“promises”
29 posts under this tag.
Just think of the responsibility, the challenge, the opportunity. One third of the population is still young enough to be natural born digital citizens (see Classmate PC and the OLPC XO laptop), to easily master an international language (whichever one), to be taught about doubt (“Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt…”), to receive the best education we can give them…
Remember that character in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, catatonic at page 169 at discovering a quarter million Chinese girls thrust to his care? Well, look around and realize we’ve been given a ship of 1.8 billion souls. Just think of the opportunity.
(Statistic according to the U.S. Census Bureau, international)
Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.
But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.
The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.
After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.
People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea.
Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid
Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.
Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.
Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.
The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.
If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world’s sense of what it is and wants to be..
Locking up suspected terrorists—and why not potential murderers, rapists and paedophiles, too?—before they commit crimes would probably make society safer. Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.
The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.
Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?
That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.
The 2month silence was worth it. Brace yourself.
PLBRS.com – Super Poderes Lexicos
Finally, after complaining for more than a year about its terrible interface design, the first sketch of a new interface for RAE’s Spanish Dictionary is now live. Expect service to be bumpy and patchy since the algorithms are still green but things will get better soon—daily!
The main improvements over DRAE so far are:
- Definitions load in the same page, stacked newest on top, which means you effortlessly keep a history of lookups. Very handy.
- You don’t have to type a word’s accents (or its ñ’s) for PLBRS to grok what you mean—99% of the time (the other, harmless 1% is made of words like LÚcido and luCIdo, where there is ambiguity). This effectively solves the original complaint and brings tears of joy to my eyes.
- Various simple format improvements that make things more attractive, more compact, and easier to grok.
- That silly tilde (~) used in phrases to stand for the entry word is now actually replaced with the word. In general, DRAE is full of abbreviations that may have made sense for the print version but are a confusing, pointless legacy in digital expanses. They’ll go away in the next couple of days.
Been getting a lot of ideas from Ninjawords—a very cool, very fast English dictionary. Check it out.
gdl.Uruban.com – web local
Asked on Wikipedia’s secret, Jimbo Wales, recently remarked,
“We make the web not suck.”
and I found it a very fitting answer and possible second slogan to the whole project. The best way I’ve found to describe what I want to do with Uruban is by adapting that phrase,
Uruban is about making the local web not suck.
It will be a wiki, a local encyclopedia, a local yellow pages, a local guide (not just a tourist guide). The place to find the menu of your neighborhood taco stand or the nearest Tejuino selling carts, movie listings of all theaters or places to get a hooker, cafes open late at night or drugstores that print your photos in an hour. It will be the city digitized and digested, given a common, comprehensive, and always updated interface. Above all, it will be local, hyperlocal.
So that’s the dream. For now I had to get myself to start and so I just transcribed a list of all churches in the metro area and their Sunday mass hours (I needed them when my grandfather was staying here and it disappointed me to no end they weren’t online anywhere). Expect bits and scraps of content added in the next couple of days and a full featured wiki (I’ll probably use MediaWiki) in a week or so.
Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?
Thanks.
22 and 23/jun/07
Bad time management. Sorry. :)
24/jun/07
Plbrs
- Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
- Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
- Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
- Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
- Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.
Uruban
- Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
- Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
- New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.
Remember to hard refresh (Ctrl-R) to see the most recent changes!
Encroachment is what makes Life interesting.
Daniel C. Dennett WP, EDGE, Freedom Evolves AM
Can’t believe what a coward I’ve been. I guess it wasn’t until I read recently about how Jon Lech Johansen humilliated Hollywood by releasing a program to easily break DVD’s much vaunted DRM (when he was 15 years old), or about “the college droputs that run >youTVpc.com for millions of people on just two low-end desktop computers that I realized how big a wuss I am.
Take Imagery. In a way, I never wanted it to be very popular because I knew I was doing something maybe-legal by scraping Google. I wanted to scrape Flickr and Yahoo! but feared they would be even less likely to see my scraping in a good light. I wanted to create a picture cache to make Imagery much faster and reliable (and to lessen the leech on independent websites) but fretted about bandwidth costs and about whether people would get angry about my caching.
Or take the Spanish dictionary of the Spanish Language Academy. It’s a tremendously useful, gratis dictionary and yet it has a butt-ugly, nonhumane interface. I’ve been bitching about it for years. And I’ve been thinking about giving it a new interface for that long, but, again, what if they don’t like my scraping? (In all probability they won’t. They’re the quintessential staid, monolithic organization.)
A lot of what ifs. But most importantly, so what? So sue me. Well, actually, most important is that I think these scrapings are an overwhelmingly good thing. I see them as a lot of fun—for me, for the scrapees (who’ll get to see how it’s done, ehem), and for the people who will enjoy just how much they never imagined missing. I see them as criticism by example.
