There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit.
I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the blanks rather than generating full characters from scratch. Where the community can add in their own templates and tropes. An author can decide that they have a character who is stoic, cynical, and sarcastic, and the tool will generate a background story, how to portray the character, what conflicts they get into with other characters.
I donate to DF, lol. While there are plenty of epic moments in there, I think it takes a while to build up, and it comes in between a lot of mundane moments as well. And I think a lot of stories are built with a romance element in mind and there hasn't been a lot of procedurally generated games that do that well.
I’m sure you’ve probably come across it but it is worth mentioning - TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org) is a veritable smorgasbord of story tropes and character archetypes. Their catalog of examples is pulled from TV, movies, literature and history.
I've thought about how systems like this could be used to greatly enhance the world of RPG's. Being able to generate a full back story and personality for every NPC would be fantastic, but only a start.
Then there could be an idea of 'atom' of information that uses models to spreading via NPCs.
There is just so much I know that could be done with this, but I'm guessing hasn't been because it takes more computation than I realize. Or maybe there just hasn't been the effort put into it. I'm hoping it's the latter.
Video game graphics seem to be providing diminishing returns for the game experience compared to depth of storyline/world building. Gamers will not care as much about how a game looks when it is very engaging due to the other elements. But it seems like those other elements are constantly undervalued by game makers.
I think it's more that content is hard. My random generator linked above already pulls from all the top tropes from TV Tropes, but it still seems repetitive. There's an awfully high proportion of stories starring a deadpan snarker or a stubbornly optimistic heroine, but these roles and personalities in a vacuum are not enough to make them unique.
Latest experiments show that details help a lot. Quality went up a lot when I moved from "they" to "him/her". And it went up even more when I had several different types of text describing the same feature. So maybe the missing link isn't just generating better skeletons, but rather different ways of saying the same thing. After all, there are a million fantasy worlds out there. All romances are the same archetypes. But some stand out more than others.
Not sure if this is weird so much as an area of business that not a lot of people think actively about, but get bit by.
THE PROBLEM
How do you automate and aggregate context across business departments for various forms of activity, and then map that to marketing analytics in a way that gives relevant and sufficient insights beyond just channel or user data? How do you more fully answer the question of "what happened when [$thing happened]?"
THE VALUE OPPORTUNITY
Countless people hours and marketing dollars are wasted going down fruitless rabbit holes looking for what caused some change, or thinking they found the cause in a change in performance and pursuing that when it reality it was something else. In many of these cases, this could have been easily avoided if only there were sufficient data on the business activities (internal and external) logged and aggregated with marketing data in a way that was then automatically surfaced in an appropriate manner. As the scale of the company increases, so does the impact of this.
WHY IT IS WEIRD/HARD
It's weird in the sense that only a small subset of people are immersed in analytics enough are aware they should care about it, and probably fewer geek out enough about marketing analytics and process to care about trying to solve it. It is hard because it is just as much a people challenge as a technical one. The technical side is somewhat straightforward in terms of aggregating as many data inputs as you can--it's basically a ton of data plumbing and monitoring for changes with that. Whether that's bid management platforms and DSPs or SSPs, email platforms, site analytics, etc. But then also project management tools and properly categorizing the meta data for relevant updates to be surfaced. You have challenges around walled data gardens and comparing apples to oranges around things like attribution measurement, but that is something that can be handled. Surfacing it in timely and sufficiently useful ways is an interesting design and UX challenge though, from annotations and "pull" data, to modals and callouts that are more "push" in how they inform people of context before it bites them.
The people side however, is constantly in flux in a way that the data side is not. Some aspects of this absolutely rely on consistent adherence to process to capture key data that is hard to slurp up through an API. Some of it is quite ephemeral. I've encountered team situations where people object (or struggle to due to limited training) to filling out a couple fields in a Google Sheet, or need to be hounded to fill out a given form, etc. Some companies can enforce this to levels others cannot. Things also get really interesting at large companies (think FAANG). You're dealing with many teams, many overlapping or conflicting processes such a solution would need to be embedded into, localization, internal/external vendors of varying levels of visibility needs, and also personalities who may want more control over their orgs' processes and need persuading.
At the end, this all needs to be balanced against how much utility you get out of the insights because it is easy to over-index on investing in building this tech and process out only to not get insights out of it. Unfortunately you often only learn that after the fact when you've been bitten by it.
If there's any companies trying to solve for this, please do reach out (see profile). I love chatting about it and want to help build the tools and processes that solve for this at scale and have ~15yrs experience in the space, a good chunk of which have been spent trying to solve for variations of this.
I've experienced this problem in small companies/side projects I've started. This a great perspective and great take on the problem. I'd love to help out in development/anything you'd need help with, email is in my profile.
I've had the same experience in larger corporations, especially the global ones. I'm interested in helping as well so if there's a need for concept development and ux let me know :)
I may not be understanding what they do here that is specific to what I'm describing. I'm talking about tools/process that practically any company could benefit from that does marketing.
Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared? Can we build optical panographs just using the reflections from a dental mirror? How can we monitor patients' oral health over the long term more often than just an annual visit to the dentist, and does that improve oral health outcomes?
Machine learning: what happens when we replace Euclidean metrics with p-adic ones? Distance is fundamental to so many algorithms (least squares regression; nearest neighbours; anything involving gradient descent). How do those algorithms behave over completely foreign metric spaces?
> Dentistry: can we replace dental x-rays with infrared?
There's a US company that has an ultrasonic "x-ray". Signal processing is used to find cracks and cavities. It's not well-known yet even to Bay Area specialists.
Do you have a link where I could read more? Because it sounds like you're describing a thing that's been around for like a decade, that I've seen in use in (my region). But I may just be comparing apples and oranges under a too-vague description.
Since I live in Tokyo, it’s about a 3 - 4 hour drive to various ski resorts. I want to snowboard every weekend. So I’m trying to find the best* ski resort I can head to next weekend.
Best is a mix of
- the ones I enjoy most
- but not one that I just visited last weekend
- where there has been recent snowfall / is predicted to snow
- that I have may have a season pass for
- where costs of highway tolls, petrol, hotels can be optimised
- driving time
- whether I’m going alone or with friends
- don’t have anything important at work on Monday
Eventually, I’d like to turn it into a kind of friend finder / social network thingy but for snowboarding.
Such a crazy difference with the amount of resorts in japan. In Colorado there are <10 resorts within 3-4 hours, and your pass only works at a couple of them. Our problem is optimizing the time you leave to reduce traffic time and maximize skiing time.
The resort finding part seems representable as a table where worst to best overlap(including dynamic weather forecast part) is displayed in a color spectrum, sort of like a many circled ven diagram. Send an email for firetool at protonmail dot com if you’re interested and have the info you’ve described(minus the weather api) tabulated. I’d be happy to cook demo up a form and grid.
Well. It's not the answer you want, but the Shinkansen and an expensive taxi ride or maybe a ridesharing with some local dudes might be a feasible, but not cheap answer.
Stay safe in those woods! I nearly perished, by getting lost.
I nearly fell into the river at Kagura on New Year's day! It was new snow that hadn't settled yet so every step I took the snow beneath me crumbled. I was on a ledge and trying very hard to climb up, luckily a few Chinese passed by and pulled me up. Then it was a long 2 hour hike back to the lifts.
Given the earth's population trajectory and the reduction in fertile arable unpolluted lands, there is a coming crisis in the distribution of food. How do we distribute food to high density Asian urban populations efficiently, minimizing needless motor vehicle trips, packaging and spoilage, when convenience purchasing is on the rise and average household sizes are shrinking? Our answer is a network of robotic service locations with automated stock-keeping and a shared, wholly owned logistics network plus personalized direct from fresh ingredient preparation.
EDIT: i am trying to find a similar story about a professor who worked in similar techniques in African farms - increasing plants/animal/water-retention using tradition techniques
This is a report by the NIC from 2013 which outlines exactly how we expect these shortages to occur, on what timeframes, in which geographical locations, and what consequences are expected.
Thought you might find it useful when planning how and where to be most efficient and to stay ahead of the clock.
I'm happy to discuss these issues more over email if you'd like to swap ideas.
I've been mulling over an idea that is essentially a combination of personal ID, secure digital authentication and online communications all baked into one.
There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The current way of authenticating is done via bank accounts or a paid extra mobile service that requires a non-prepaid mobile contract.
This is a relatively huge issue. First off, the Finnish government pays the banks for each auth any user does when they for example want to log into their medical records etc. It's a few million euros a year just for verifying the users.
There's also obviously issues with whom the banks serve, there has been some cases with them not taking foreigners or people with bad credit as customers, making it impossible for them to authenticate themselves.
The current EU directives also indirectly require that the banks should provide a bank customer the possibility to authenticate without needing to have a banking account (which costs money), but to my knowledge this still isn't possible. I pay around 20 euros a month just for the luxury of having an account, not everyone can afford that on top of other bills.
Auth services are not accessible for impaired users.
It's also basically impossible to manage who has essentially the power of attorney and over which matters, for how long etc. Either you have to give them your login info (good luck resetting your SSN) or try to use the services over the phone and somehow convince the other side that you have permission to manage things for another person.
There's no ways of authenticating who is using your accounts online and actually verify the users.
Basically, my idea is combining biometrics, PGP and having the government running the identity management themselves. This would have added benefits of basically enabling hashed throwaway addresses and info for use online while providing a free and accessible way of authenticating strongly online.
