4 ms·

That was slightly irritating; what is more irritating (notwithstanding the obvious best intentions of the project!) is the seemingly widespread notion that typo

That was slightly irritating; what is more irritating (notwithstanding the obvious best intentions of the project!) is the seemingly widespread notion that typography has much to do with Wirth's work. It would be as if the people in Plato's cave, instead of contrasting the outside and inside, were to obsess over which section of cave wall had the most pleasing texture over which the shadows might play...

kragen 3y ago
experienced buddhist meditators famously sometimes meditate despite chilblains, or incense burning on their scalps, or being aflame with gasoline, or starving themselves to death over a period of months but if you try to begin your practice of buddhist meditation with incense burning on your scalp, you probably will not get very far; you will probably quit. instead, beginning meditation focuses on finding the pleasure in relaxing in a comfortable position, even though that is clearly not what motivates more experienced meditators (and of course you're aware old don and old ed (rip) spent a lot of effort on typography, though they sometimes understood wirth's work better than he did himself)
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Good point. I don't think I ever showed you, but when I was playing around with adjoint representations, I came up with an adjoint between plaintext files and PDF, such that (non-ultimate) lines in the PDF would display fully justified, but a simple filter (that did not model the PDF format itself) sufficed to recover the original plaintext file. That didn't seem very useful, but as you point out, maybe making things prettier is worthwhile (and enabling reversibility so one could always retrieve the lighter representation given only the prettier one would satisfy my technological anabaptism); if it were useful to do so maybe I should try with .gmi (although the vertical layout issues here would keep pagination from being as straightforward...)?
  - kragen 3y ago
    this sounds wonderful! i don't know what adjoint representations are yet, though, and i haven't looked at the gemini format; i hear vague echoes of how my handaxeweb would happily extract indented lines from markdown files, html files, postscript files, you name it... though i haven't tried pdf. what's the connection between linear transformations of lie algebras and pdf files? an interesting thing i have noticed is that people living in prettier houses tend to treat one another better, to the point that you can sometimes improve family dynamics by interior decoration. i suspect the humans' direct preattentive aesthetic experience interacts with their psychology in ways that would appall old rené and which they are often unconscious of
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      Here's the basic idea: The nicest situation we can have between two representations (x,y) is that they can encode each other, so transformations (f,g) "round-trip": f x == y x == g y x == g (f x) f (g y) == y That isn't always possible, though. (and some mathematicians find it so boring that they work "up to isomorphism", meaning they don't even bother keeping track of the exact round-trippable transformations, and just assume we use any suitable coercion, writing down only the non-round-trippable transformations, just as we don't bother keeping track of exactly which and how many zeroes there are in 1+2 [or is that 1+0+2? or 1+0+0+2?] or which and how many null strings there are in the middle of "hi") Much more commonly (this always happens, if we allow degenerate encodings) is a situation where each representation can encode only a subset of the other, so we only have: f x == f (g (f x)) g (f (g y)) == g y because attempting to round trip is lossy, but the loss is idempotent: unlike analogue copying, further generations (which are already in the mutually-expressible subset) aren't any more lossy. [aside: does the 3-in-1 trinitarian nature of these equalities suggest that one transformative application may exist in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial hypostatic applications? end of aside] Finally, the situation I'd contrived between plaintext and pdf is where a more expressive representation can encode a less expressive, but not the other way around, so we have an intermediate situation, where Procrustes only affects the more expressive side: x == g (f x) g (f (g y)) == g y If you squint, you should be able to see the relation between this abstract algebraic notion of adjunction and the linear algebraic notion of "best possible approximation to an inverse". Galois connections are also closely related. I don't think I can do it justice in an HN post, but old János also did a lot with these concepts, both theoretically exploring when the idempotents mentioned above are "regular" (related to regular expressions and the Kleene star) and practically suggesting that we should make Y-combinator-style autoreplicating mining-factory-complexes on the moon (in the asteroid belt?); see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893829 ...

kragen 3y ago

experienced buddhist meditators famously sometimes meditate despite chilblains, or incense burning on their scalps, or being aflame with gasoline, or starving themselves to death over a period of months but if you try to begin your practice of buddhist meditation with incense burning on your scalp, you probably will not get very far; you will probably quit. instead, beginning meditation focuses on finding the pleasure in relaxing in a comfortable position, even though that is clearly not what motivates more experienced meditators (and of course you're aware old don and old ed (rip) spent a lot of effort on typography, though they sometimes understood wirth's work better than he did himself)

082349872349872 3y ago
Good point. I don't think I ever showed you, but when I was playing around with adjoint representations, I came up with an adjoint between plaintext files and PDF, such that (non-ultimate) lines in the PDF would display fully justified, but a simple filter (that did not model the PDF format itself) sufficed to recover the original plaintext file. That didn't seem very useful, but as you point out, maybe making things prettier is worthwhile (and enabling reversibility so one could always retrieve the lighter representation given only the prettier one would satisfy my technological anabaptism); if it were useful to do so maybe I should try with .gmi (although the vertical layout issues here would keep pagination from being as straightforward...)?
- kragen 3y ago
  this sounds wonderful! i don't know what adjoint representations are yet, though, and i haven't looked at the gemini format; i hear vague echoes of how my handaxeweb would happily extract indented lines from markdown files, html files, postscript files, you name it... though i haven't tried pdf. what's the connection between linear transformations of lie algebras and pdf files? an interesting thing i have noticed is that people living in prettier houses tend to treat one another better, to the point that you can sometimes improve family dynamics by interior decoration. i suspect the humans' direct preattentive aesthetic experience interacts with their psychology in ways that would appall old rené and which they are often unconscious of
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    Here's the basic idea: The nicest situation we can have between two representations (x,y) is that they can encode each other, so transformations (f,g) "round-trip": f x == y x == g y x == g (f x) f (g y) == y That isn't always possible, though. (and some mathematicians find it so boring that they work "up to isomorphism", meaning they don't even bother keeping track of the exact round-trippable transformations, and just assume we use any suitable coercion, writing down only the non-round-trippable transformations, just as we don't bother keeping track of exactly which and how many zeroes there are in 1+2 [or is that 1+0+2? or 1+0+0+2?] or which and how many null strings there are in the middle of "hi") Much more commonly (this always happens, if we allow degenerate encodings) is a situation where each representation can encode only a subset of the other, so we only have: f x == f (g (f x)) g (f (g y)) == g y because attempting to round trip is lossy, but the loss is idempotent: unlike analogue copying, further generations (which are already in the mutually-expressible subset) aren't any more lossy. [aside: does the 3-in-1 trinitarian nature of these equalities suggest that one transformative application may exist in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial hypostatic applications? end of aside] Finally, the situation I'd contrived between plaintext and pdf is where a more expressive representation can encode a less expressive, but not the other way around, so we have an intermediate situation, where Procrustes only affects the more expressive side: x == g (f x) g (f (g y)) == g y If you squint, you should be able to see the relation between this abstract algebraic notion of adjunction and the linear algebraic notion of "best possible approximation to an inverse". Galois connections are also closely related. I don't think I can do it justice in an HN post, but old János also did a lot with these concepts, both theoretically exploring when the idempotents mentioned above are "regular" (related to regular expressions and the Kleene star) and practically suggesting that we should make Y-combinator-style autoreplicating mining-factory-complexes on the moon (in the asteroid belt?); see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893829 ...