So here’s Domburi and here’s NotReality. The idea of Domburi has changed somewhat from its inception (oh, the shame, so many goals not accomplished), it shall now be a collection of search superpowers instead of limiting itself to imagesearching. I believe, with an arrogance that I can’t believe but that I’ve missed, that I have a thing or two to teach Google in its own turf, not just in forgotten backwaters like imagesearching (where Imagery still kicks Google’s ass easily). So I’m starting really tiny now with only a simple redesign of Google search results (there isn’t even imagesearching yet). I’ll be fleshing it out in the coming days, daily, with the daylog here below.
Not Reality, otoh, is still what I’ve always wanted it to be: my webfront for my interface experiments. It’s really simple now but I’ll be improving it daily too.
So please visit the websites, leave your feedback in this post’s comments, and come back often to check out the daylogs—there are loads of interesting things in the pipeline! Thanks for reading.
12-14/May/07
Endless fiddling on Domburi. Collapse of the incrementalism. Obsession with pipe dreams.
15/May/07
Not Reality
Still no attention…
Domburi
Big changes!
- Ajaxed requests. Loading icon. Everything happens on the same page. Title changes. Very lightweight script behind the scenes: the now deprecated but still unsurpassed moo.ajax.
- New one-column format with even results shaded. Results turn yellow on mouse over, which is silly interactivity, but surprisingly pleasant. Entire result is a link. No numbers anymore showing order.
- Displayed URL is now a link that shows results only within the website. This idea from SearchMash, of which I just found out yesterday, and which is a website run by Google where it tries out new interface ideas without the Google brand skewing perception. Very intriguing.
- Displayed URL is now cased smartly. So instead of greysanatomyinsider.com you get GreysAnatomyInsider.com. It extracts the case from the result’s title, uses some general heuristics (like upcasing after a ), and if all fails, it simply capitalizes.
- Results displayed in-page. This had been the idea ever since I decided to expand Domburi from image searching. I wanted to make the whole searching experience feel faster and more like what Ben Schneiderman calls direct manipulation. It has been much harder than I thought and it was this point where I spent most of my fiddling (I also played for hours with the two-columns layout…). Here’s what I ended up with.
- Results seem to open in the entire page, with only the result entry on top. They really open in a full-screen iframe but the effect is surprising. To return to the results you can simply scroll out of the iframe, click the result entry, or…
- Pixelside. This is a strange but crucial feature that even if invisible and initially nonintuitive I find very, very promising: it’s simply a 1px-wide, 100%-height leftmost line. Right now you can click on it when on a full-screen result and return to the resultlist (and from there you can click again on it to return to your full-screen result). It is incredibly fast (in Fitt’s lawWP terms, it has “infinite size”), handy, and habituating—and I imagine lots of cool ways to enhance the feature. The only problem is that crappy IE doesn’t allow leftmost pixels! So I’ll have to make up for it with JS. I cringe with only the thought.
- The title (but not the entire result, which is JS triggered) is a normal link so if you want to open results in a separate tab just middle-click or CTRL-click it.
- Strange cool script used. More details to follow. If you’re interested, check out $.
- Works in Firefox, IE, and Opera.
Not tested yet on Safari. Some weird bugs on Safari but it broadly works.
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
10-day trip to the US (haven’t told you about that!) with days way too happily busy. Too many books afterwards (63!) to do anything but read for several wonderful, obsessed days until all the stress and overcrowding of the house finally bring me down. Languishment in captivity.
21/Jun/07
Not Reality
Complete Redesign!
I gotta say, I really, really like it. The new eye-candy screenshots are tremendous improvements but the crucial difference is the new text—sort of modeled on ancient book covers—and how it explains infinitely better what it is that I want to accomplish with Domburi and now PLBRS. Please do read it—it’s extremely short and heavily formatted—and tell me what you think.
Added a Not Reality link to Imagery, btw (and finally dropped publicly the promise of more browsers to come for it, it’s all Domburi from now on). Added Google Analytics tracking.
Domburi
Simple changes.
# Fixed logo to point correctly at home. Thanks volve!
# CSS fiddling for greater clarity, minor improvements, and cross-broswser compatibility.
# Added Google Analytics tracking.
# Height adjustment menu. A simple (though surprisingly troublesome) addition that makes Domburi much more useful, you can now adjust the height of the embedded windows and so can view and compare two or three results at the same time! Imagine this with dragging and width-adjustment…
22 and 23/jun/07
Bad time management. Sorry. :)
24/jun/07
Domburi
Still nothing!
Not Reality
# New Book Section! With great quotes and cool photocovers.
Remember to hard refresh (Ctrl-R) to see the most recent changes!
In computing, the second-system syndrome is a form of sophomore slump that describes the tendency to design the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system as an elephantine, feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks WP in his classic The Mythical Man-MonthWP, AM.