In my european country we can use the Personal identity card with the use of a USB to ID card converter?, to log in to governmental resources. although people mostly use the SmartID because its on the phone and free, unlike the SIM card authentication which is a bit more cumbersome.
Hi! I’m working on a similar thing aiming at bringing a digital identity to everyone. I’d love to hear more about what you’re working on. You can reach me at fabian (at) flapplabs.se
Unrelated but speaking of throwaway addresses, it would be cool to be able to create a throwaway postal address (which is then translated by the postal service), so online shops don't get your personal address information.
So you're thinking like a virtual mailing address as a service. You receive and forward people's mail. Seems interesting. Also kind of high risk for the service provider. People will use something like this to buy guns and drugs and other stuff on the black markets. But I guess they do that anyway. You would have to be prepared to deal with a lot of subpoenas to unmask the real mailing addresses. Could be a useful service though. Be sure to charge a lot for it.
My idea would have to be implemented on a national level. I take issue with the socio-economic injustities in the current identity and personal management solutions as they're not technically accessible nor free while still being simply a must have in order to do anything in Finland.
Isn't this essentially a URL shortener for post? The post operator generates an ID for your address, sender uses it to post stuff, the post office maps it back to the address. One additional challenge I see is that if the fees vary by distance, the sender would still get some sort of an idea as to how far away you are, but that is probably acceptable.
PO boxes cost and I still need to provide my name, SSN, email, phone etc even if I'm not ordering online.
If PO boxes were free, it'd solve one part of which I take issue with, but it costs like 4 euros per pickup. If your income is low, the 4 euros on top of the some 20 euros for banking and another 20 for a cellular plan will quickly add up.
That would be a nice service that the postal service could charge for. Virtual po boxes that could be created or re-routed on demand. You would just have a one line address, and when the address is digitized it would be converted to the current address.
Yeah exactly, this was one of the usecases I wanted to deal with.
Several brick and mortar retailers here require your address and personal info even when buying and picking up physically at their store and several have had their databases hacked and leaked.
Why do I need to give those when they're not shipping anything to me and I pay in cash?
We have an agency called Maistraatti which is our nation wide registry office which will have all of my postal information, family relations etc.,basicslly anything related to me as part of our society. Why can't I just provide online and physical retailers some ID that the registry can then translate into my actual info when it's actually needed, for example for shipping or if they want to check my credit etc. They could just save that ID for that purchase and temporarily check the necessary info through an API.
Hashed info would be one solution, the retailers would only get the hashes I provide and the registry office could then match those hashes to my info. In essence, I could basically create single use throwaway information for each retailer if I'd wanted to and they would be none the wiser.
I’m very interested in doing this as well, and have been trying to get the Login.gov folks (US centric) onboard (with Estonia’s electronic ID system as the model). We should chat!
It occurred to me the USA might do something similar in the future and let the banks authenticate and verify identities.
(The $1200 CARES Act stimulus payments were automatically wired to those who previously authorized the IRS to post their tax refunds to their banks.)
> actually verify the users
Maybe you can harness existing Public Notaries instead of using online banking? The USA has over four million Public Notaries who can "witness" and verify identities. For example, a user can pay for a Public Notary to come to his house. The Public Notary reviews the user's government provided identification and issue them an official E-ID and a encryption USB key like Google Titan Security key. The Public Notary can record this transaction in a government database so that there is a trail of who received the Titan key and who provided it.
We don't have public notaries as such and it would still 1. be a system that places trust in humans (which is easily exploitable) and 2. not free for the end users.
I mean, I think it's some ten cents per auth through a bank, if you'd have to invite a notary or visit them every time you want to auth, it'd definitely cost more than that.
I was thinking of a combination of biometric ID, physical card with NFC or USB and a pin or a password. Biometric info is hard to spoof, but not entirely impossible which is why ust stealing the ID card or biometric info shouldn't be enough, you'd need some type of password. Once the user provides all three, you'll know that physically that person carries the aforementioned identifications and is like whom they claim. These would be used to encrypt and unencrypt hashes, meaning that other individuals can also use the hashes to make sure they're contacted by or contacting themselves the correct person they meant to.
We'd also need to implement a way to manage permissions for other users to manage our own data. If you're for example physically incapacitated and want your caretaker to be able to access some services, you could add their hashed identity as an allowed entity and decide over which services and features they can see and/or edit.
You should take a look at SingPass[1], which is the Singapore government’s version of this. Most people[2] with a valid Singaporean ID card can register for it, and we use it for all kinds of stuff - signing in to government websites, opening bank accounts, checking in for covid contact tracing, etc.
I work in healthcare in the US, and using banks to perform auth is a fascinating concept. I also don't see the US ever adopting it due to nuances in American concepts of privacy. We don't mind sharing literally everything with a single entity, but once you get more than 1 entity involved, everyone freaks out. Using banks for auth would also eliminate the wide array of third party auth services, like Auth0. Eliminating the middle-man is very un-American.
It's interesting that Finland took that approach. In Portugal the government just created its own ID provider (https://www.autenticacao.gov.pt/), which lets you login with your ID card (which is a PGP smartcard) or a two-factor PIN + mobile phone token.
The relationship is actually opposite: banks will let you login on their sites using the government's ID provider. It's not mandatory, though.
I don't know what language you're using, but if you want help I'd be happy to do it. I just built an E-commerce site with NodeJS using Stripe as the payment processing (PayPal is next). My contact information should be on my profile.
JHipster style templating for SAAS onboarding design patterns.
UX description language for forms that respects high level constraints. Compiles to desktop browser, phone browser, and Alexa layouts.
Solving the complexity of matrix matrix multiplication by brute forcing the lower bound with semigroup combinatorics.
DSL for linear logic.
Ending Iowa’s criminalization of “annoying” speech. (Iowa Code 708.7)
Exposing Polk County Iowa Sheriff Kevin Schneider torturing inmates with denial of basic medical care.
Exposing pure nepotism corruption between Iowa Attorney General Chief of Staff Eric Tabor and his sister Iowa Court of Appeals Judge Mary Tabor (mom of @ollie).
Exposing that the prosecutor on Tracy Richter’s murder trial had relations and ended up marrying the daughter of his star witness Mary Higgins - and that the blood spatter expert Englert is a known fraud who wrongfully convicted David Camm and Julie Ray Harper.
Fully offline, fully searchable copies of personal data (email, tweets, calendar, etc.), English Wikipedia, IMDb, OpenStreetMap (tiles, routing, points of interest), geocoding. Fully offline and state of the art speech recognition. Fully offline voice assistant with almost complete coverage of the most common usage.
I’m working on this as well, but with a different set of content types. I want my personal search to primarily support second-brain functionality for creative work, so focusing on indexing:
- podcasts
- self-authored internet comments (Reddit, Hackernews)
We're writing too much code.
So I'm making stuff that will help us write less code.
Like a vim-like editor that translates your spec into generated code while you also see it on the go to fix any issues. Think yeoman on generics and steroids.
Not really - the generated code isnt some mystic code, it's simple templates.
I originally got there by making a complex magic data structure that held relations to everything in multiple dimensions so I could generate a huge amount of stuff, but that turns out to be just like 4GL - a load of slow confusion. The reason I am doing it is exactly because of ML/AI hope - with enough data and proper structures, I can generate a lot.
Safe is interesting but it’s still pretty much still a ledger. I am not sure this will work at current-internet-scale, let alone in a couple of decades worth of data. In addition to that they still pretty much keep building on top of the web, which is really not accessible to machines.
Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed.
A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution.
For this I have also written a new type of web browser called NAVI which takes ALFI code and produces (somewhat) beautiful widgets and renders them using OpenGL.
You need NAVI to actually browse blunder.se properly. otherwise you will just see ALFI code. Also this is still very early so all features are not done yet.
I checked out the repo, but didn't have high hopes when there weren't any screenshots in the README.
But these look great! You should definitely show them off. Adding them to the repo for others to see might generate the tinest bit more excitement for people stumbling on the project. :)
>ALFI is stateless so a typical use-case would be to have a regular web server serving ALFI queries as responses from regular HTTP requests (like GET, POST, etc).
One thing does not exclude the other. The sites are stateless like Lorddragonfang already said. This doesn't mean you can't make nice client side apps and you surely don't need to use javascript to do it.
What js does is that it allows you to dynamically update the contents of your website like changing an image when you hover over it for example. This is something you can actually do with ALFI by itself without having to depend on a second language like js. I'm glad you asked this question.
>A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution.
HTML without styling will render correctly on any display with any resolution. The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so. Your widgets need styling for each device they're rendered on, in which case you're back to the exact original problem as HTML and CSS. All you've done is move the problem to someplace else.
Frankly, I don't see why this isn't a markdown extension, since that seems much better suited to solving your base problem and is WAY more readable than the mess you have currently (which only seems readable to someone versed in high-level programming, either functional or OO)
> The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so.
Wait, what? Are we on different webs? The facts of the history of the web tell us that some of the most popular services for publishing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc - places that allow for very limited custom styling.
I think you misunderstand what OP is trying to do, and are criticizing them for not instead making a thing you already know.
I think it's very, very obvious that "custom styling" here is referring creator styling, not user styling, so I'm not sure that you're in a position to be criticising the person you're responding to for "misunderstanding".
If I read you right, you’re saying that I’m the one misunderstanding OP? It’s honestly not clear to me what the difference between “user” and “creator” would be in the context of this discussion. Could you elaborate?
