Assuming your movements are tracked by other methods (surveillance cameras and facial recognition, purchase records, etc) the absence of your phone when you would otherwise normally have it is a data point, too.
There is no time that I would normally have my phone other than when I am at home; the data point that I provide would be the rare times I take my phone out of the house and most of that time it is off, I only turn it on if I actually need it. My phone is turned off a fair amount which also means I do not have internet since I get my internet through my phone's hotspot, it is nice to be able to disconnect from the world so simply, just turn off my phone. If this was the norm, location data would have far less value and possibly not be worth the expense. Phone addiction seems the real issue here.
My purchasing data is not much better, two purchases so far this year other than my three monthly bills and groceries once or twice a week where I also get cash for my other expenses. I don't do this out of concern about being tracked, just how I live my life. Sometimes I leave my phone off for a week, nothing bad happens, at least nothing that having my phone on would have prevented.
Flashback had the bulk of Prince of Persia's mechanics but developed story and the puzzle aspect to a far greater extent and was less action based compared to Prince of Persia's race against the clock. There are times in Flashback when you have to race the clock but there are also times when you just have to stare at the screen and figure out how to do something or wander the world trying to figure out what you missed and where the fuck you are supposed to go next. Flashback is one of my favorites but I am not a gamer and the majority of my gaming was in the previous century.
This would be fantastic on a tablet; stylus for entry and fingers for navigation would make it very efficient and a great improvement over the standard infinite page. I would probably pay for a non-web tablet version, it is rare my tablet is connected to the internet.
(I'm the dev) I tried it out on an iPad and it seems to work fine. Let me know if you run into any issues. Supporting direct stylus/Pencil input will definitely be a challenge, but I think it’s worth a shot.
It worked on my Android tablet but I can't scribble a note and draw a picture/diagram with the stylus. I don't know anything about iPads but on Android you have the USI pen and for any app that understands the USI pen, it interprets fingers and stylus individually, the stylus is active so the tablet knows when it is input from the stylus or input from a finger. The google Cursive app which is the standard Android note app shows this well, stylus only writes and fingers only pan/scroll/zoom unless you switch it into finger mode so you can write with a finger.
If you managed to give all the features of Googles Cursive app within your Poincaré disk paradigm, I would happily drop $100 on it, assuming it worked as an offline app.
Edit: should mention that I don't think this is worth $100, other than to the handful of people like me who it would be perfect for assuming it was well executed. You would probably make more charging far less. The paradigm could translate amazingly well to the tablet/stylus experience if the details are worked out well.
I got a partial load and what it looks like it does is just search each submission for a list of key words and discards any that hits, so it would discard this submission.
I was not suggesting that it would be a false positive, I was suggesting that this will filter out many submissions that would be of interest to those that want less AI on HN. This would flag a blog that has nothing to do with AI if some random person mentioned AI in the comments of that blog post, right?
A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
The term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.
Most of the shareware I got was downloaded from BBSes and the internet and even these central repositories that are the norm now are nothing new, in the 80s I went to a local BBS that was dedicated to shareware and in the 90s a handful of sites, and there was always the developer's site for the direct download but often they just linked you to one of the big repositories. The only shareware I can remember getting physically was the stuff that came on a disk/cd with some magazine I bought just for the CD filled with shareware. I miss those CDs.
For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the author's programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.
Edit: deleted a comment about source code, realize I misread your post. Should try to fix a couple of those sentences as well, my language skills tend to fall apart when I get nostalgic and I find it very difficult to restructure the thought, I lose the nostalgia.
It has worked this way since the days of the vacuum tube, so there probably is some legal precedence somewhere. I think part of this with the NE5532 is just that these days most EEs spend most of their time with digital where the data sheet and its spec is absolute; in the linear world the spec sheet is an ideal and an average because the parts themselves are an ideal and the real world never lines up with the math. Back when the NE5532 came out it was still common to see power supplies that were unregulated or barely regulated or cheap regulators with poor tolerance that would vary a fair amount with wall voltage and massive tolerances on passives, data sheets and EEs took this into account, most parts would survive max voltage but there would be a higher failure rate, so run at 70% or 80% and you don't have to worry about it.
In these days of cheap SMPS and EEs that are trained with a strong lean towards digital and much improved IC fab, the max seems to be treated as the max safe voltage for good reliability and life, and you don't have to worry much about the tolerances of everything else so much. Back in the 90s when I was learning this stuff, the old EEs scolded me when ever I ran at max voltage and would patiently explain it all to me and that even if it can operate at that voltage, you can't be certain your PS will still be putting out that voltage in a year, parts drift as they age and accidents happen and the world is not ideal. They were right.
Using the three plots of Infinite Jest as the vertices doesn't really work, there is nothing fractal like about the plot itself and plot is not the structure. How I see it is that the vertices would be family, education, and society, which are all deeply interrelated. For the majority of the characters we learn their relation to these three things, in Hal and Gately we get a very well developed view of it, not so much for Marathe and Steeply where the family and education aspect is abbreviated and I think this is where the mentioned mercy cuts happened.
I don't think I would say Infinite Jest has three plots, it feels like it does because the plot never happens, we get the setup and then it is dropped right when it actually starts. We can view it as three plots but those plots don't provide anything useful towards understanding. They would be more accurately viewed as triangles, they are containers for information.
Edit: I also don't think we can fully interpret Infinite Jest through the Sierpinski structure, that was the structure of the first draft which was something like 500 pages longer and had the bulk of the novel in the end notes. It has been too long since I last read it to say what the structure of the final form of the novel is but I think he may have just made the gasket more linear; he keeps repeating the full triangle but each time he goes a bit deeper with the iterations.
