Notices by Nate Cull (natecull)

When you suddenly click that

1) 'Silpheed/Sylpheed' (an email client, and a space shooter videogame series) is just Japanese mangled English for 'sylphid', better known as 'sylph'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed

2) ... which was a word in the popular Romantic mythology of the 1700s-1800s era for 'airy nature spirit'...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylph

3) ... but is itself fake Latin made up by the Swiss-German Paracelsus (1493-1541) to describe his theoretical alchemical entities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus

Sadly I have now learned the term 'KOL' ('Key Opinion Leader') and I wish I hadn't. It reeks of Marketing in the worst way.

We are living the Gibson Blue Ant trilogy.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/entertainment/article/2183174/trust-me-you-need-how-chinas-live-streaming-kol-stars-are

Expert / Impert System

@thegibson what if we had, like, a World Wide Web, but NOT all running on one computer in Jeff Bezos' basement

21H Jump Sequence

Thanks to our Java product's (former) reputation for high quality, reliability, etc, we at Oracle are currently setting all that on fire while flushing it, and our own reputation, down the toilet.

Wheeee!

Unpopular opinion:

1. The mainstream news media, as well as professional futurists, warned loudly since the 1990s that The Internet Will Lead To Filter Bubbles TM, which are Terrible and Must Be Avoided.

2. 2010s Internet "raid" culture which is today considered the root of all online harrassment, and the worst thing ever, actually grew out of heeding this warning: what they fear the most is Filter Bubbles, so they consciously jump into other people's forums deliberately to 'break the bubble'

Found text of the day:

"printed out of think air"

it's like smart dust but, smarter

Toot
Toot
Let it all oot
These are the things I could do withoot

C'mon
I'm talking to ye
C'mon

The fascinating world

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/C64%20Programmer's%20Reference%20Guide.pdf

For one brief shining moment in the 1980s-1990s, it seemed like we the people would own and control our own computing infrastructure.

That we wouldn't ever after need permission from opaque central authorities to process data, send messages, create devices, teach machines ideas. No corporations or governments could put themselves between us and the data bits in our machines. We would be free to think.

That moment is rapidly slipping into a history that feels ridiculously over-optimistic.

The mother of all weather reports, courtesy of the The Weather Channel

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/13/17857478/hurricane-florence-storm-surge-flooding-the-weather-channel-video-graphics

At some point after 2009, it feels like everyone just.. gave up on Semantic Integration of Personal Information Management

and started, idk, buying Facebook shares I guess

https://bigdata.uni-saarland.de/publications/DSB09.pdf

<< In the iMeMex project at ETH Zurich, we have explored a new hybrid data management architecture in-between the two extremes of search engines and traditional information-integration systems. We term systems built following this new architecture Personal Dataspace Management System (PDSMS) [2]. >>

A thought that's just struck me, sighing over the insane tab jungle in my browser and the feeling of unutterable loss that comes over me when I close even one.

and wondering why bookmarks don't substitute for tabs?

And it hit me:

Tabs are our Memex trails!

The back-arrow stack on each tab stores vital context information on 'what does this page mean to me, what does it relate to, what search was it part of, what is its provenance...'

This is Memex data! *AND BROWSERS DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT*.

The current focus of the software industry on 'apps' rather than data seems a little like walking into a hardware shop full of elaborate cases, holsters, display racks, for tools.. and no benches or sawhorses.

We're information workers. We work with information. That's our input and our output.

And yet we don't really have any good means of dealing directly with information itself. We have to work indirectly through apps and silos; and good luck if we need to use one dataset on two platforms.

[This toot has been blocked in your country due to copyright and/or international memetic arms control treaties.]

Aww man a super weird unfolding drama in the physics community, as yet unresolved and involving :

* very surprising claims of room temperature superconductivity!
* datasets that look super faked!!
* some hacker spoofing emails from respected scientists telling investigators to lay off investigating the research group with the super dodgy looking data!!!

You want cyberpunk? Here's cyberpunk!

https://mobile.twitter.com/gravity_levity/status/1027717419400392705

It's stuff like that last boost (about Firefox turning on Cloudflare as DNS resolver just... like that, by default) that make me really want to abandon even the web browser and start again with something simpler.

Our browsers are too complicated now and we can't trust the companies making them.

I know that's a dumb idea because everything's so super-complicated now that no human could possibly start from scratch, but....

... we thought that before the 6502, and before Linux, right?

@aral @Antanicus @Gargron

Love this article!

It strikes me that 'the ethical computing' rebellion goes in waves, about 20 years apart so far.

Wave 1, 1977: "personal computing". Rebellion against mainframe timesharing

Wave 2, 1997: Internet and Open Source. Rebellion against siloed data services and copyright lock-in

Wave 3, right on cue: distributed social networks, local data, ethical computing. Rebellion against surveillance capitalism and the cloud.

Game idea:

Non-ASCII Unicode characters are spells. Given only the name, try to describe what it does.

If the other players disagree, you are sucked into the Supplementary Ideographic Plane and can only continue playing as an astral character.