Since a “creator” is also a user of the web, I guess you mean “user” as in someone who only consumes content? I’m confused by that since nothing in the discussion seems to be about user stylesheets.
I...am a bit confused as to whether you're actually reading the same conversation.
The project creator explicitly said that their creation cannot be styled, at all. It renders the exact same "standard" way on all devices. The retort was that the vast majority of people (with a clear callout to companies that would obviously like their own branding) do not want a web where every site looks the exact same, which is why CSS exists in the first place. You seem to have read/decided to turn this into a discussion about end-user customisation of sites (and, frankly, a thinly veiled rant about Facebook and Medium), when that first of all has nothing directly to do with what was being discussed and second of all would also be out of scope for this project because it had styling itself out of scope.
I’m very sorry, but I don’t understand where you’re coming from.
The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.
One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.
My counter argument is: There are many successful platforms that don’t allow people to style the content they publish, and people seem to be fine with that.
Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.
> The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.
And with a language that explicitly does not allow styling, how exactly is "the platform" that takes care of presenting it going to render anything but a single, default style for all content without...reinventing styling?
> One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.
No, one criticism was rather obviously that people don't want to go on the web and see the exact same thing everywhere they navigate to, which is what you get when styling is not possible. However, you seem to be looking at the entire conversation through some strange lens.
> Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.
The creators of a web service/platform wanting to be able to brand their creation and the users of that service simply going with their chosen brand's aesthetics when publishing content are two concepts that can simultaneously exist - in fact, can even be linked.
I am not sure how it has to be explained that people being okay with publishing content on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium without much custom styling is the furthest thing from an indicator that people want Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and every other website to look exactly the same.
I’m starting to feel silly for continuing this thread. I will just conclude with my best understanding of how we are talking past each other.
I think I understand that you are imagining a middleman to be “the platform” even in the context of NAVI/ALFI. I understood NAVI itself to be this platform; much like the Facebook app allows you to publish and browse Facebook content with very little variation in the styling of different content, so NAVI might allow you to browse and perhaps create ALFI content with little variation in styling. You are comparing all the content within Facebook and others to the content on the rest of the web, while I’m talking about how content within a platform doesn’t need to be visually distinct for the platform to be appealing to publishers and readers. You’re thinking of the web as the “platform”, Facebook etc as the “creators” on the platform, and you are grouping people who publish and read on Facebook as “end-users”. I’m thinking of Facebook as the platform, people who publish things on Facebook as creators, and people who read the things published as the end-users.
Sorry in advance if I’ve misrepresented what you’re saying, but this is the best I can do in explaining why we’re unable to understand one another.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium all have custom styling specific to that platform. The person you're arguing with has interpreted me exactly correctly, you're the one misinterpreting. Please don't engage in pointless flame wars based on poor reading comprehension.
The adjacent thread was not about how to interpret your comment.
It’s completely besides the point that these platforms have custom styling with regards to the web in general. The point is that people are publishing enormous amounts of content on these platforms despite not having the ability to control what that content styled like. Ergo, lack of styling is not a deal breaker for people to publish stuff on a platform.
I have moved the problem of styling to the browsers, like NAVI in my case. The browser is the only part that understands the limitation of the device and knows how to best render each widget so it makes sense for it to handle all the styling instead of having styling intertwined with the data itself like HTML does. CSS doesnt solve the problem of mixed data and styling either, it just hides it better.
The lack of styling I do understand can make it feel as if your site lacks personality when all sites look kinda the same so I see your point here. I might later allow some minor themeing, like say allowing you to select a color scheme, with the understanding that this might be ignored by the user. I will have to think about this more. What you will never get to decide are things lika margins and paddings and things like that.
I don't think you can compare Markdown with ALFI like that exactly. Markdown will generate HTML in the end and it is the resulting HTML that you need to compare with because that is what the browsers understands. Also, Markdown only solves the trivial cases and that is why it can be kept simple and readable but how do you for instance create a three column layout in Markdown with an image in the middle column? I don't know, maybe there are extensions for that these days too.
It would be interesting to have a Markdown to ALFI generator, but I suspect that when you are used to reading ALFI code you might find it to be a bit overkill because even though I am a bit biased of course I do think ALFI is pretty readable.
Also, there is no intentional OOP or funcional aspects, I did not quite understand what you wanted to convey there.
just fyi, something similar called the gemini project as released recently. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/, not saying either one is better or worse, but it might either be an avenue for collaboration or at the very least to get validation that your idea is one that people want!!
Yes but I haven't looked into how much work it would be. I think this might be essential in order to reach a wider audience because I think people want to be able to use the same browser to surf both ALFI and regular websites. Would be awesome for this to work in Firefox and Chrome.
I want to give everyone a digital identity. In some countries (including mine) basically everyone has an e-ID which we use to sign in to things like government services, banks, payment providers and much more. This is absolutely essential to everyday life and many startups are built around it.
Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create a single digital identity which works for everyone, for all applications, across borders. The basic features are:
- App based with no special hardware necessary.
- Privacy friendly with the user always fully aware of what data they are revealing.
- Simple to integrate for developers. It's a standard SSO flow over OAuth/OIDC.
I'm currently calling it Pass: https://getpass.app. If anyone wants to have a chat about digital identities you can reach me at fabian (at) flapplabs.se
Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?
Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved in all their identity interactions? If the server stops working, does the user lose their identity?
Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they wanted to?
> Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?
That's precisely what it means. User IDs will be unique for each site and I'm hoping to anonymize email addresses as well, similar to what Apple has done for "Sign in with Apple". Some companies might be required by law to collect some PII but in that case their needs will be vetted before.
> Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved in all their identity interactions? If the server stops working, does the user lose their identity?
I'm currently building this as a centralized product so no, there is only a single server maintained by us. I'm mostly concerned with building a great product but the prospect of decentralized, verified identities is also very interesting. I'd love to see what that could look like!
> Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they wanted to?
The current product is in the form of an app so you will need a phone but you won't need a phone number (or SIM). An email address is currently required though.
My current system assumes one identity per person but it's fully possible to have multiple devices which acts as that identity. This might change depending on regulation though and is not set in stone.
If you have any more questions I'd be happy to answer them!
Thank you for those excellent answers. I do have a couple more questions if you are interested:
> [companies'] needs will be vetted before.
Is the plan that a single entity offering this centralized product will control not just which users are allowed to have identities, but which companies are allowed to access users' IDs? Presumably there is a somewhat costly process to vetting companies and their requirements, so would companies pay a fixed amount to cover this vetting process, or pay more based on the level of personal information they hoped to receive from users?
> the prospect of decentralized, verified identities is also very interesting.
What type of verification do you imagine being necessary or available for user identities?
> The current product is in the form of an app so you will need a phone but you won't need a phone number (or SIM).
Are there any technologies specific to phones that mean this couldn't run as a web app instead?
> My current system assumes one identity per person but it's fully possible to have multiple devices which acts as that identity.
So if you can install multiple copies of the app on your (Android) phone, you could have multiple identities on the same device?
> Is the plan that a single entity offering this centralized product will control not just which users are allowed to have identities, but which companies are allowed to access users' IDs? Presumably there is a somewhat costly process to vetting companies and their requirements, so would companies pay a fixed amount to cover this vetting process, or pay more based on the level of personal information they hoped to receive from users?
That's the plan, yes. The current pricing structure is to let companies pay a monthly price per active user. They would not be able to pay more to get access to more data. As this is early stages, I'm not sure what the vetting process will look like yet. It's mostly there to ensure that the the data the companies request are actually needed for their core business and will not be used for tracking. For example, a company can only request the legal name of a user if the law requires them to know it. This might be true for a bank but not for a dating app.
> What type of verification do you imagine being necessary or available for user identities?
The verification we will be performing is at the level required by some laws, for example Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws. Our goal is to make Pass suitable for fintech companies which have quite stringent requirements. I can also see lighter forms of verification being good enough for other applications, like the Web of Trust model used by PGP.
> Are there any technologies specific to phones that mean this couldn't run as a web app instead?
Yes. Many modern phones have a built-in Hardware Security Module (HSM) which can be used to store and use asymmetric keys securely. Browser storage can't offer the same level of security currently but there have been some interesting developments which might change this, for example WebAuthn.
> So if you can install multiple copies of the app on your (Android) phone, you could have multiple identities on the same device?
I can't really answer this right now as I'm not sure which way we'll go. It will depend on what regulations require and what we can achieve in terms of verification.
eIDAS is a great initiative but unfortunately I think it’s going to take a while before it becomes useful outside government. As you said, many countries don’t have well established e-IDs and that is what I’m trying to remedy. My main target is not government. Ht
Smart cards don’t work very well today where the average person uses most services through their phone. With the HSMs in modern phones, security in a e-ID app will get very close to that of a smart card though which is really exciting!
How do you plan to insure that your digital identity system can be used for illegal/criminal purposes, such as aiding Jews and other undesirables in evading lawfully authorized detention and relocation (or by said undesirables for said evasion)?
(I don't mean to single you out specifically; this is something that any digital identity system needs to deal with. And most of them enthusiastically don't.)
Why have you chosen to express this point in such a trollish way? We've already received complaints about it.
It sounds like you're trying to say something about the danger of such systems being abused by the state in holocaust-like situations, but the wording is so odd that it's unclear what your real intent is.
> Why have you chosen to express this point in such a trollish way?
I am legitimately confused by this question, since it does not appear trollish to me.
