The network of trails functions as a shared external memory for the ant colony.

I decided to start with a fresh install of Python 2.7. First surprise: no C compiler.

There has been significant pressure for scientists to make their code open, but this is not enough. Even if I hired the only postdoc who can get the code to work, she might have forgotten the exact details of how an experiment was run. Or she might not know about a critical dependency on an obsolete version of a library.

What is not OK is what I perceive as the dominant attitude today: sell SciPy as a great easy-to-use tool for all scientists, and then, when people get bitten by breaking changes, tell them that it’s their fault for not having a solid maintenance plan for their code.

over the seven years of the project, I ended upspending a lot of time catching up with dependencies. Newreleases of NumPy and matplotlib made my code collapse,and the increasing complexity of Python installations addedanother dose of instability. When I got a new computer in2013 and installed the then-current versions of everything,some of my scripts no longer worked and, worse, oneof them produced different results. Since then, softwarecollapse has become an increasingly serious issue for mywork. NumPy 1.9 caused the collapse of my MolecularModelling Toolkit, and it seems hardly worth doing muchabout it because the upcoming end of support for Python 2in 2020 will be the final death blow.

a blog post

The moral is not to abandon useful tools; rather, it is, first, that one shouldmaintain enough perspective to be able to detect the arrival of that inevitable daywhen the research that can be conducted with these tools is no longer important;

It seems that one of the innovations of the Port-RoyalGrammar of 1660 – the work that initiated the tradition of philosophical gram-mar – was its recognition of the importance of the notion of the phrase as agrammatical unit.

the Port-RoyalGrammar and Logic,

Michael Spinella, executive director of the Textbook and Academic Authors Association

“on a decadal time scale, wecannot rely on software to run repeatably.

Finally, software is hard to work with. Forgetmaking research reproducible, it is hard enough touse it 6 months later.

I like to think of thoughts as streaming information, so I don’t need to tag and categorize them as we do with batched data. Instead, using time as an index and sticky notes to mark slices of info solves most of my use cases. Graph notebooks like Obsidian think of information as batched data. So you have a set of notes (samples) that you try to aggregate, categorize, and connect. Sure there’s a use case for that: I can’t imagine a company wiki presented as streaming info! But I don’t think it aids me in how I usually think. When thinking with pen and paper, I prefer managing streamed information first, then converting it into batched information later— a blog post, documentation, etc.

Politique documentaire Ensemble des objectifs et processus pilotant la gestion de l’information, incluant la politique d’acquisition, la politique de conservation et la politique de médiation des collections. La politique documentaire est une partie intégrante et essentielle du projet d'établissement, permettant de répondre aux missions de la structure et aux attentes des usagers.

I’d be interested in hearing more about the ways oral cultures did their thinking, if you have resources on that handy. Otherwise if you recall your source for that could you pass it on?

But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days

Admiral and Mrs Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy

three miles

youthful infatuation

Numerous other technologies to produce booming detonations to disorient and frighten enemies were described in ancient Chinese war manuals. These explosive devices employed gunpowder, invented in China around A.D. 850, reaching Europe about 1250.

10-year project by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology revealed that nature-friendly farming methods boost biodiversity without reducing average yield

Fiona McPherson has some good suggestions/tips in her book on Effective Notetaking. In general it revolves around using relevant icons for your illustrations and limiting your supporting text of the diagrams. (I.e. Have a good icon that explains the process and only 2-4 words paired with the icon).

you can also replicate the bind:this syntax if you please: Wrapper.svelte <script> let root export { root as this } </script> <div bind:this={root} />

if you’re a beginner you can use Replit which allows you to program through your browser without installing anything on your machine

We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs.

It's also hard to share this workflow with someone non-technical. I have to setup and maintain the correct environment on their machine

We brought in a metadata librarian, Elizabeth Padilla, from British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), to ensure people can find the materials in the niches they want, using the language they already know.

