I blocked Twitter from my computer and now I have to talk to real humans when I'm bored instead of throwing screenshots into the void for vibes and it's annoying.
Starting to think a research residency role at an applied AI research lab would be an interesting way to structure + continue my work on notational intelligence and knowledge representation. Here are two that stand out:
Nothing like feeling like your stated career ambitions are too ambitious, and then running into someone whose project description is like "yeah, that's one of many points in the infinite parameter space of ideas we're exploring."
The Internet is great.
When you shift your perception of the status quo from "natural language works perfectly" to "natural language has faults" you very quickly start noticing all the different ways language and text fails us, sometimes in grave and fundamental ways.
Text is too sterile. Compared to the range of beauty, the range of emotions, the range of feelings, the range of vibes humans are capable of feeling — drowning in — text barely even registers. Text will become whatever humans were stuck with before we invented ways to communicate in full-fidelity. Our job is to invent it.
oak now has a Homebrew formula!
$ brew tap thesephist/oak
$ brew info oak
thesephist/oak/oak: stable 0.2, HEAD
Expressive, simple, dynamic programming language
https://oaklang.org/
/usr/local/Cellar/oak/0.2 (5 files, 5.7MB) *
Built from source on 2022-06-08 at 03:26:22
From: https://github.com/thesephist/homebrew-oak/blob/HEAD/Formula/oak.rb
License: MIT
==> Dependencies
Build: go
==> Options
--HEAD
Install HEAD versionThe word freesia has been stuck in my head for the last week, but I can't figure out where it came from. It feels like a good name for a project though.
Both my prime joy and deep frustration in research work comes from the fact that I can't simply Google my way out of pressing fundamental questions I face.
Every time I try to explain some complex idea for how things ought to work to people, I am always reminded that the best way to communicate a new complex idea is a demo they can try themselves.
Hyperlink maximalism
I'm a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn't hyperlinked by the author, and the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.
There are two obvious problems with this idea. (1) No author has time to hyperlink infinite permutations of everything they write, and (2) if everything is hyperlinked, nobody will know what links are useful.
But both of these issues are trivially solved if we simply begin with today's lightly hyperlinked documents, and let the reader's computer generate links on-demand. When I'm reading something and don't understand a particular word or want to know more about a quote, when I select it, my computer should search across everything I've read and some small high-quality subset of the Web to bring me 5-10 links about what I've highlighted that are the most relevant to what I'm reading now. Boom. Everything is a hyperlink.
This raises a third issue: How would I, the reader, know which words or ideas are interesting to click on?
That, too, can be solved similarly. The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a "map" of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about. Links are no longer lonesome strands precariously holding together a sparsely connected Web, but a booming choir of ephemeral connections tightly binding together everything I have read and I will read. From explorers walking across unknown terrain guided only by the occasional blue text, we become master cartographers, with every path and trail between our ideas charted out in front of us.