I chose to express it that way to emphasize that (some) abuses of a digital identity system would present as lawful actions by authorized law enforcement personnel, and (apparently too tacitly) that "holocaust-like situations" are not a qualitatively different operating regime that system can assume it is not in during 'normal' operation.
I was a bit worried that it would be percieved as overly confrontational (hence the second paragraph attempting to disclaim that), but I assume that's not what you mean by "trollish".
FWIW, I didn't read that comment as trollish at all. It's quite awkwardly written, and it could do with scare quotes around "undesirables" to make it clear that it refers to the view of authorities in their scenario rather than the view of the comment author, but which part of it is trollish?
My understanding of the comment was expressing a concern that some kind of universal identity system would undoubtedly become an agent of the state, which is fine most of the time but in various situations (including holocaust-like ones) means that it could be used as an instrument of oppression, since it would likely be unable to be used by those who wanted to hide some aspect of their identity for safety reasons.
This seems like a legitimate concern for something that has a goal of becoming a global universal identity system. I would hope that something like that would look more like cash - usable by anyone, whether the state likes it or not, with fundamental privacy aspects - rather than like VISA with some privacy bolted on.
I actually specifically omitted the scare quotes since, in such a situation, from the perspective of the identity system creator, the victims would in fact be undesirables.
It's hard to give a reader a example of someone who they actually believe is a Evil Mutant(TM) who clearly (to that same reader) is a innocent victim, and I didn't bother to try in favor of "well obviouly a non-negligible portion of 1930s Germans agreed with the Nazis".
You didn't read as trollish but others did, and unfortunately there's a problem with comments sometimes being written deliberately to straddle the line. That's why I wrote my reply as a question.
After the twitter account of DDOSecrets got shut down (due Blueleaks), this got me thinking: How would you leak / provide data but are not directly attributable. (At least like a retweet - not your tweet, just amplified.).
And how to add some resilience and protection to the distribution, since there were indicators that the torrent and download of leaked data was being attacked.
So far, I have come up with an encryption matryoshka: you distribute leaks without telling whats in and enable gradually a few to look inside until they are public.
All thats missing is a better document describing it and a command line tool to help to walk through the multi level encryption ... so there is 90% still to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Not really sure what this is trying to solve. If it's some legitimate leak of public interest then the organizations active in this space often have a tip line / encrypted drop where you can put it.
If it's something that's not of interest to many but you want to put out there for some reason then what's stopping you from uploading it to some random one click hoster and posting the link in random places on the internet?
Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law.
Many teachers are plain awful.
They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supplemental education and the rest languish.
Schools assign homework that is not easy to do when the student hasn’t fully grasped the concept. That burns time they could use to get better.
So... I am implementing Math common core in software. The first part is an automatic homework solver for math. Once we solved the student’s homework, we can teach them how to do it with generate problems. Crucially, there will be multiple perspectives and an ontology of topics do the student can backtrack to where they got lost in class weeks ago.
After we are good with math, we’ll do the same with English. It will probably not go too deep, but it will let students obtain the missing foundation of knowledge.
As a father with a 12 year old struggling with math, to say something is extremely easy makes me think you have a better understanding of math than people.
To be fair, they never said it was easy to figure out how to properly explain it, nor that the right pace was necessarily as fast as anyone involved would like.
Yeah, I feel there are a few potential PhDs in that statement. Coding the solver and the problem generator is the easy part, figuring out how to explain something and from multiple perspectives will be tough. The multiple perspectives is key. I hope I can build a community of people willing to explain and a community of moderators to vet the explanation.
Take your child back to first grade and systematically re-test his knowledge. Identify where he got lost, catch up, and then today's assignments will not be as difficult. The child is likely stuck on something that wasn't thoroughly understood in the past.
I did this for a child recently. He was in the special needs program. I looked at his homework and re-tested his math understanding. It turns out he had no solid understanding of place value and had difficulty with adding two digit numbers mentally. No wonder he was struggling. We fixed that by spending a week 30 minutes per day on just that concept, he caught up to the next roadblock, which was fractions, we fixed that, and so on.
That's expensive if you hire someone to do this, but enabling self-study through ability to backtrack would not require as much teaching skill and be more of a supervisory activity for parents.
There are entire books on how to interpret math word problems, which is really all about converting verbal expressions into mathematical symbols. If you haven't already, buy one or check one out at the library. I am building a parser that implements those books as if they were algorithms.
That's the approach I am working on. No NLP, no ML, nothing fancy like that. It will take a while, but I should be able to pull this off. This is a question about hard problems and I think it qualifies. ;)
I totally agree that missing foundation is a huge, compounding issue, and that it can be solved with “surgical education”. I used to do this as a tutor. You dig deeper down the stack of fundamentals until you find something that’s missing, and then you build the stack back up.
That being said, surgery is hard and can be traumatizing if taken on haphazardly. One of the harder problems, in my experience, is if an adolescent has been behind for years, it takes a long time to get to “normal”, and that can be really depressing for both the tutor and the pupil.
Another huge compounding problem is literacy skills. There are people in high school who can barely read, and it dramatically impacts their ability to catch up in every other subject. You can write a perfect explanation, but it might be totally disorienting to these students.
Education is really hard. I wish you the best of luck, it’s inspirational to read your ideas here!
Exactly. Literacy will be the second prong. I want to annotate Strunk & White with background information. Writing the grammar engine will be difficult.
While reading S&W, I had to look up many terms that were assumed knowledge.
Hey, this doesn't sound too different from the adaptive diagnostic Maths Pathway (https://mathspathway.com/) has. It starts at Level 1 and retests all mathematical knowledge of the student until it reaches their zone of proximal development (ZPD). It's all within a classroom environment, but it means all the students are learning the maths that suit them, not a one-size-fits all which is the issue you are referring to I believe.
You could use automatic homework as a reward. Basically replacing broken curriculum with your own until they catch up. (Or even beyond that: homework takes time even when you know everything.)
Retired teacher here...glad to see fresh thinking on this problem. The mega-publishers that serve school districts are stuck in a 1980s model. A project related to yours is ASSiSTments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The market is big, with space for several innovative projects.
I certainly agree that so much about school is problematic and could be improved, but ...
> Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons.
A prison by definition cannot be part-time ; ). Plus, it's a totally unfair comparison. Schools are intended for everyone. Prisons are intended for a specific subset of people deemed to have broken a law.
I would love to understand where you are from and what education systems you have seen. Where does your assumption of students relying on being taught by parents ceme from?
I didn't mention parents not being able to teach. I just asked where your assumption for that is coming from.
Just wondering as I haven't heard of this at all in my home country. Homework is usually quite clear, and the basics to get through it are made clear in the classroom. We had separate times for learning maths, and doing exercises.
Have you thought maybe your assumption is based on very very old anecdotal data?
I would be delighted if my product turned out to be unnecessary and I am not being sarcastic.
Science homework should be able to be done in little more than it takes to copy it from an A student. It should not take hours, which it often does. I am looking through the lens of disadvantaged students.
That sounds good and maybe the country you are from does not have this problem (anymore).
The parents I know from my home country are telling me that their kids are often struggling and are overwhelmed by the homework assignments. While this is already recognised also by the board that created the curriculum the changes are slow and half-hearted.
In my opinion, however, that is not even the problem, nor is it the problem that they are trying to solve. We usually forget that teaching is not "transfer" of knowledge. Each person actually recreates the knowledge in their own head and tries to fit it in with the rest of the world they know.
I believe that the best solution to education is to be able to personalize the new content in a way that naturally extends the student's knowledge. As already stated this may mean backtracking a little to be able to put the new knowledge onto a good foundation.
Normally, teachers cannot do that for each student individually so getting a program that could do that customization would be a great win.
I learned basic algebra from something like this in book form. Kind of like a "choose your own adventure", but it would pose problems, and either skip ahead on the correct answer, or lead to clarifying text for common mistakes.
(no longer remember the series title, but do still remember the penny finally dropping on "x is an unknown")
Maybe a relevant personal anecdote might help you -
My grandfather used to sit with me for an hour every morning and used to teach me maths.
He would focus on basics first. He would make sure I had the basics drilled in to me. Not just understood them, but mastered them. Then we would move on to the next topic.
It was a bit slow at first. But after a while, once the basics were done, I finished the whole year's math book in 2-3 months.
I have seen this in software engineering too. Once I am good at basics, or once they're drilled in enough, I am faster and quicker.
Drilling basics is basically like having the basics in O(1) look up with very reduced space complexity too. It reduces the amount of overhead your brain utilises. This makes your brain free to think about the actual problem you are solving. Also, I think this is what allows your brain to work in the background, even when you aren't actively thinking about the problem.
Lockdown has really shown up how my 7 year old struggles with his maths work set by school. I've gone back to basics with him and have been drilling him on simple numeracy until he can do it effortlessly using some flash cards I bought and some iPad apps (DoodleMaths, DoodleTables - can't recommend them enough).
Since then he has sailed through all of the new parts we're learning. I really expected it to be much harder than this, but it seems like not fully understanding some basic concepts and having confidence with basic numbers makes all the difference for really understanding the why of all the concepts that are build on top.
In about 6 weeks of me spending around 30 mins to an hour each weekday he has gone from refusing to look at a maths problem to being confident with it.
My wife and I have taught our daughter materials sometimes 2 grade levels above where she is. I think every child has the potential for genius. It is really how you present the material.
I taught a few classes last year on how to program in Scratch to grades 1-5. The 4th and 5th graders really loved it and they went off on their own to learn more. It was not a large sample, but I think presenting the right material in the right way to the right age makes a huge difference.