I bet with the advent of computers and the digitalizing of reference material there was a spike in the amount of verbatum quotes that are used instead of summarizing the thought into your own words.

Here are the rules associated with the free and checked vowels. Theserules apply only to stressed syllables.

In this paper, we propose and analyse a potential power triangle between three kinds of mutuallydependent, mutually threatening and co-evolving cognitive systems—the human being, the socialsystem and the emerging synthetic intelligence. The question we address is what configuration betweenthese powers would enable humans to start governing the global socio-econo-political system

5.11 Convert your principles into algorithms and have the computer make decisions alongside you.

5.5 Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.

5.1 Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding).

4.4 Find out what you and others are like.

4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

4.2 Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves—they are genetically programmed into us.

4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.

3.5 Recognize the signs of closed-mindedness and open-mindedness that you should watch out for.

2.7 Understand your own and others’ mental maps and humility.

2.2 Identify and don’t tolerate problems.

1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences.

1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.

1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.

1 Embrace Reality and Deal with It

It's likely you're constantly solving problems and learning interesting things at your job. This is a great opportunity

When you’re building developer tools, if the officially supported developer environment doesn’t work for people in some way, they build their own approach.

i mean i have a whole speech about that

imagine you were measuring

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

This perspective has been called an “emblematic worldview”; it is clearly visible in the iconography ofmedieval and Renaissance art, for example. Plants and animals are not merely specimens, as in modernscience; they represent a huge raft of associated things and ideas.

so in this essay i'm going to explore the what i take to be the very most profound illusions diagnosed in the buddhist tradition and one and the most difficult to overcome and the primary one will be the illusion 00:08:58 that we have immediate access and vertical access to our own experience that we have a direct first-person access to our own minds that gives us our minds just as they are that the duality between subject and object that 00:09:11 structures our understanding is primordial this is the illusion that we're subject standing over and against the world rather than um interdependent beings in the world that's the conviction that we might know 00:09:24 the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties but that we know the world only in virtue of immediate access to the outputs of those faculties

Mander, R., Salomon, G. and Wong, Y. A PileMetaphor for Supporting Casual Organisationof Information. Proceedings of Human Factorsin Computing Systems CHI’92, pp 627-634,1992.

Their value lies intheir diversity - companies exploit the fact that thesepeople make different sense of the same phenomenaand therefore respond in diverse ways.

now we go back to jakub von ogskul and we find him critiquing exactly the 00:09:20 same thing for exactly the same reasons 30 years after john dewey there on the left he has picked out the reflex arc pointing out that it is a linear throughput which leaves no room 00:09:34 for subjectivity no room for intentional action no room for meaning to arise if you if the middle is only animated by inputs then it's a puppet 00:09:47 he replaces this with a model on the right that will whose terms will not be entirely clear to you as you read the article but i want you to notice one thing about it it's circular it's not a linear 00:09:59 throughput it's circular he starts by noting the embeddedness of the body in the world and the fact that the activity of the 00:10:13 body is meaningful at all times and not separable into inputs and outputs his replacement of the linear throughput with this circular model that he elaborates in various ways 00:10:25 is remarkably prescient of the basic cybernetic insight that will arise after the second world war in which it's all feedback systems positive feedback systems negative feedback systems 00:10:37 homeostatic systems um reciprocity is always involved the fact that you do something and something is done to you at the same time that that we dance in the world 00:10:50 rather than standing apart from it and recording a movie of it so his um uncovery of this basic cybernetic principle with which one might approach the body and its being in the world is 00:11:02 remarkably prescient but these profound ideas of vulnerable are often hidden because he's well frankly so charming well he's a problematic character as we'll see lately 00:11:14 but he tells a good story and he does cool experiments

you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the 00:41:08 beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the 00:41:20 compassion side also um so i applaud you for that

let me first say how why we're here um 00:05:01 and first point out that barry and carl have never met before this is the first time you will discuss

Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna

When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute.   Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.

The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute

The place of the here and now IS the true reality and that can’t be described by any of the words above or by language.

