of the way the Swiss think about visual design and advertising.

But I absolutely loved it. It was so refreshing to see the beauty of a city block without being bombarded by advertisements.

It really lets the character of a city shine through.

LA, SF and Sac seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum… practically the only thing you notice are the billboards.

Happened at around unix time -15 trillion

Everything is political. Anything you do will be considered political to someone somewhere :shrug:

Being on the platform is considered political to some and leaving the platform is considered political to others.

All things considered, I think they did fine by not making a big fuss about it. They don't seem to be looking for pats on the back.

Interesting read! Thanks for sharing.

For others who are curious, the article says the global cooling effect is on the geological timescale (millions of years).

Over the holidays, my family and I were discussing something like this… one of my family members had an interesting hypothesis.

He suggested dissatisfaction is probably at about the same level that it always has been, but people on average are more accustomed to and capable of articulating their feelings than before.

For me, the takeaway is less about why these movements are popular and more about how our perception of past events differs from our perception of current events.

The experiment (to me) shows that what appears appalling and repulsive in hindsight can feel appealing, exciting and positive in the present.

But, ultimately, this wasn't really an experiment. There was no hypothesis, and so any "results" or "conclusions" from this are going to be subjective. Doesn't mean it isn't interesting though!

edits: bad grammar

A good idea is a good idea, regardless of where it comes from.

Scratch wasn’t my first “encounter” per say, but I did write my first non-trivial program with scratch. Everything else before that was just tinkering.

In high school (2010s) I was familiar with programming from the outside in. I remember knowing that Ruby on Rails was a big thing. I had tried to learn ruby a handful of times and got lost in the process. I was super excited about wine because it helped me play boot leg video games on my old MacBook. I liked to try and read about how wine worked, but it was way over my head.

Enter scratch: the first real program I wrote was a scratch game in a high school computer science class called “glub run”! It was a little Mario like side scroller in which a little green blob (the glub) would run along the and try to get little coins.

It was a lot of work to get it all setup, and definitely went way beyond what was expected of us for the class, but I just had so much fun with it! Building a whole interactive 2d world from just a bunch of linear gui code blocks was mind bending to me. To be honest, the block based gui code was more of a hindrance than a help.

That was pretty much the extent of my time with scratch, we quickly moved to using a canned version of Java with some other little GUI attached. To be honest, it took me a long time to write another program of that same complexity as glub run. Maybe it was my magnum opus.

Why was scratch so great: Reflecting on it now, the best advantage of scratch was that there was no setup involved. You just clicked new and were off and going! (This is what I imagine BASIC was back in the day). Every other programming language had way too much fluff around it that made it really hard to get started. You needed a system for managing dependencies, you needed a system for managing versions of the language, then everyone said you needed all these libraries to go with the language. As a beginner, it was a total non-starter. For the longest time, I didn’t understand where the lines were between the language, the framework, and the tooling. Scratch avoided all of that and let you actually just build a program!

So even though I never returned to it, scratch is where the rubber hit the road for me so to speak! First time I had that feeling that I could actually create something novel with software! Been happily programming for the petter part of the last decade since!

Thank you for the recommendation! I will add that to my list. So far, the following 3 books have been very useful to me (in the following order).

1. Propositions and Predicate Calculus by Derek Goldrei: The first 3 chapters in this book helped me learn propositional logic and helped me learn the basic ideas about the relationship between models and logical statements (syntax vs. semantics). For some reason, this book's transition from propositional logic to first order logic left me in a daze, so I started up on the book below.

2. A friendly Introduction to Mathematical Logic by Christopher C Leary and Lars Kristiansen: The first 2 chapters of this book were a great way to see a fully fledged axiomatic first order proof system in action. They do a great job of setting up a complete proof system with all the gory detail. But this book only focuses on axiomatic proof systems before moving on to results about compactness and incompleteness. While the precision of this book is one of its best strengths, I found myself getting lost in the specifics of the particular axiomatic proof system they create. Felt like I was missing the forest for the trees a bit... and I wanted to learn more about other proof systems as well. This lead me to the book below.

3. Intermediate Logic By David Bostock: This book is a bit less rigorous than the previous two. It is more focused on philosophers than on mathematicians. For me though, this was a welcome change. Chapters 4 - 7 of this book are very useful because they develop 4 different proof systems. Semantic tableau (ch. 4), Axiomatic (ch. 5), Natural Deduction (ch. 6) and Sequent Calculus (ch. 7). This is the book that really helped the idea of formal proof "click". I don't think it would have been as effective had I not worked on the more rigorous previously mentioned books first though.

What excites me most about the book you mention is the connection to lambda calculus. That has been completely absent from the books I have read so far. Also excited to dive into it after seeing an article from quanta yesterday on HN about the Curry-Howard isomorphism connecting lambda calculus and types to proof systems.

Thanks!

I am currently trying to learn formal logic and proof systems.

I’ve always been interested in learning higher level math, but was consistently mystified by the proofs. I could always come around to understand them, but I never understood how the authors knew that proof method was “allowed”.

Learning about the formal proof systems has been a very interesting diversion for me. It has helped me begin to understand the foundations of the math subjects I am interested in and definitely has upped my confidence reading intricate proofs.

But perhaps the best outcome of this learning has been that I now have a much stronger framework for sound reasoning. It is easier for me to express and argument clearly or pin down a shortcomings in other arguments.

It is unclear to me how applicable these learnings will be for my primary interest in software development, but it has been a very enlightening process nevertheless.

We have rank choice voting in my city and it is amazing. I was effectively able to vote for my two favorite candidates who have very similar views with no fear of splitting a vote.

Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.

When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”

This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.

Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting

We have already introduced so many automations into our lives in the past century. People from 100 years ago would assume that, with the tools we have today, we already would have reached “fully automated luxury communism”. But instead, we fall short of that utopia.

The growth in consumption seems to always ever so slightly outpace innovation.

A result of this relationship between consumption and innovation seems to be that there is always some drudgery for humans right beyond the edge of what we can automate. The drudgery serves to eek just a bit more out of the system in order to match the demands of consumption.

Tomorrows drudgery will not look like todays, but it will remain drudgery all the same.

I am no philosopher, and only an amateur mathematician…

But to me it seems that even when you consider math as just being language… you still run into the same philosophical problem when you consider what the semantics of that language are.

For example, you may believe that the practice of algebra is simply operations on stings of a language. But when you start asking what objects those sentences refer to, you end up asking what math is again.

On Exactitude in Science By Jorge Luis Borges

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

source: https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf

Telling of what?

Not trying to be snarky, I am genuinely curious.

Booooooooo

This has always been a favorite day dream of mine.

I think all of us have some sort of fantasy in which we invent something which changes the world, makes us famous for generations to come, or something like that.

I always noodle on something like this. some new technology which makes the carbon in the air an asset to humanity.

But, of course, I know nothing about physics, material science, energy, or chemistry… and so it will remain a fantasy for me!

I think this is a really beautiful little concept.

While I imagine this being very interesting for circles formed around some topic matter, I can also imagine this as a nice way to carry forward small friend groups.

I’m imagining socials circles that existed in college would be very nice in this format. A simple low pressure way to keep in touch while also continuing to learn with and from each other.

Can anyone recommend a resource on how linkers work other than the "Linkers and Loaders" book? Maybe a linker repo that is easier to read through, or a more modern book or series of articles on the topic?

No shame on the book, it is a classic, but it is certainly a bit long in the tooth.

I am very interested in linkers, but find them a bit inaccessible to learn about.