I have been thinking of ways to improve education. I think there is a huge potential in online video. If it is produced right in the sense of say "Hollywood" verse say Khan Academy, kids will enjoy it a lot more.
Thanks for sharing, I have not heard of Shadiversity. I would recommend MrBettsClass channel for high school history. I wish there were more channels like this for a younger audience.
I’ve been coming up with a new pedagogy for the fundamentals of interactive and computer art, and trying it out with kids on TikTok. Maybe you saw the software I put out a few weeks ago on HN called No Paint: https://nopaint.art. However, most of the time I’m using pen and paper for this work.
I've been journaling my dreams for years and I'm working on an app that makes it easier to (visually) map them out & find patterns: https://oneironotes.com/
I like the idea of accessing other (inner) dimensions during sleep, like an explorer (an "oneironaut"). The problems to overcome are related to capturing and recollecting experiences that only take place in the mind. You asked about the weird stuff...
1. Set your intention as you are falling asleep by repeating “tonight I’m going to remember my dreams”.
2. When you wake up, don’t move! Stay in bed for 5-10 minutes and try to remember. Once you remember one thing try to ask yourself what happened before or after.
3. Dream journal.
I practiced the above back i. High school. Went from occasionally remembering a dream to remembering about 4-5 a night. Some small snippets and others longer. Was really incredible and I plan to try it again.
- The #1 way to remember more dreams is to be interested in them! The only personality trait correlated with high dream recall is "openness to experience" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience#Dream_r...). If you want to remember dreams, first consider WHY you want to remember them. Hone into that curiosity and strengthen it.
- Second best tip I can think of is: more sleep! REM periods get longer in the later cycles of your sleep, meaning a higher chance of dreams.
- Also, if you really really want to recall dreams (and perhaps induce lucid ones) and you don't mind being tired the day after, try interrupting your sleep at ~90 min intervals (the average length of a sleep cycle) with a (silent) alarm clock - or raise a baby :)
- Finally, quit smoking weed if applicable, as it suppresses REM sleep ;-)
Hey, I also did a lot of work on dreams - I have also journaled my dreams for years and had therapy at the same time. I got super into them, read a bunch about them, even did a psychology masters to spend time researching them. I couldn't find theory that matched with my experience so I wrote this paper on them:
"A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering."
Hey Joshua, thanks for your kind comment! Very interesting thesis in your paper.
Do you think that besides as a framework for anxiety diagnosis, this could suggest lucid dreaming as part of the therapeutic treatment? Consciously inducing lucidity and choosing confrontation of the dream scenario rather than defaulting to avoidant behavior?
So relatable. I have notes of most of my dreams from last 2-3 months(mainly) and some from last few years. I might sign up. Does it only work with browser or any offline thing?
Browser, desktop, mobile, ... I'm supporting all of them because of my typical process starts with taking sloppy notes on my mobile phone and then editing & annotating them on my desktop...
I’m building a platform to host my book club online due to covid, and I think that I can generalize my solution to reinvent MOOC’s and possibly further areas of communication.
I would argue that open source as we know fails to balance the market. We now have monopolistic tech incumbents in the “GAFAM“ companies, that thrive on open source while paying little tax and outcompeting actual tax paying businesses. I see maintainers either burning out or selling out to venture capitalists.
I want to believe in free and open source, but I also see that it fully enables surveillance capitalism, casino capitalism and tax avoiding monoliths.
So, I realize that I need to move past classic licensing and consider ethical licensing that try to remedy society’s inequalities and injustices.
Call me a cyber hippie, but if I want to build cool stuff in my spare time to share I want to maximize its chances of doing something good in the world. To that end I’m evaluating some ethical licenses.
There are many ethical licenses out there which are evolving. Presently, I’m evaluating this one: The (Cooperative) Non-Violent Public License: https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html
After the weekend I’ll try to get in touch with a Lawyer to review the license implications. It’s arguably not open source in definition, but maybe more so in spirit.
Working on building a self-hosted app that would alow you to save, organise and search your knowledge in one center.
It would contain information like notes, bookmarks (it would download the links contents) and in general provide a programmable, opensource interface to preserve the info you'll find useful and even sync with external apis to save your online presence locally (think reddit posts, hn links, etc...)
Wow that is quite similar! Mine is a bit simpler but insists on providing flexibility with different apis so you can sync your online presence locally while also providing an easily programmable interface.
I'm working on a website that helps me to keep track of the podcasts that I'm listening to across platforms (Think Last.fm / Trakt.tv but for podcasts) by automatically importing the listening data from various podcast apps.
831 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 996 ms ] threadThere's a sample at https://random-character-generator.com/
There's an unreleased version, which focuses more on how to portray characters, rather than just what they are. For example, instead of saying "energetic", they'll be pacing about a bit.
I might just pivot it into a story/plot tracker for writers, and use it to fill out the blanks rather than generating full characters from scratch. Where the community can add in their own templates and tropes. An author can decide that they have a character who is stoic, cynical, and sarcastic, and the tool will generate a background story, how to portray the character, what conflicts they get into with other characters.
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Woods-Five-Act-Journey-Story/dp/...
It's more for screenwriters, but his theses on plot, pacing, characters, and world are good and easy to read. It's a very good book.
The ideas for the pivot are great. Read the book, it's seriously good.
Then there could be an idea of 'atom' of information that uses models to spreading via NPCs.
There is just so much I know that could be done with this, but I'm guessing hasn't been because it takes more computation than I realize. Or maybe there just hasn't been the effort put into it. I'm hoping it's the latter.
Video game graphics seem to be providing diminishing returns for the game experience compared to depth of storyline/world building. Gamers will not care as much about how a game looks when it is very engaging due to the other elements. But it seems like those other elements are constantly undervalued by game makers.
I think it's more that content is hard. My random generator linked above already pulls from all the top tropes from TV Tropes, but it still seems repetitive. There's an awfully high proportion of stories starring a deadpan snarker or a stubbornly optimistic heroine, but these roles and personalities in a vacuum are not enough to make them unique.
Latest experiments show that details help a lot. Quality went up a lot when I moved from "they" to "him/her". And it went up even more when I had several different types of text describing the same feature. So maybe the missing link isn't just generating better skeletons, but rather different ways of saying the same thing. After all, there are a million fantasy worlds out there. All romances are the same archetypes. But some stand out more than others.
THE PROBLEM
How do you automate and aggregate context across business departments for various forms of activity, and then map that to marketing analytics in a way that gives relevant and sufficient insights beyond just channel or user data? How do you more fully answer the question of "what happened when [$thing happened]?"
THE VALUE OPPORTUNITY
Countless people hours and marketing dollars are wasted going down fruitless rabbit holes looking for what caused some change, or thinking they found the cause in a change in performance and pursuing that when it reality it was something else. In many of these cases, this could have been easily avoided if only there were sufficient data on the business activities (internal and external) logged and aggregated with marketing data in a way that was then automatically surfaced in an appropriate manner. As the scale of the company increases, so does the impact of this.
WHY IT IS WEIRD/HARD
It's weird in the sense that only a small subset of people are immersed in analytics enough are aware they should care about it, and probably fewer geek out enough about marketing analytics and process to care about trying to solve it. It is hard because it is just as much a people challenge as a technical one. The technical side is somewhat straightforward in terms of aggregating as many data inputs as you can--it's basically a ton of data plumbing and monitoring for changes with that. Whether that's bid management platforms and DSPs or SSPs, email platforms, site analytics, etc. But then also project management tools and properly categorizing the meta data for relevant updates to be surfaced. You have challenges around walled data gardens and comparing apples to oranges around things like attribution measurement, but that is something that can be handled. Surfacing it in timely and sufficiently useful ways is an interesting design and UX challenge though, from annotations and "pull" data, to modals and callouts that are more "push" in how they inform people of context before it bites them.
The people side however, is constantly in flux in a way that the data side is not. Some aspects of this absolutely rely on consistent adherence to process to capture key data that is hard to slurp up through an API. Some of it is quite ephemeral. I've encountered team situations where people object (or struggle to due to limited training) to filling out a couple fields in a Google Sheet, or need to be hounded to fill out a given form, etc. Some companies can enforce this to levels others cannot. Things also get really interesting at large companies (think FAANG). You're dealing with many teams, many overlapping or conflicting processes such a solution would need to be embedded into, localization, internal/external vendors of varying levels of visibility needs, and also personalities who may want more control over their orgs' processes and need persuading.
At the end, this all needs to be balanced against how much utility you get out of the insights because it is easy to over-index on investing in building this tech and process out only to not get insights out of it. Unfortunately you often only learn that after the fact when you've been bitten by it.
If there's any companies trying to solve for this, please do reach out (see profile). I love chatting about it and want to help build the tools and processes that solve for this at scale and have ~15yrs experience in the space, a good chunk of which have been spent trying to solve for variations of this.
They do need worthy competitors, so go for it!
Machine learning: what happens when we replace Euclidean metrics with p-adic ones? Distance is fundamental to so many algorithms (least squares regression; nearest neighbours; anything involving gradient descent). How do those algorithms behave over completely foreign metric spaces?
There's a US company that has an ultrasonic "x-ray". Signal processing is used to find cracks and cavities. It's not well-known yet even to Bay Area specialists.
