Hard to resist the experiment of a $60 chromebook. "Lenovo 11.6" 100e Chromebook 2nd Gen (2019) MediaTek MT8173C 4GB RAM 16GB eMMC (Refurbished)" (more)

Randall Collins: Simmelian Numbers. 3 -- The lowest sociological number. This is the cornerstone of Georg Simmel’s “The Significance of Numbers in Social Life” [1908]. 3 is the lowest number for social structures, because it makes possible coalitions of 2-against-1, creating a dimension which transcends the immediate 1-on-1. It also creates the sense of a group, since no one individual can destroy a group of 3 or more by leaving. (more)

Computer Science post-doc (PhD) at MIT. (more)

For Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Case Against Education (Schooling). (more)

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money[1] is a book written by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan and published in 2018 by Princeton University Press. Drawing on the economic concept of job market signaling and research in educational psychology, the book argues that much of higher education (college education) is very inefficient and has only a small effect in improving human capital, contrary to the conventional consensus in labor economics. Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education ISBN:978-0691174655

I want to speed up the future. I work at OpenAI and I’m thinking about speeding up science at New Science. I’m most inspired by Augustine of Hippo, Aaron Swartz, Freeman Dyson, Scott Alexander, and Gwern. https://guzey.com/

Fredrik DeBoer says Scott Alexander is not in the Gizmodo Media Slack. (more)

Zed Shaw has a decent model for recognizing/avoiding high-ProjectFailure-risk situations. *In reality, I don't use XP or CMM but end up using Scrum most of the time because nobody has perfect little projects that fit neatly into Collaborator+Invention or Customer+Implementation sweet spots... the real reason I prefer Scrum is it's a great methodology for (more)

reflective thought (more)

Blame is the act of censuring, holding responsible, making negative statements about an individual or group that their action or actions are socially or morally irresponsible, the opposite of praise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame (more)

NotebookLM generating notes. Yes, collaborative groups of thinkers have frequently instigated significant technological and political changes throughout history, operating through various mechanisms such as shared vision, informal roles, rebellion against established norms, and instrumental intimacy. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI (AGI) and and the Technological Richter Scale. The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver’s new book On the Edge. (more)

Something to Change The World (Technological Determinism, Technological Revolution) (Evolution) (to solve a Grand Challenge?) (see "meta" at bottom) (more)

An XML database is a data persistence software system that allows data to be specified, and stored, in XML format. This data can be queried, transformed, exported and returned to a calling system. XML databases are a flavor of document-oriented databases which are in turn a category of NoSQL database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_database (more)

Lightning Memory-Mapped Database (LMDB) is an embedded transactional database in the form of a key-value store. LMDB is written in C with API bindings for several programming languages. LMDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, has a range-based search capability, supports multiple data items for a single key and has a special mode for appending records (MDB_APPEND) without checking for consistency.[1] LMDB is not a relational database, it is strictly a key-value store like Berkeley DB and DBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Database

Designers often desire an open-ended data structure that allows for future extension without modifying existing code or data. In such situations, all or part of the data model may be expressed as a collection of tuples (attribute name, value); each element is an attribute-value pair. (more)

Berkeley DB (BDB) is an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open-source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database,[2] although it has database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems. BDB was commercially supported and developed by Sleepycat Software from 1996 to 2006. Sleepycat Software was acquired by Oracle Corporation in February 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB (more)

Steve Yegge on what makes great software systems (Platform). The big realization I had, sometime in the last month or so, is that all of the common properties of my favorite software systems can be derived from a single Root Cause: one property, or design principle, that if present will cause software to take on the right characteristics automatically. What are my favorite software systems? Here are a few of the very best: UNIX. WinXP. MacOs X. EMacs. MsExcel. FireFox. Ruby On Rails. Python. Ruby. Scheme. Common Lisp. LP-Muds (MUD). The Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A few more that just barely make the cut, for now: MsWord. OmniGraffle Pro. JavaScript. Per Force. Some that I think would make the cut if I learned how to use them effectively: The GIMP. Mathematica. VIM. Lua. MsIE.... I won't keep you in suspense. I think the most important principle in all of software design is this: Systems should never Re Boot. If you design a system so that it never needs to reboot, then you will eventually, even if it's by a very roundabout path, arrive at a system that will live forever.... I think the second most important design principle, really a corollary to the first, is that systems must be able to grow without rebooting... First (essential feature): every great system has a command shell (Command Line)... Great systems also have advice. There's no universally accepted name for this feature. Sometimes it's called hooks, or filters, or Aspect Oriented Programming... World-class software systems always have an extension language and a PlugIn system... The last big feature I'll enumerate today, and it's just as important as the rest, is that great software systems are Intro Spective. You can poke around and examine them at runtime, and ideally they poke around and examine themselves as well... Introspection can (and should) take many different forms, not just health monitoring. (aliveness? turing-complete?) (more)