iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 15/11/2023

A status update for the #Zcash Trailing Finality Layer project: We've published v0.1.0 of the book which links to a hackmd for the Crosslink construction, an Ebb-and-Flow hybrid PoW/PoS protocol. forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/the-traili...

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 07/11/2023

LLM feature request: automate git commit message generation. Or: given a proposed git commit message, automate the code diff. ;-)

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 01/11/2023

Today's UX gripe is brought to you by Chrome™! Bookmarks in a menu, bookmarks in a manager widget, bookmarks in a panel on new tabs (which has a drop-down menu for overflow bookmarks), bookmarks in a sidebar! Make up your mind! (Each context displays/interacts w/ them differently, for extra fun.)

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 01/11/2023

Well, it's possible, but clunky: blue.mackuba.eu/skythread/?a... It'd be nice to streamline that flow in clients.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 01/11/2023

One of my favorite Infosec UX Antipatterns: you click on what appears to be a link, only to be taken to a dialog/interstitial page warning you it's on a different website. Like… um… have you heard of the world wide web? It allows hyperlinked content across any site. It's pretty sweet, try it.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

I caught wind there's a US Executive Order or some other dino-boomer busybody "rule" that restricts access to data that was processed with too many floating point operations. If anyone has links or download instructions for such illegal data, please share so I know what data to avoid downloading…

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Turning off public reads on sites like Twitter or Reddit is a definite buzzkill. The whole point of the web is open composition across sites! This is especially crucial during the modern epistemological crisis of centralized social control of content.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Ok, since I can link to AT Protocol (e.g. bsky.app) threads so that anyone on the web can read them, it is definitely way better than Twitter.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Perfect! This is what I was hoping for. Thanks for your service!

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Who are some geeky indie sketch artists who could do this well?

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Sketch: a person walks into a store to order something, and a store employee jumps in their face in front of the register to explain a new menu item, and refuses to go away until the person says "got it".

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

Example: I open an app, and it pops open one of those new feature dialogs with "learn more" or "got it".

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

My sketch comedy idea: take all the UX papercuts that bug me, and for each make an analogous scene were some characters represent users and some represent the UX.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

How can I share a URL so that people can publicly read AT Proto posts/threads (with no account, signup, etc…)?

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

The lesson for me is: start top-down, rather than bottom up. I had gone from reading docs, to asking ChatGPT questions about the docs. Now instead I will just explain what I want to do and ask why it's not working.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 31/10/2023

New ChatGPT unlock: I was asking multiple questions like "does `git commit --amend` run the `pre-commit` hook?" Then I just tried: "Why doesn't this work?" and pasted a terminal paste where I cat relevant configs/scripts, ls, cmds. It listed multiple diagnoses. The first one resolved the issue!

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Has anyone written a wrapper for `rustc` which inserts `ChatGPT` project-specific advice for each error?

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Reposted by Nate ZEC

Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

This is my point. People tend to assume UBI is "guaranteed income for people without work" but in reality it implies work: proving you are human. If we're not careful it might replace jobs where people do something valuable with a "job" of just proving you are human.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

If you're on github, show up to that issue!

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 24/10/2023

Github used to have a widget for "processing" events of interest, which showed them in a list, and when you viewed an item (e.g. an issue page) it would insert a widget with next/previous, "mark as seen". Did they remove that? It was incredibly helpful for me to track my state.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Trying to revive that ticket and also pointing out there are two issues: privacy and authorization. github.com/rust-lang/cr...

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Let's see if there's any way I can help github.com/rust-lang/cr...

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Hm, to publish on crates.io I must use github OAuth therefore I must grant crates.io the ability to read all "private" repositories on Github for every organization of which I'm a member? I can think of no reason crates.io needs to read any github state other than the "is a legit user" bit.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Are Charlie Brooker or Terry Gilliam on bsky? Match made in heaven. Come on guys, do it!

