lotw_dot_site

So, I take it that the "decentralized" aspect of all this stuff really comes into play when all of the server hardware is surgically implanted into our limbs!

Does anybody know what the first popular "Against Something" was?

My guess is it was Feyerabend's Against Method...

Among other things, Linux on the Web can be used to usher in a new paradigm for accessing online resources.

The current document-centric approach has an intensely graphical (attention grabbing) aspect which very much encourages the least common denominator types of results that the author abhors.

Those who want to be more thoughtful about these things need better toolsets to allow them to focus the way that they go about their online lives (including general search).

Google is in indeed more than search. They are also the machine learning framework, Tensorflow. Linux on the Web is in as good a position as anything else to start putting the JavaScript implementation (Tensorflow.js) to very good use.

We don't need new search engines as much as we need new search engine interfaces.

Nevermind, I see the demo is the Eliza widget on the main page.

So, I can do Eliza with it then...

I'll keep that in mind for the next time that I need to get an Eliza widget working ;)

No demo. I was wondering what kinds of things I could be doing here that I couldn't do before (with websockets, webrtc, etc) but demo.connect.build just redirects to connect.build. I'd only known of "Protocol Buffers" as something that was internal to Google, but never knew exactly to what end.

>Lighten up on the philosophy of a topic before you understand it

But philosophy is an activity that must necessarily be done in order for there to even be a topic that can at all be understood in the first place! We had to have someone like Descartes before we could get someone like Newton, and Newton before the quantum theorists, etc.

The idea that you can just jump straight to (and always stay within the framework of) "hard science" and do away with the malleable philosophical bits that allow for the kind of connective tissue that binds civlizations is perhaps the biggest reason why we collectively face the existential crises that we currently do.

And the other idea that everyone (or at least everyone who has jumped through the hoops to get the necessary credentials) can simply sit fat and happy in their own arcane specialties as long as they are able to "prove" their worth to the rest of us by patting each other on the back with their circles of academic citations is... well... not very sustainable. All academic disciplines, to the extent that they cannot remain "rooted" within some larger framework of philosophical sensibility will necessarily get weeded in due time.

>they're space-time shapes with a singularity at the middle

Upon googling "black hole singularity", the first "People also ask" is "Does black hole contain singularity" and the answer is, "No, black holes in our universe, that is to say the real universe, do not contain singularities." While this doesn't in itself invalidate your point, it does seem to raise questions.

>The black hole at the center of our galaxy extends across 16 million miles, or a little over eighteen times the size of our sun.

I think what you are doing here is conflating the physical effects of the thing (the gravitational field of force) with the mathematical description of the thing itself (a precisely defined geometric structure). If you are talking about extremely strong gravity fields, such as those that bind entire galaxies (or galaxy clusters or even larger organizational patterns), then that is one class of things (empirical), but the purely theoretical notion of physical singularities is an entirely different class of things altogether (a class, which, IMO is perfectly self-contradictory).

>That's because solutions to the Laplace equation smooth themselves out as quickly as possible as you move away from the boundary condition.

This seems incorrect. I find that solutions to the Laplace equation typically "smooth themselves out" in a quasi-linear way (ie, the way sines and cosines do). The most vexing question in Quantum Mechanics is in fact why quantum states (i.e. the eigenfunctions that are solutions to PDE's such as Laplace's equation) appear to us as localized packets rather than how their "wave functional" mathematical descriptions would dictate (diffuse). The way this conundrum is resolved in QM is by way of a perfectly ad-hoc procedure called "collapsing the wave function".

At a certain point of abstraction, theoretical physics almost never has any direct correlation with empirical reality. It is most often used as a way to give the paradigm lenses that color our thoughts nice little workouts. (One can also apply Wittgenstein's notion of language games here.)

If, by the term "black hole", a person is referring to some object that has the shape of a mathematical point, then it just doesn't make much sense to call it a thing that relates to the world of observation. (The postulates of Quantum Mechanics dictate that physical objects must be fundamentally spread out in the form of wave functions.)

Solutions to simplistic kinds of mathematics come in the form of idealizations called "points". But physical reality is fundamentally spatial, and the necessary maths must involve things like topological manifolds, which brings us directly to the doorstep of String Theory, which is not so much a "theory" but rather a broad category that consists of the entire spectrum of all possible Quantum Field Theories. String Theorists, in fact, are always speculating over the possibility of some given theory's existence, such as when Witten spoke of a mysterious "M-theory" in the mid-90's.

Funny, that, seeing how M$ themselves are perhaps the biggest contributors to the current browser codebase monoculture issue.

Anytime a software project develops enough complexity, there is no shame in targeting a specific platform. Given enough eyes on a thing, though, those kinds of "supported" issues always take care of themselves.

But I'm just a lone developer trying to do something never before done. I'm still trying to prove a concept...