Hey friend, if it helps, every “song” you make will eventually become a symbol and memory of a time in your life. It doesn’t have to be good. Sometimes these sounds have even more fidelity than text when it comes to capturing your emotional state and thoughts at the time. I didn’t realize that for a while but in retrospect all of the “it sounds bad” and “I didn’t finish it” didn’t matter
Part of my training for doing "engine room checks" on a boat involved checking for any unusual smells, e.g. fuel leak, burning oil (from generator/engine), burning coolant (from generator/engine), or burning rubber (from sea chest raw water impeller). All of the components in there are equipped with sensors[1] that measure levels, temperature, etc. Perhaps there is room for a new olfactory sensor there? Aside from avoiding catostrophic issues like fire and engine or generator failure, it's also important to not pump out[2] any water from the compartment into the ocean if it's contaminated with oil, fuel, or coolant (the laws about this are super strict).
[1] There are digital sensors that are readable directly from the pilothouse by the captain which are rigged to automated alarms, as well as manual sensors (e.g. a pressure dial) that are readable from the engine room itself, for redundancy. So I don't think an olfactory sensor would replace the unusual smell check, but it could maybe augment it.
[2] The "bilge pump" is used to pump out water from the bilge (bottom floor cavity of engine room). To be honest on my vessel the policy is to never turn on the bilge pumps in the engine room at all because the risk of dumping contaminants is too high. But I still thought to mention this just in case there's an idea there.
Ha! I just had a debate about this with my friend. A certain ferry company uses a big Google Sheet to track where all of its vessels are currently docked in their home port, as well as which employee is assigned to which vessel for the day, etc (it's very information dense with color coding, and employees check it daily to get their vessel assignment). My friend thought this was completely unacceptable for a big company, and that they should build a bespoke software for this purpose. I think that it was a brilliant idea to use Google Sheets, it already solves all of the difficult problems and obviates the need to have an inhouse software development team or an expensive contract. I buried my hubris deep underground
Oh wow thanks for writing out that summary of Sockwell's talk. I had a sort of similar line of thought a few years ago which I haven't followed since, but this just brought me back. https://josh8.com/blog/personal_computing.html
I was musing about the point on which technologies one ought to use for writing personal (or FOSS) software vs. corporate software like in the talk, but also whether the ethos we bring to the table between the two should differ -- i.e. 'software as a soap bubble' rather than only allowing yourself to write scalable and maintainable programs that are generalized for re-use. It's as if a whole class of programs which would help us Personally Compute never come into existence because of this mindset. I think the AI vibe coding thingy majingies are not too bad of an antidote to this actually
That quote about conjecture reminds me of a big point from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author suggests that 'science' / 'the scientific method' don't actually account for the process by which ideas/hypotheses come into existence, science only comes into play once the hypothesis appears (from whence does it appear?). He calls that magic smoke 'Quality'. (Using the language you cited, I guess we would be asking about where the conjecture itself comes from). I'm realizing now that this is tangential to your point, sorry, but thanks for posting this interesting comment.
> What confuses me is that other people can form images in their minds. Are all those with character amnesia also aphantasic? That can't be, given that aphantasics amount to less than 5% of the population, while a much larger number of people forget how to write (70% of teenage participants in a Chinese TV show were unable to write the word "toad"!).
They were discussing their aphantasia as a precursor to other very interesting points, e.g. about how "seeing" a character in your mind isn't enough to be able to draw it, --> verbatim traces and gist traces.
> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk.
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> The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution.
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> Two thoughts:
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> It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been
working pretty well for about 4 billion years.
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> It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria.
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>It's not working so well today either.
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> We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?