Best is a mix of
- the ones I enjoy most
- but not one that I just visited last weekend
- where there has been recent snowfall / is predicted to snow
- that I have may have a season pass for
- where costs of highway tolls, petrol, hotels can be optimised
- driving time
- whether I’m going alone or with friends
- don’t have anything important at work on Monday
Eventually, I’d like to turn it into a kind of friend finder / social network thingy but for snowboarding.
Stay safe in those woods! I nearly perished, by getting lost.
an eco-recovery robot
Inspired by
https://interestingengineering.com/jadav-payeng-the-man-who-...
https://relieved.co/couple-plants-2-million-trees-in-20-year...
EDIT: i am trying to find a similar story about a professor who worked in similar techniques in African farms - increasing plants/animal/water-retention using tradition techniques
This is a report by the NIC from 2013 which outlines exactly how we expect these shortages to occur, on what timeframes, in which geographical locations, and what consequences are expected.
Thought you might find it useful when planning how and where to be most efficient and to stay ahead of the clock.
I'm happy to discuss these issues more over email if you'd like to swap ideas.
There's a EU directive instructing on how citizens should be able to identify online with eIDAS. In my country, you can use eIDAS to authenticate in basically any governmental agency portal, but you can't get any eIDAS enabled auth method as a citizen. The current way of authenticating is done via bank accounts or a paid extra mobile service that requires a non-prepaid mobile contract.
This is a relatively huge issue. First off, the Finnish government pays the banks for each auth any user does when they for example want to log into their medical records etc. It's a few million euros a year just for verifying the users.
There's also obviously issues with whom the banks serve, there has been some cases with them not taking foreigners or people with bad credit as customers, making it impossible for them to authenticate themselves.
The current EU directives also indirectly require that the banks should provide a bank customer the possibility to authenticate without needing to have a banking account (which costs money), but to my knowledge this still isn't possible. I pay around 20 euros a month just for the luxury of having an account, not everyone can afford that on top of other bills.
Auth services are not accessible for impaired users.
It's also basically impossible to manage who has essentially the power of attorney and over which matters, for how long etc. Either you have to give them your login info (good luck resetting your SSN) or try to use the services over the phone and somehow convince the other side that you have permission to manage things for another person.
There's no ways of authenticating who is using your accounts online and actually verify the users.
Basically, my idea is combining biometrics, PGP and having the government running the identity management themselves. This would have added benefits of basically enabling hashed throwaway addresses and info for use online while providing a free and accessible way of authenticating strongly online.
Unrelated but speaking of throwaway addresses, it would be cool to be able to create a throwaway postal address (which is then translated by the postal service), so online shops don't get your personal address information.
If PO boxes were free, it'd solve one part of which I take issue with, but it costs like 4 euros per pickup. If your income is low, the 4 euros on top of the some 20 euros for banking and another 20 for a cellular plan will quickly add up.
Several brick and mortar retailers here require your address and personal info even when buying and picking up physically at their store and several have had their databases hacked and leaked.
Why do I need to give those when they're not shipping anything to me and I pay in cash?
We have an agency called Maistraatti which is our nation wide registry office which will have all of my postal information, family relations etc.,basicslly anything related to me as part of our society. Why can't I just provide online and physical retailers some ID that the registry can then translate into my actual info when it's actually needed, for example for shipping or if they want to check my credit etc. They could just save that ID for that purchase and temporarily check the necessary info through an API.
Hashed info would be one solution, the retailers would only get the hashes I provide and the registry office could then match those hashes to my info. In essence, I could basically create single use throwaway information for each retailer if I'd wanted to and they would be none the wiser.
It occurred to me the USA might do something similar in the future and let the banks authenticate and verify identities. (The $1200 CARES Act stimulus payments were automatically wired to those who previously authorized the IRS to post their tax refunds to their banks.)
> actually verify the users
Maybe you can harness existing Public Notaries instead of using online banking? The USA has over four million Public Notaries who can "witness" and verify identities. For example, a user can pay for a Public Notary to come to his house. The Public Notary reviews the user's government provided identification and issue them an official E-ID and a encryption USB key like Google Titan Security key. The Public Notary can record this transaction in a government database so that there is a trail of who received the Titan key and who provided it.
I mean, I think it's some ten cents per auth through a bank, if you'd have to invite a notary or visit them every time you want to auth, it'd definitely cost more than that.
I was thinking of a combination of biometric ID, physical card with NFC or USB and a pin or a password. Biometric info is hard to spoof, but not entirely impossible which is why ust stealing the ID card or biometric info shouldn't be enough, you'd need some type of password. Once the user provides all three, you'll know that physically that person carries the aforementioned identifications and is like whom they claim. These would be used to encrypt and unencrypt hashes, meaning that other individuals can also use the hashes to make sure they're contacted by or contacting themselves the correct person they meant to.
We'd also need to implement a way to manage permissions for other users to manage our own data. If you're for example physically incapacitated and want your caretaker to be able to access some services, you could add their hashed identity as an allowed entity and decide over which services and features they can see and/or edit.
1. https://www.singpass.gov.sg/
2. As far as I know, people on migrant worker visas aren’t allowed to use SingPass.
The relationship is actually opposite: banks will let you login on their sites using the government's ID provider. It's not mandatory, though.
It will have all features that WooCommerce have but much stable and easily customisable.
UX description language for forms that respects high level constraints. Compiles to desktop browser, phone browser, and Alexa layouts.
Solving the complexity of matrix matrix multiplication by brute forcing the lower bound with semigroup combinatorics.
DSL for linear logic.
Ending Iowa’s criminalization of “annoying” speech. (Iowa Code 708.7)
Exposing Polk County Iowa Sheriff Kevin Schneider torturing inmates with denial of basic medical care.
Exposing pure nepotism corruption between Iowa Attorney General Chief of Staff Eric Tabor and his sister Iowa Court of Appeals Judge Mary Tabor (mom of @ollie).
Exposing that the prosecutor on Tracy Richter’s murder trial had relations and ended up marrying the daughter of his star witness Mary Higgins - and that the blood spatter expert Englert is a known fraud who wrongfully convicted David Camm and Julie Ray Harper.
- podcasts
- self-authored internet comments (Reddit, Hackernews)
- books
- articles
- code
- music
- lectures
Started it at http://rememex.org
Like a vim-like editor that translates your spec into generated code while you also see it on the go to fix any issues. Think yeoman on generics and steroids.
Anyone old enough to be in IT in the late 80's/early 90's will remember the "4th GL" phase that swept through Fortune 100 companies.
I was in banking at the time, and 'Focus 4GL' was brought in to replace programmers. Of course, in the end, it turned out to be a fools-errand.
My prediction though is that in less than a decade, ML/AI will be decent enough at developing solutions via client specs for many applications.
I originally got there by making a complex magic data structure that held relations to everything in multiple dimensions so I could generate a huge amount of stuff, but that turns out to be just like 4GL - a load of slow confusion. The reason I am doing it is exactly because of ML/AI hope - with enough data and proper structures, I can generate a lot.
Think more in terms or ipfs/ipld.
Replacing HTML/JS/CSS with a language called ALFI. It is stupidly simple in its design but still very powerful. Similarly to HTML you use it to create widgets, place them, and define their behavior. It is humanly readable like HTML but line-based instead of markup-based. Instead of nesting it uses references. This allows it to be streamed.
A big difference is that the language itself doesn't allow styling (like CSS), the downside being you get less flexibility but the upside being it will render correctly on any display with any resolution.
For this I have also written a new type of web browser called NAVI which takes ALFI code and produces (somewhat) beautiful widgets and renders them using OpenGL.
Source for both ALFI and NAVI: https://github.com/jezze/alfi
My own ALFI website: http://www.blunder.se/
You need NAVI to actually browse blunder.se properly. otherwise you will just see ALFI code. Also this is still very early so all features are not done yet.
http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s1.png http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s2.png http://www.blunder.se/screenshots/s3.png
But these look great! You should definitely show them off. Adding them to the repo for others to see might generate the tinest bit more excitement for people stumbling on the project. :)
So, no
What js does is that it allows you to dynamically update the contents of your website like changing an image when you hover over it for example. This is something you can actually do with ALFI by itself without having to depend on a second language like js. I'm glad you asked this question.
HTML without styling will render correctly on any display with any resolution. The facts of the history of the web tell us that people want custom styling, though, and businesses want it even more, because marketing says so. Your widgets need styling for each device they're rendered on, in which case you're back to the exact original problem as HTML and CSS. All you've done is move the problem to someplace else.
Frankly, I don't see why this isn't a markdown extension, since that seems much better suited to solving your base problem and is WAY more readable than the mess you have currently (which only seems readable to someone versed in high-level programming, either functional or OO)
Wait, what? Are we on different webs? The facts of the history of the web tell us that some of the most popular services for publishing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, etc - places that allow for very limited custom styling.
I think you misunderstand what OP is trying to do, and are criticizing them for not instead making a thing you already know.
Since a “creator” is also a user of the web, I guess you mean “user” as in someone who only consumes content? I’m confused by that since nothing in the discussion seems to be about user stylesheets.
The project creator explicitly said that their creation cannot be styled, at all. It renders the exact same "standard" way on all devices. The retort was that the vast majority of people (with a clear callout to companies that would obviously like their own branding) do not want a web where every site looks the exact same, which is why CSS exists in the first place. You seem to have read/decided to turn this into a discussion about end-user customisation of sites (and, frankly, a thinly veiled rant about Facebook and Medium), when that first of all has nothing directly to do with what was being discussed and second of all would also be out of scope for this project because it had styling itself out of scope.
The original proposal seems to be this: You publish a document. The platform takes care of presenting it.
