spirographer

I came here looking for your comment!

It would be great to register this in downdetector to make sure it is up.

You mean "Losely", right...

This is a great article! Funny about Yugiri (39), because your version is a mirror image to Eawase (17), and the traditional Japanese Yugiri breaks that symmetry.

Every Genji-mon that is not self-symmetrical should have a mirror image, which I was able to quickly verify in the Genji-mon table you displayed.

Minori (40) is the only non symmetrical Genji-mon that breaks the rule, because it's the only one whose mirror image is also isomorphic to itself.

I can only imagine that there was something deliberate about the symmetry breaking for Yugiri, given the almost fanatical attention to detail in Japanese arts in general, and the equally strong penchant for deliberate imperfection in traditions like Kintsugi.

Brilliant synthesis:

Globally humans have transitioned almost overnight from information/knowledge scarcity to information flood. Once we had plenty of time to forage information to construct narratives and share them and agree/disagree on them before the next influx. Now we are literally waterboarded with information that has no context, minimal sharing and no real conversation attached. We are left with whatever individual narrative our pattern matching can construct, and it's usually inadequate. Narrative is definitely a superpower of the group not the individual.

We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.

Loved the article! There are so many great details such as the standardization of UTC happening after UNIX time invented, UNIX itself being born before the epoch, and all the great insight into the morass of 64 bit time across modern OSes.

Putting on my pedantic hat though, I see that East and West were switched in the discussion of Japan's unique 50/60Hz AC frequency split, and I can't get my mind off it. Hope you can make the edit.

I was a teenager, desperately looking for the cheapest possible system (because I couldn't afford any of them). And I would longingly read all the ads hoping a miracle wold happen. Later on I learned that one of those companies was named after the college dorm where the computer was conceived. So cool.

Null island is like the opposite of the Bermuda triangle. In fact, maybe they form a portal...

Also, very relevant to discussions of whether we live in a simulated universe!

The whole discussion of whether we live in a Matrix-like simulation falls into this category as well. There are so many layers of oversimplification at play in most peoples' conceptualization of a simulated universe that it is hard to even begin to have a conversation about it.

Companies fill ecological niches. When new technologies emerge there is room for a new apex species/(company), and a few smaller wannabes. There just isn't unlimited room for large companies to emerge, and that is the principal reason why there aren't more googles and facebooks around. In the end it has very little to do with VCs and entrepreneurs, except for the ones who happen to be in the right place at the right time to take an as yet non obvious idea and turn it into something huge.

The reason Instagram's founders are no longer there is because they could not stomach being forced by facebook to publicly make these kinds of statements.

At a meta level, Category Theory requires some comfort with abstraction, which really only comes with a mathematical education. So while it may stand apart from much math, it relies on your strong mathematical foundations.

Rob Pike's rules of programming simplified :

- Start with stupid code built on smart data (after Fred Brooks)

- When in doubt use brute force (Ken Thompson)

- Premature optimization is the root of all evil (Tony Hoare)