Ah, maybe I made my claim unclear. So my claim is that the 3 vertices are the institutions (ETA, Ennet House, the Wheelchair Assassins), not plots. I agree that IJ is kind of plotless, and that to me is what the voids in the Sierpinski Gasket could represent, but this article was more about the two-ways-to-construct-the-triangle thing.
But I like your vertices (family, education, and society).
You're making me think that there's something to the fact that you could 'seed' the Gasket with different vertices as well. Something I learn when re-reading is that you can bring so many interpretations and perspectives to this novel and still come out with an entertaining and valid experience of it. In that respect, I like the idea that you can use different triplets to seed the Gasket!
You're correct that we can't lean fully on the Sierpinski idea. Wallace mentions in his interview that after those edits, the book became more like a 'lopsided' Sierpinski Gasket "it looks basically like a pyramid on acid" (https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...).
Separate from the Gasket thing, but I like your point about the footnotes. I wish people spent more time on those. I've heard commentary on the structure of those. Some folks talk about the 'self referentiality', as text (obviously) references footnotes, and there are even instances of footnotes referencing the main text! I've also heard that the back-and-forth emulates the back-and-forth in a tennis match, although that one seems less interesting.
Edits: fixed spelling mistakes
Edit: I added your 3 vertices idea and the fact you can invert the 3 vertices to the post, thank you! I attributed back to this thread.
Wallace was a masterful writer of short fiction, and I think IJ is best read as a (very) long series of short pieces with much that interrelates them.
Past a certain point on my first successful read through, maybe ~300 pgs in, I started realizing that, with very few exceptions, the more abstruse, boring, or frustrating the vignette, the more powerfully it ended; and at that point, I couldn’t put it down. So, in my opinion, skipping around would not make it more fulfilling, and would certainly not make it make more sense (and I do think it would be easy to understate how much they do compose together into a functioning plot for the novel). I could only advocate cultivating an appreciation of the individual vignettes themselves as more-or-less complete short stories.
I think the order in which the different elements of the book are introduced is crucial, as it leads to a lot of "aha!" moments.
> What put me off it is it just kind of reads like a rambling stoner conversation.
Yeah well, that book may not be your cup of tea then. The book _is_ rambling, plus a lot of the characters _are_ actual stoners/addicts/recovering addicts. But keep in mind that most of the book is in the third person, not in the first (as the first few pages would make you assume).
I like some of David Foster Wallace's writing, but I'm afraid Infinite Jest never did much for me. My copy is copiously annotated and I listened to the audiobook as well, so I doubled up.
I found Ulysses more engaging. I have a copy of Gravity's Rainbow which I will try to get into at some stage.
"rambling stoner conversation". Lol, you've clearly made it to Ken Erdedy's section, which is literally that. That's a brief passage in the book, and honestly one of the hardest parts to read.
I'd say there's a lot of groundwork laid in the first 60 - 100 pages or so. After that, I honestly don't think it would be harmful to cherry pick interesting passages from the book. You could research interesting sections of the novel and target those for a first pass read through, then maybe later read it sequentially. There aren't really plot spoilers as the book is somewhat plotless.
Even still, I'd recommend the first read through be sequential. My first read through was, but I also skipped around a little bit. My favourite thing about DFW is his writing style. Also might help to whet your appetite for his voice by reading something like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", which is a hilarious anecdote and commentary about his trip aboard a cruise liner.
In general, I'd say the best advice is to free yourself from the burden of 'understanding' the novel on your first read through and just enjoy the chaos. Besides, there is so much ambiguity in the novel that, even if you do crystallize some understanding, there's likely many alternative interpretations. That's where the re-reads get really fun.
Erdedy's vignette is one of my favourite passages! The Wardine section was the one that had me second guessing, but after two full read throughs I'll be approaching a third next year with the Sierpinksi Gasket in mind :)
Try the audiobook, although I’m sure purists would consider it cheating. You can zone out and it keeps going and something will pull your attention and you can rewind to get the context.
I read IJ in a two (three?) day binge shortly after it was published and never returned. Although I will say I really liked it. Since you're an experienced reader, I'll ask a question bugging me since the 1990s -- my intuition post-read was that you would get a totally different plot line out of the novel if you skipped the endnotes. Holding the novel in one's head is a lot to ask, especially of someone who just read straight through very quickly, so I'm curious what the current literary establishment thinks about the end notes, and how the main text interacts with them from a more formal or structural standpoint.
I don't have anything sophisticated to say about this, but I know the footnotes are critical. There are some plot points in there. They are also an important aspect of the book's structure and the methodology of reading the text. I'd say skipping the end notes would be a disservice to the reader as they would miss so much.
Something I want to do is read the footnotes alone in 1 whack and see what that experience feels like. I haven't done this yet, but I feel like it could illuminate exactly how much of what I latently remember about the novel is located in the footnotes.
Seems to miss the real reason, which is that AI is terrible with subtext. This is what the author is hinting at with "It often looks perfect but bothers me for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious." Most people have an intuitive understanding of it and employ it constantly even if they can't identify or purposefully use subtext to any extent.
>A lot of smart people only engage with APL via toy puzzles
I think part of this is because that is how most (possibly all) sources teach APL and array languages, solving puzzles and manipulating arrays. If you learn to write programs in an Algol derived language, you can write programs in most common languages without having to learn how to write programs, you just need to learn the language. Modern array languages sort of allow us to use them like the Algol derived languages, but this does not seem to work out so well and often does not work to the strengths of array languages.
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