Y’know, I remember reading about the syndrome in Brooks’s book with a smug confidence that it would never happen to me. It did. Imagery was by many accounts a pretty cool thing, but then I tried to outdo myself with its successor, Domburi, and, many, many ineffectual months later, I must admit that I’ve only weird sketches and weirder code to show for my time.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ve given up. It means that we need a new strategy. The all-or-nothing, hail-mary, next-big-thing, under-wraps-until-perfect approach was doomed since the beginning. (I really should have known better.) So the new strategy is to get it all out. As rough and soon as possible.
I’m calling it ”Improv’d Daily!” and it is akin to beta-hoodWP—in that it indicates that the website is still under developement—but it carries the all important mantra of radical incrementalism: every single day there will be at least one new, stand-alone, non-trivial improvement for the website. It won’t be earth shattering every day but it shall always be interesting.
I’m starting the meme with this very blog, which is supposed to be my online self and yet still lags far, far behind of what I want from it. (Domburi will be up in a couple of hours. Domburi up.) This very post will be updated daily with each day’s changes starting now and I have several new goodies to kickstart the kaizen:
8/May/07
# Related Posts section added (when viewing an individual post). Posts are related the more tags they have in common and the more rare those tags are.
# List of comments (accessible from the right sidebar, at the bottom of the Recent Comments header)
# New URLs: http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE, which is shorter and sweeter. You don’t need to remember a post’s date now and, what’s more, if there’s no post found with that TITLE, Google comes automagically to the rescue.
# Left sidebar redesign: new headshot, shorter description, just email (putting my phone # up there was always a bad idea, that phone-call confirmed it), new format for the archives.
# Collapsed “for:” tags in a post’s tag list. Much clearer. Tags are also now ordered alphabetically.
# Lots of tiny improvements all over. Like the orange bar atop a single post—neat, huh?—or icons for search (a magnifying glass in the searchbox) and for favorites (a star in favorite articles).
9/May/07
# Crappy day: a minor, bureaucratic improvement to the website became a nightmare. Blog crashing on and off. Domburi will have to wait until tomorrow.
10/May/07
# Blog back!
# Section Cache!: the recent list (favorites, posts, comments), the tags list, and the archive are now cached, making the website much, much faster.
# List of all posts (accessible from the left sidebar, below the Archives header)
11/May/07
# Save to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, and Stumble Upon when viewing an individual post.
# Tag Cloud!
# js-less Improv’d Daily! Ok, this may not sound like much but it’s important and cool. I use ALA’s CSS Sprites technique.
12-14/May/07
Obsessed Domburi fiddling. Sorry.
15/May/07
# Fixed broken Tag Cloud links (Thanks Aaron!)
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
Big, humongous gap—or vacations—or depression bout. Or all of them together. See chronicle on Domburi’s Improv’d Daily.
21/Jun/07
- Old URLs redirect to URLs to keep with the migration announced May 8. http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE now really becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE.>
- Sidebar Redesign: new picture, new welcome copy bared down to its barest Basic EnglishWP essentials, new webapps added to webapp section, new, much better descriptions for most items in the sidebar.
- Daily Improves section in the sidebar for you to keep handy track of my progress—or lack thereof.
- Minor CSS fiddling—like a new, bigger size for small caps type (it could be hard to read at some resolutions and some platforms).
- New 404 page, that is, a new page to aid you when you type in an address that can’t be found. Try it now with http://elzr.com/this-address-is-wrong/. Thanks Aaron!
-
New title for homepage. Since the delta thing is already obscure conceit enough, I decided to convert seconds into more humane time units. 8,321,231s delta is now 96 day delta.
Delta, btw, means something like the divergence (the difference) that has come to pass between two different times, one of which is usually the present—so when I say in this blog’s homepage title that there’s a 96 day delta I mean that I haven’t updated it in 96 days, i.e., me and my digital self have had 96 days to go our own separate ways. This wonderful sense of the word comes from Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
- Unified search into a simple URL, http://elzr.com/search/QUERY, which currently carries a personalized Google search of elzr.com but will eventually change to Domburi. This new unified interface allowed me to finally create a YubNub command for the blog: try elzr (see its man page) at every input box that speaks YubNub.
Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchismWP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.
Timothy C. May’s WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collectionAM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)
Crypto anarchy is the cyber spatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make..
[It] ensures that men with guns cannot be brought in to interfere with mutually agreed-upon transactions, the only kind of economics interaction possible in crypto anarchy. Some people will of course scream “Unfair!” and demand government intervention, which is why strong cryptography will probably be opposed by the masses, unless of course, they are wise and take the long view. This may smack of elitism, but I have very little faith in democracy. De Tocqueville warned in 1840 that, roughly translated, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” We reached that point several decades ago..
To put it bluntly, crypto anarchy basically undermines democracy: it removes behaviors and transactions from the purview of the mob. And once crypto is deeply entwined into the fabric of life and commerce, it will be too late to pull the plug.
Timothy C. May, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.
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