One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.
My counter argument is: There are many successful platforms that don’t allow people to style the content they publish, and people seem to be fine with that.
Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.
And with a language that explicitly does not allow styling, how exactly is "the platform" that takes care of presenting it going to render anything but a single, default style for all content without...reinventing styling?
> One criticism was: No, people want to control the styling of what they publish.
No, one criticism was rather obviously that people don't want to go on the web and see the exact same thing everywhere they navigate to, which is what you get when styling is not possible. However, you seem to be looking at the entire conversation through some strange lens.
> Again, assuming you’re talking about readers when you say “end-user”, I never even mentioned them.
The creators of a web service/platform wanting to be able to brand their creation and the users of that service simply going with their chosen brand's aesthetics when publishing content are two concepts that can simultaneously exist - in fact, can even be linked.
I am not sure how it has to be explained that people being okay with publishing content on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium without much custom styling is the furthest thing from an indicator that people want Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium and every other website to look exactly the same.
I think I understand that you are imagining a middleman to be “the platform” even in the context of NAVI/ALFI. I understood NAVI itself to be this platform; much like the Facebook app allows you to publish and browse Facebook content with very little variation in the styling of different content, so NAVI might allow you to browse and perhaps create ALFI content with little variation in styling. You are comparing all the content within Facebook and others to the content on the rest of the web, while I’m talking about how content within a platform doesn’t need to be visually distinct for the platform to be appealing to publishers and readers. You’re thinking of the web as the “platform”, Facebook etc as the “creators” on the platform, and you are grouping people who publish and read on Facebook as “end-users”. I’m thinking of Facebook as the platform, people who publish things on Facebook as creators, and people who read the things published as the end-users.
Sorry in advance if I’ve misrepresented what you’re saying, but this is the best I can do in explaining why we’re unable to understand one another.
Yes, you are.
It’s completely besides the point that these platforms have custom styling with regards to the web in general. The point is that people are publishing enormous amounts of content on these platforms despite not having the ability to control what that content styled like. Ergo, lack of styling is not a deal breaker for people to publish stuff on a platform.
The lack of styling I do understand can make it feel as if your site lacks personality when all sites look kinda the same so I see your point here. I might later allow some minor themeing, like say allowing you to select a color scheme, with the understanding that this might be ignored by the user. I will have to think about this more. What you will never get to decide are things lika margins and paddings and things like that.
I don't think you can compare Markdown with ALFI like that exactly. Markdown will generate HTML in the end and it is the resulting HTML that you need to compare with because that is what the browsers understands. Also, Markdown only solves the trivial cases and that is why it can be kept simple and readable but how do you for instance create a three column layout in Markdown with an image in the middle column? I don't know, maybe there are extensions for that these days too.
It would be interesting to have a Markdown to ALFI generator, but I suspect that when you are used to reading ALFI code you might find it to be a bit overkill because even though I am a bit biased of course I do think ALFI is pretty readable.
Also, there is no intentional OOP or funcional aspects, I did not quite understand what you wanted to convey there.
I guess that alternative or even non-graphical interfaces (like CLI or voice) are possible?
If someone else is interested in a less radical version of this topic, maybe you can share some insights here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23737903
https://futureofcoding.org
Unfortunately, many countries don't have useful e-IDs and the ones that do are limited to that one country. I want to create a single digital identity which works for everyone, for all applications, across borders. The basic features are:
- App based with no special hardware necessary.
- Privacy friendly with the user always fully aware of what data they are revealing.
- Simple to integrate for developers. It's a standard SSO flow over OAuth/OIDC.
I'm currently calling it Pass: https://getpass.app. If anyone wants to have a chat about digital identities you can reach me at fabian (at) flapplabs.se
Does this mean that a user can use their identity on two separate sites, and those two sites can't collude to build a shared profile of the user, without the user's permission?
Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved in all their identity interactions? If the server stops working, does the user lose their identity?
Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they wanted to?
That's precisely what it means. User IDs will be unique for each site and I'm hoping to anonymize email addresses as well, similar to what Apple has done for "Sign in with Apple". Some companies might be required by law to collect some PII but in that case their needs will be vetted before.
> Does the user have to choose a specific server to be involved in all their identity interactions? If the server stops working, does the user lose their identity?
I'm currently building this as a centralized product so no, there is only a single server maintained by us. I'm mostly concerned with building a great product but the prospect of decentralized, verified identities is also very interesting. I'd love to see what that could look like!
> Also, is it possible to create an account without a phone (or rather without a SIM, since those are often tied to real identities)? Does your proposed system assume that people can't register multiple identities (using multiple phones) if they wanted to?
The current product is in the form of an app so you will need a phone but you won't need a phone number (or SIM). An email address is currently required though.
My current system assumes one identity per person but it's fully possible to have multiple devices which acts as that identity. This might change depending on regulation though and is not set in stone.
If you have any more questions I'd be happy to answer them!
> [companies'] needs will be vetted before.
Is the plan that a single entity offering this centralized product will control not just which users are allowed to have identities, but which companies are allowed to access users' IDs? Presumably there is a somewhat costly process to vetting companies and their requirements, so would companies pay a fixed amount to cover this vetting process, or pay more based on the level of personal information they hoped to receive from users?
> the prospect of decentralized, verified identities is also very interesting.
What type of verification do you imagine being necessary or available for user identities?
> The current product is in the form of an app so you will need a phone but you won't need a phone number (or SIM).
Are there any technologies specific to phones that mean this couldn't run as a web app instead?
> My current system assumes one identity per person but it's fully possible to have multiple devices which acts as that identity.
So if you can install multiple copies of the app on your (Android) phone, you could have multiple identities on the same device?
That's the plan, yes. The current pricing structure is to let companies pay a monthly price per active user. They would not be able to pay more to get access to more data. As this is early stages, I'm not sure what the vetting process will look like yet. It's mostly there to ensure that the the data the companies request are actually needed for their core business and will not be used for tracking. For example, a company can only request the legal name of a user if the law requires them to know it. This might be true for a bank but not for a dating app.
> What type of verification do you imagine being necessary or available for user identities?
The verification we will be performing is at the level required by some laws, for example Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws. Our goal is to make Pass suitable for fintech companies which have quite stringent requirements. I can also see lighter forms of verification being good enough for other applications, like the Web of Trust model used by PGP.
> Are there any technologies specific to phones that mean this couldn't run as a web app instead?
Yes. Many modern phones have a built-in Hardware Security Module (HSM) which can be used to store and use asymmetric keys securely. Browser storage can't offer the same level of security currently but there have been some interesting developments which might change this, for example WebAuthn.
> So if you can install multiple copies of the app on your (Android) phone, you could have multiple identities on the same device?
I can't really answer this right now as I'm not sure which way we'll go. It will depend on what regulations require and what we can achieve in terms of verification.
Moreover it requires a smart card for the highest level of authentication.
Smart cards don’t work very well today where the average person uses most services through their phone. With the HSMs in modern phones, security in a e-ID app will get very close to that of a smart card though which is really exciting!
(I don't mean to single you out specifically; this is something that any digital identity system needs to deal with. And most of them enthusiastically don't.)
It sounds like you're trying to say something about the danger of such systems being abused by the state in holocaust-like situations, but the wording is so odd that it's unclear what your real intent is.
I am legitimately confused by this question, since it does not appear trollish to me.
I chose to express it that way to emphasize that (some) abuses of a digital identity system would present as lawful actions by authorized law enforcement personnel, and (apparently too tacitly) that "holocaust-like situations" are not a qualitatively different operating regime that system can assume it is not in during 'normal' operation.
I was a bit worried that it would be percieved as overly confrontational (hence the second paragraph attempting to disclaim that), but I assume that's not what you mean by "trollish".
My understanding of the comment was expressing a concern that some kind of universal identity system would undoubtedly become an agent of the state, which is fine most of the time but in various situations (including holocaust-like ones) means that it could be used as an instrument of oppression, since it would likely be unable to be used by those who wanted to hide some aspect of their identity for safety reasons.
This seems like a legitimate concern for something that has a goal of becoming a global universal identity system. I would hope that something like that would look more like cash - usable by anyone, whether the state likes it or not, with fundamental privacy aspects - rather than like VISA with some privacy bolted on.
It's hard to give a reader a example of someone who they actually believe is a Evil Mutant(TM) who clearly (to that same reader) is a innocent victim, and I didn't bother to try in favor of "well obviouly a non-negligible portion of 1930s Germans agreed with the Nazis".
After the twitter account of DDOSecrets got shut down (due Blueleaks), this got me thinking: How would you leak / provide data but are not directly attributable. (At least like a retweet - not your tweet, just amplified.).
And how to add some resilience and protection to the distribution, since there were indicators that the torrent and download of leaked data was being attacked.
So far, I have come up with an encryption matryoshka: you distribute leaks without telling whats in and enable gradually a few to look inside until they are public.
All thats missing is a better document describing it and a command line tool to help to walk through the multi level encryption ... so there is 90% still to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
If it's something that's not of interest to many but you want to put out there for some reason then what's stopping you from uploading it to some random one click hoster and posting the link in random places on the internet?
Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons. You must attend daily under penalty of law.
Many teachers are plain awful.
They rely on students being additionally taught by their parents. That forces parents to go to school with their children, which perpetuates the vicious cycle. The teacher recalibrates the class to the students who either understood everything the first time or had supplemental education and the rest languish.
