jveld

6 ms·

1.
by jveld 10y ago
Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who purchase 'smart' (read data gathering ) de
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by jveld 10y ago
Fascinating! I wonder if Tolstoy was depecting Dostoevsky. I guess I'll have to read War and Peace as my enormous literary undertaking of the summer.
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by jveld 10y ago
Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov, Crime And Punishment) was sentenced to be executed by the Tsarist government in 1849. He was actually in front of the firing squad , waiting for his turn to die, when he learned that his sentence had bee
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by jveld 11y ago
> It occurs to me that my analogy with categories and functors is itself a transport between the language game of category theory and the language game of language games. Bahahahahaha! Brilliant. If I remember my category theory correctl
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by jveld 11y ago
@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconcepti
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by jveld 11y ago
It seemed to me like the author of the article was playing a bit loose with Wittgenstein's ideas. Isn't the idea that gravity is merely a "translation" of the curvature of spacetime an example of precisely the kind of Tr
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by jveld 11y ago
I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers a
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by jveld 11y ago
I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some words into phrases while some phrases may be condensed
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by jveld 11y ago
> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Writers who proclaim that English has no tra
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by jveld 11y ago
I agree, thus my suggestion that we try and move towards apprenticeships. But I think we should avoid framing apprenticeships/bootcamps/whatever as a replacement for universities, and instead frame them as an alternative . adde
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by jveld 11y ago
>> The fact that academia itself doesn't want to hire its own children suggest even further that academia needs to focus on vocational skills, so that academics can transfer out into a "post-academic" career. Or perhaps
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by jveld 11y ago
Emotional beauty is a multiplayer game. It's created when people use their time and energy to break the script and let the people around them know that they are valued. It's not something that's easy to just receive passively
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by jveld 11y ago
The tendency to characterize educational institutions as 'factories' for producing intellectual laborers (or knowledge workers , to use a synonomous but less harsh sounding term) is deeply unsettling to me. Although this piece ma
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by jveld 11y ago
I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc). There's also a mental hygeine aspect: I've noticed a pretty distinct cor
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by jveld 11y ago
good point - for some reason it hadn't clicked that number theory only involves the integers and not, ya know, complex numbers.
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by jveld 11y ago
Here's how I explain "pure math" to people, based on my experience taking a highly theory-oriented linear algebra course and thinking that "this stuff couldn't possibly be useful." Boy, was I wrong... I think
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by jveld 11y ago
Why the ad hominem? I understood the scope of the OP's suggestion. I just thought it could've been presented more clearly. The fact that tons of the comments here are directed at the idea of this notation as a replacement would se
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by jveld 11y ago
Here are some shortcomings I thought of immediately. - Traditional notation is instrument-agnostic. - It may be easily printable, but a staff is easily writable . With just a pen and a ruler, I can produce a neat staff in ~10 seconds. The
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by jveld 11y ago
Yes, but since he frames it in the title as a "redesign," it's hard to get out of the frame of thinking about it as such. If he had titled it "A Simpler Notation for Piano Music" or something, his intent would'
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by jveld 11y ago
Thanks for the correction! It's been a couple years since I've actually done any calculus. I couldn't remember the exact function, so I had to google - I guess I read too quickly.
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by jveld 11y ago
I've thought it was paradoxical that infinitely long curves could have finite integrals ever since I first took calculus. For example, the integral of 1/x is |ln x|. I wonder why it takes three dimensions before people start getti
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by jveld 11y ago
It got the job done by making the 99% majority of use cases more difficult in order to make the 1% minority simpler. This is a design pattern I think is being repeated in systemd. I kinda had the opposite impression. I first encountered s
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by jveld 11y ago
Reading Stallman these days always gives me such mixed feelings. I appreciate the fuck out of all the work he's done for the software community, and admire his courage and willingness to stand out. Overall, I think his agenda to keep t
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by jveld 11y ago
To me, the defining feature is automation. A "programmable" system is one where smaller actions can be composed into larger ones and saved for invocation later (by name, in response to some event, etc). I don't know much abou