💎 Spreadsheets have an essence, what Alan Kay described as 'the value rule' back in 1984: a cell can read from any other but can only write to itself.

This is the founding, simplifying constraint of spreadsheets, akin to how structured programming outlawed go-to’s in code.

Design is not the vision.

Design is a set of well-established techniques to manifest a vision.

Knowing the techniques does not make you a visionary. Terms like “design-led” often misguide designers

Design is simply a means to an end.
That is the main role.

I wrote a list of beliefs about quality that I wish weren't true. These are all 'unfortunate facts' I believe. I'd be happy if you proved any of them wrong, but I'd need strong evidence.
anthonyhobday.com/blog/20240428.…

Christian Selig, MD John Rosster Dajjal Dr. Heather Berlin Daniel Dennett His best message IMO wasn't about religion or minds, but about his didactic way of explaining most of the counterintuitive results of biological evolution.

'Competence without comprehension' is a great idea of Darwin's, and Dennett explained it in a way that made it 'click'. 💡

John Kim MIT CSAIL To be fair, git is a loose 'clone' (written from scratch) of BitKeeper. Just like he developed Linux as an x86 loose 'clone' of Unix.

Linus Torvalds is a very skilled pragmatic engineer because he has always adopted the wisdom of being conservative, & a skeptic at innovating.

Yoïn van Spijk mar I think you'll appreciate the following attempt at a reconstruction of the 'latest common ancestor' of word families of Romance languages.

In the early 20th century, scholars actually tried to 'extract' from this an international 'bridge language'.

interlingua.com/ied/intro/#:~:…

Spanish 'sé' (be!) comes from Latin 'sedē' (sit!).

Spanish and Portuguese 'ser' (to be) is a mix of two Latin verbs:
'esse' (to be) and 'sedēre' (to sit; to be located).

In medieval Spanish and Portuguese, these were still distinct, but they're now merged.

Here's their story:

Dominus Clarus Opinions.txt Austen Allred Neco This. Without understanding that a database relation (with distinct 'rows') a set of tuples/records, the programmer cannot SQL their way out of a paper bag.

The entire relational model of data is built upon discrete mathematics. There is no way to get around it and be skilled.

Alternative definition of bijective function by means of a homomorphism:

A function f with domain X is a bijection if and only if it preserves (sub)set complementation, that is, f(X\S)=f(X)\f(S) for every subset S of X (S⊆X).

Hard to overestimate how much this drives us

Daniel Propson It depends on what you mean by 'smaller'. There are 2 possibilities:

1️⃣ If S⊆T, then S is smaller than T.

2️⃣ If there is a 1-to-1 mapping, then the two sets have the same cardinality. (One is not 'smaller' than the other.)

For infinite sets, both can be simultaneously true.

Sean So ChatGPT is a bullshit tool in response to the existence of bullshit jobs? That makes sense

Freek Wiedijk 🎲 An inference line lets you write (to the right) a reference and leave the work to the reader. Frege who came up with the original turnstile in his ConceptScript, also introduced this inference line shorthand (but with the reference to the left).

Freek Wiedijk 🎲 The arrow is an object-language expression. The turnstile and horizontal line are meta-language expressions at the inferential and meta-inferential level respectively. There are sequent calculi that go all the way up to meta-meta-….omega level and beyond!

Why are in this system *three* notions of “from this follows that” involved: the arrow, the turnstile and the vertical line? Two or infinitely many I could accept, but why *three*?

The non-reversed graph is a plausible candidate solution to Fermi's paradox.

Credit for this insight:
twitter.com/EmmetPeppers/s…

A tribe of 100 people gained 100 years of life experience every year.

A city of 10,000 gained the same in 3 days.

Today, our species lives 15,000 years every minute and almost a million years every hour.

Tiny improvements in how we communicate can pay massive wisdom dividends.

Our brains come preset to look at life up close. Don't forget to zoom out.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and is expected to be swallowed by the sun in about 5 billion years, when Earth is 9.5 billion years old. If we make 100 million years one 'Earth year,' then the planet is currently 45 (out of a 95-year life). Humans are Earth's mid-life crisis.

Attention to details (2020 video). It worked as intended on Mars. 👌🏼

mars.nasa.gov/resources/2508…