Schools assign homework that is not easy to do when the student hasn’t fully grasped the concept. That burns time they could use to get better.
So... I am implementing Math common core in software. The first part is an automatic homework solver for math. Once we solved the student’s homework, we can teach them how to do it with generate problems. Crucially, there will be multiple perspectives and an ontology of topics do the student can backtrack to where they got lost in class weeks ago.
After we are good with math, we’ll do the same with English. It will probably not go too deep, but it will let students obtain the missing foundation of knowledge.
The entire curriculum is extremely easy when properly explained at correct pace.
I totally agree that getting a high quality corpus of information is the hardest part.
I like the idea of explaining “themes/metaphors”, with version-controlled iterative improvements.
I did this for a child recently. He was in the special needs program. I looked at his homework and re-tested his math understanding. It turns out he had no solid understanding of place value and had difficulty with adding two digit numbers mentally. No wonder he was struggling. We fixed that by spending a week 30 minutes per day on just that concept, he caught up to the next roadblock, which was fractions, we fixed that, and so on.
That's expensive if you hire someone to do this, but enabling self-study through ability to backtrack would not require as much teaching skill and be more of a supervisory activity for parents.
There are entire books on how to interpret math word problems, which is really all about converting verbal expressions into mathematical symbols. If you haven't already, buy one or check one out at the library. I am building a parser that implements those books as if they were algorithms.
That's the approach I am working on. No NLP, no ML, nothing fancy like that. It will take a while, but I should be able to pull this off. This is a question about hard problems and I think it qualifies. ;)
That being said, surgery is hard and can be traumatizing if taken on haphazardly. One of the harder problems, in my experience, is if an adolescent has been behind for years, it takes a long time to get to “normal”, and that can be really depressing for both the tutor and the pupil.
Another huge compounding problem is literacy skills. There are people in high school who can barely read, and it dramatically impacts their ability to catch up in every other subject. You can write a perfect explanation, but it might be totally disorienting to these students.
Education is really hard. I wish you the best of luck, it’s inspirational to read your ideas here!
While reading S&W, I had to look up many terms that were assumed knowledge.
Full disclosure: i work at maths pathway.
> Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons.
A prison by definition cannot be part-time ; ). Plus, it's a totally unfair comparison. Schools are intended for everyone. Prisons are intended for a specific subset of people deemed to have broken a law.
Schools are for children. Prisons are for adults.
And so on.
Sure it can. Check out "weekenders" and "work release" programs, for example.
“X is like prison”.
Work is like prison. Childhood is like prison. Society is like prison.
Is everything like prison?
If we live in The Matrix yes but we don’t?
> Schools are for children. [a specific subset of people]
Bills of attainder[0] may be illegal and unconstitutional, but they're still a thing that happens as long as noone who matters cares.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder
You are right though, many parents can’t teach. That’s the problem I am trying to solve - parents shouldn’t have to go to school with their children.
Just wondering as I haven't heard of this at all in my home country. Homework is usually quite clear, and the basics to get through it are made clear in the classroom. We had separate times for learning maths, and doing exercises.
Have you thought maybe your assumption is based on very very old anecdotal data?
Science homework should be able to be done in little more than it takes to copy it from an A student. It should not take hours, which it often does. I am looking through the lens of disadvantaged students.
The parents I know from my home country are telling me that their kids are often struggling and are overwhelmed by the homework assignments. While this is already recognised also by the board that created the curriculum the changes are slow and half-hearted.
In my opinion, however, that is not even the problem, nor is it the problem that they are trying to solve. We usually forget that teaching is not "transfer" of knowledge. Each person actually recreates the knowledge in their own head and tries to fit it in with the rest of the world they know.
I believe that the best solution to education is to be able to personalize the new content in a way that naturally extends the student's knowledge. As already stated this may mean backtracking a little to be able to put the new knowledge onto a good foundation.
Normally, teachers cannot do that for each student individually so getting a program that could do that customization would be a great win.
(no longer remember the series title, but do still remember the penny finally dropping on "x is an unknown")
My grandfather used to sit with me for an hour every morning and used to teach me maths.
He would focus on basics first. He would make sure I had the basics drilled in to me. Not just understood them, but mastered them. Then we would move on to the next topic.
It was a bit slow at first. But after a while, once the basics were done, I finished the whole year's math book in 2-3 months.
I have seen this in software engineering too. Once I am good at basics, or once they're drilled in enough, I am faster and quicker.
Drilling basics is basically like having the basics in O(1) look up with very reduced space complexity too. It reduces the amount of overhead your brain utilises. This makes your brain free to think about the actual problem you are solving. Also, I think this is what allows your brain to work in the background, even when you aren't actively thinking about the problem.
Lockdown has really shown up how my 7 year old struggles with his maths work set by school. I've gone back to basics with him and have been drilling him on simple numeracy until he can do it effortlessly using some flash cards I bought and some iPad apps (DoodleMaths, DoodleTables - can't recommend them enough).
Since then he has sailed through all of the new parts we're learning. I really expected it to be much harder than this, but it seems like not fully understanding some basic concepts and having confidence with basic numbers makes all the difference for really understanding the why of all the concepts that are build on top.
In about 6 weeks of me spending around 30 mins to an hour each weekday he has gone from refusing to look at a maths problem to being confident with it.
I taught a few classes last year on how to program in Scratch to grades 1-5. The 4th and 5th graders really loved it and they went off on their own to learn more. It was not a large sample, but I think presenting the right material in the right way to the right age makes a huge difference.
I have been thinking of ways to improve education. I think there is a huge potential in online video. If it is produced right in the sense of say "Hollywood" verse say Khan Academy, kids will enjoy it a lot more.
I've been journaling my dreams for years and I'm working on an app that makes it easier to (visually) map them out & find patterns: https://oneironotes.com/
I like the idea of accessing other (inner) dimensions during sleep, like an explorer (an "oneironaut"). The problems to overcome are related to capturing and recollecting experiences that only take place in the mind. You asked about the weird stuff...
Keep it going. If I had an iPad or something better to write on after waking up I'd definitely use it.
do a 10-day retreat or some other intensive period of learning with a teacher
and then from place of proficiency, continue the practice on your own.
you’re likely to begin having wild/intense/vivid dreams on days in which you meditate.
(1-2+ hours per day)
2. When you wake up, don’t move! Stay in bed for 5-10 minutes and try to remember. Once you remember one thing try to ask yourself what happened before or after.
3. Dream journal.
I practiced the above back i. High school. Went from occasionally remembering a dream to remembering about 4-5 a night. Some small snippets and others longer. Was really incredible and I plan to try it again.
Dedicate 30-40 days and see what happens!
- The #1 way to remember more dreams is to be interested in them! The only personality trait correlated with high dream recall is "openness to experience" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience#Dream_r...). If you want to remember dreams, first consider WHY you want to remember them. Hone into that curiosity and strengthen it.
- Second best tip I can think of is: more sleep! REM periods get longer in the later cycles of your sleep, meaning a higher chance of dreams.
- Also, if you really really want to recall dreams (and perhaps induce lucid ones) and you don't mind being tired the day after, try interrupting your sleep at ~90 min intervals (the average length of a sleep cycle) with a (silent) alarm clock - or raise a baby :)
- Finally, quit smoking weed if applicable, as it suppresses REM sleep ;-)
"A Suggestion for a New Interpretation of Dreams: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering."
https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
Also your project is awesome!
Do you think that besides as a framework for anxiety diagnosis, this could suggest lucid dreaming as part of the therapeutic treatment? Consciously inducing lucidity and choosing confrontation of the dream scenario rather than defaulting to avoidant behavior?
https://ethicalsource.dev/
The hard problem is multifaceted:
I would argue that open source as we know fails to balance the market. We now have monopolistic tech incumbents in the “GAFAM“ companies, that thrive on open source while paying little tax and outcompeting actual tax paying businesses. I see maintainers either burning out or selling out to venture capitalists.
I want to believe in free and open source, but I also see that it fully enables surveillance capitalism, casino capitalism and tax avoiding monoliths.
So, I realize that I need to move past classic licensing and consider ethical licensing that try to remedy society’s inequalities and injustices.
Call me a cyber hippie, but if I want to build cool stuff in my spare time to share I want to maximize its chances of doing something good in the world. To that end I’m evaluating some ethical licenses.
There are many ethical licenses out there which are evolving. Presently, I’m evaluating this one: The (Cooperative) Non-Violent Public License: https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html
After the weekend I’ll try to get in touch with a Lawyer to review the license implications. It’s arguably not open source in definition, but maybe more so in spirit.
Working on building a self-hosted app that would alow you to save, organise and search your knowledge in one center.
It would contain information like notes, bookmarks (it would download the links contents) and in general provide a programmable, opensource interface to preserve the info you'll find useful and even sync with external apis to save your online presence locally (think reddit posts, hn links, etc...)
Maybe we should start a subreddit for people building this stuff.
So far, I have full baseline feature support for everything back to Mosaic, including Lynx, IE3, Netscape3, Opera3, and many others.
At the same time, still including advanced features like client-side PGP for browsers which will support it.
Every browser presents its own challenges, and it is not always the oldest ones which have the dumbest behaviors.
My intent is to promote interoperability and offer something as an alternative to today's near-monoculture.
It's not the most secure solution, but it's just one of the options.
There are browser add-ons that do integrate PGP.
There is no such official documentation.
Python package: https://github.com/kotartemiy/pygooglenews
Blog post: https://codarium.substack.com/p/reverse-engineering-google-n...