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

How far off are we? People surviving of off UBI + AI arms race -> more and more convoluted and time consuming CAPTCHas -> it eventually takes more than full-time effort to survive and everyone's "occupation" is just proving their humanity to the Great Machine.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

It's high time for a Brazil-like dystopian comedy where people's full time occupation is just solving increasingly absurd and baroque CATPCHAs.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 19/10/2023

A fun operational engineering practice: whenever writing a delay/poll loop (e.g. `while cmd; do sleep $X; date --iso=s; done`) pick a randomish prime number for `X`. Why? The idea is to avoid different processes from synchronizing incidentally to help balance load, avoid spurious correlations, …

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

So I think I'll try `gitless` and see if unit testing is always coherent. If so, it seems like an obvious win. If, OTOH, it requires exceptions for unit testing, then I'll have to decide if those are better/worse than vanilla `git`.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

For example, running unit tests on a git repo is often incoherent if the staged content != working directory content, so I'm always trying to patch over that and wondering why that extra complexity is necessary since it requires work to do right.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Yes, I read a summary or abstract of the research. I think I should give it a go, because as I recall it removed the distinction of "staging", which makes sense to me.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Is anyone familiar with systems like this, whether historical or modern?

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

That's my fantasy UI. In that world, we would have a single context management system and could thus navigate any new app rapidly in an integrated fashion without learning a new context-management UI per app. Then we could also arrange contexts across apps for specific tasks.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

This search could be scoped to apps, time ranges, etc… ie: "search Signal conversations from the past hour with Alice that mention 'banana'" or "search all apps from the past day that mention 'banana' and involve any user named 'Alice'."

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Imagine for example context-navigator has "search all contexts" which shows every context from every app which matches a search, so if I search for "banana" it shows a slack conversation, an editor buffer, some browser windows, etc…

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

A uniform context navigation system could title contexts within an app. Then the context navigation system would allow browsing and searching contexts.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

For this to work, apps would need to specify different contexts uniformly. We have a good solution for that: windows. But they would also need a way to inform the "context/attention manager" of existing contexts and a way to navigate them.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

My browser has tabs. It also has code for context management of tabs. Then inside it, it has Slack. Slack has a tab-like concept, and again it's own bespoke context management. These should be the same thing.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

The status quo is a giant pile of inconsistent context management: desktops, windows, tabs, tmux sessions, tmux windows, editor buffers, etc… What I'm imagining is a combination of something akin to a tiling window manager + an integrated application SDK.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Unfortunately, every app has its own built-in bespoke "context management". IMO, an ideal interface would have a single context/attention management system that I fully control, and apps would only be able to provide UI within some context.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Why that feature? I have adhd, so a key strategy is for me to remove out-of-context notifications. I explicitly do a context switch to "handle incoming arbitrary messages/notifications", and I have a dedicated desktop for that, and intentionally manage when I "allow distractions".

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

Implications of desktop-per-task: Say one desktop is about a research goal. Then in that desktop I want: - specific slack/signal/telegram/discord/… rooms open - a specific chatgpt conversation - specific browser tabs - specific editor/cli I wish Slack et al had an "open room in new window".

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 18/10/2023

I'd love to see a UX movement take over design of apps to support my particular needs/usage. One feature of my usage is desktop-per-task: I have separate desktops dedicated to specific tasks, so that all the contents there are contextually coherent.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

Have y'all ever tried `gitless`? I've read about the design, and like the idea. I have yet to try it.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

The Chinese seemed to have solved the "not enough shapes" problem. ;-)

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

I'll be ready for a neural link just as soon as I can install sovereign open-web-trained me-aligned FLOSS AI on a deterministically built FLOSS software stack on silicon I've self-fabricated in my personal mobile fablab from scavenged and recycled electronics junkyards.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

Can we start civilization over without any homoglyphs like O vs 0? kthxbai

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

It's funny to imagine if all concepts in a paper were described that way as a dialog of anonymized participants. Papers in the form of a play.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

Hm, yeah, that seems believable.

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Nate ZEC @natezec.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

The twitter diaspora plus the emergence of a multitude of social networks is like when people at a party segregate from the big center to the nooks and crannies in smaller groups, ie when the party gets good. So now I feel less frustrated and more enthusiastic about fragmentation. ;-)

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