Playing with a dog, cat, or other pet can elevate levels of serotonin and dopamine, which calm and relax.

My head was as red as a lobster; but, in other respects, I was as nicely dressed for the ceremonies of the evening as a man need be.

“We have certain events to relate,” Mr. Franklin proceeded; “and we have certain persons concerned in those events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn–as far as our own personal experience extends, and no farther. We must begin by showing how the Diamond first fell into the hands of my uncle Herncastle, when he was serving in India fifty years since. This prefatory narrative I have already got by me in the form of an old family paper, which relates the necessary particulars on the authority of an eye-witness. The next thing to do is to tell how the Diamond found its way into my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years ago, and how it came to be lost in little more than twelve hours afterwards. Nobody knows as much as you do, Betteredge, about what went on in the house at that time. So you must take the pen in hand, and start the story.”

irst Period The Loss of the Diamond (1848) The events related by Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward in the service of Julia, Lady Verinder.

Here is how I produce invoices and contracts for consulting: Open an old invoice/contract in firefox. Use the inspector to change the values. Hit 'save as new file'.

It took me an hour to rewrite my ui code and two days to get it to compile. The clojurescript version I started with miscompiles rum. Older clojurescript versions worked with debug builds but failed with optimizations enabled, claiming that cljs.react was not defined despite it being listed in rum's dependencies. I eventually ended up with a combination of versions where compiling using cljs.build.api works but passing the same arguments at the command line doesn't.

I recently started building a website that lives at wesleyac.com, and one of the things that made me procrastinate for years on putting it up was not being sure if I was ready to commit to it. I solved that conundrum with a page outlining my thoughts on its stability and permanence:

One of the risks I heard mentioned is that of becoming/ being perceived as an ”arm of the university bureaucracy”, as CTLs become more involved in decision-making on educational issues.

Dilemma: should/ can the CTL be neutral territory (and can it be?)

The stormy market is here to bid goodbye to FAANG and say hello to Triple-A in 2022

FAANG is an acronym of five major technology stocks that include Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (now Alphabet). Jim Cramer coined the term in 2013 while giving accolades to the companies for being the dominant companies in their niches.

That means many investors already have at least some exposure to them. Because the heavy weighting of FAANG stocks in indexes such as the S&P 500 gives them an outsize impact on the broader stock market, it’s worthwhile for investors to learn a bit more about them.

In finance, “FAANG” is an acronym that refers to the stocks of five prominent American technology companies: Meta (META) (formerly known as Facebook), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX); and Alphabet (GOOG) (formerly known as Google). 

In finance, “FAANG” is an acronym that refers to the stocks of five prominent American technology companies: Meta (META) (formerly known as Facebook), ...

having to go through all the trouble of compiling and building a custom extension

The battle of firmware vs middleware is fierce. Firmware is a particular class of computer software that gives low-level command over the particular hardware of the device.

other people’s toolchains are absolutely inscrutable from the outside. Even getting started is touchy. Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager.

preventing the build from bitrotting would probably require a full-time maintainer in the long run

when doing independent research I've typically fallen into the habit of creating unbounded projects with no internal structure. I don't think this has been good for my sanity.

That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personalgrowth. As your information environment changes, the way yourmind operates starts to be transformed.

This fundamental tension—between quality and quantity—is atension we share as knowledge workers. We also must producework to an extremely high standard, and we must do it fast,continuously, all year long. We are like sprinters who are also tryingto run a marathon.

Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity

Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element ofserendipity. When you present an idea to another person, theirreaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completelyuninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’tnecessarily right or wrong, but you can use that information eitherway. The reverse can also happen. You might think something isobvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also usefulinformation. Others might point out aspects of an idea you neverconsidered, suggest looking at sources you never knew existed, orcontribute their own ideas to make it better. All these forms offeedback are ways of drawing on not only your first and SecondBrains, but the brains of others as well.

Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media

Intangible, invisibleYet here, there and everywhereEternallyWithout limit

It will be interesting to see where Eyler takes his scholarship post-COVID. I’ll be curious to learn how Eyler thinks of the intersection of learning science and teaching practices in an environment where face-to-face teaching is no longer the default.

you label boxes so you knowwhat’s in them; you arrange your clothes according to color. Eventually you reach apoint where you look around and you’re satisfied. There are no loose ends.Everything is in its place, put away or accounted for or easily accessed. The roomexudes order and harmony. When you look around, you’re happy.

The summary of Hoy’s post makes a point similar to Caulfield’s piece, but more pronounced: the wide-spread adoption of the blog format killed gardens. The dichotomy is the same; here, we also have a causality of demise.

Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. 00:07:11 And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye 00:07:35 as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.

The old cookbook said: " Take enough butter." I say: "Do nottake too many notes." Both recommendations are hard to inter-pret except by trial and error.

I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.

Your personal dev environment travels with you no matter which device you use

I have one Gatsby site left that I haven't touched in years, I doubt it will get past npm install.

Built using Go, Hugo is incredibly fast at building large sites, has an active community, and is easily installable on a variety of operating systems. In our early discovery work, we found that Hugo would build our docs content in mere seconds.

right now we're not being honest with each other about our values and if that's happening then we cannot form norms you can't design norms they happen 00:47:46 out of human action not human design but they only emerge when there is a real consensus about our shared values and so we've got to get back to that i mean it seems almost like like self-evident and we'll duh but like 00:47:59 if if we're going to continue to self-silence or even lie about our beliefs like the result are going to be collective illusions at scale and whole societies can be taken down by those and listen it 00:48:11 would something like a free society living in a democracy like we take that for granted that is a blip in human history the idea that it can't disappear overnight is silly it can and it will 00:48:23 and it would be one thing if it disappeared because privately we collectively gave up on that experiment right but it's a tragedy if it disappears not because of 00:48:34 private change in values but because of collective illusions and that's that's what for me felt like the urgency to write the book right like that it just felt like things were spinning out of control 00:48:46 and yet we have more data on private opinion in america than probably anybody else i would argue um and i can tell you it's just not true right so i think that's both there's both a dangerous aspect to 00:48:58 illusions but also a hopeful one you know because history has shown us that if you recognize the illusion and you take an effort to dismantle it social change can happen at a scale and pace that would seem unimaginable 00:49:10 otherwise well i can't think of any other way to end in that message so thank you todd so much for this marathon you did with me and two parts thank you we obviously have so much shared values and we're not 00:49:22 as divided as people tell us we are [Laughter] but but now we know why right now we know why it feels that way and if we if we can recognize that we really can no longer trust our brain to accurately 00:49:36 read group consensus then we can get back to this it never really mattered right be who you are learn to be authentic um discover your real self and and work really hard to be congruent between your 00:49:48 private self and your public self the rest takes care of itself

the human brain is an energy hog like and you can learn a lot about a lot of our uh biases and problems from the kinds of shortcuts that the brain takes 00:06:41 in the name of energy conservation well it looks like estimating group consensus is one of those shortcuts right because all it's equal your brain tends to assume that the loudest voices repeated 00:06:53 the most are the majority and and i think about that i think wow that doesn't seem like a good a good shortcut at all but i guess if you go back and f through evolution and when most of our time was spent and like 00:07:05 seeing like the dumbar number kind of you know groups it probably it obviously had to work well enough right to just be here with us but now when you think about with social media 00:07:18 and these massive imaginary communities like nations where you're never going to meet more than a tiny tiny percentage of the people in your group that shortcut becomes problematic um and 00:07:31 we can talk about it like i mean social media in particular makes it very very easy to distort perceived group consensus

i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions

Every morning now brought its regular duties—shops were to be visited; some new part of the town to be looked at; and the pump-room to be attended, where they paraded up and down for an hour, looking at everybody and speaking to no one.

The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.