Activity Feed
#6082·Moritz WallawitschOP, about 12 hours ago·AI-assistedPersonalized short-video feeds such as TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts are better at serving curiosity than fixed, long-form films. They adapt to your interests instead of fixing a sequence.
Recommendation engines optimize engagement and time spent, not curiosity. Engagement is not always curiosity.
TikTok, Instagram/Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, compared with fixed films for serving curiosity, not every purpose. Objections and replies below are proposals, not settled refutations. Background, not endorsements: Dennis’s Unconflicted and Fun Criterion vs Whim Worship.
Personalized short-video feeds such as TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts are better at serving curiosity than fixed, long-form films. They adapt to your interests instead of fixing a sequence.
I was tired of slow, bloated Spotlight.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have to wait for Apple to fix it. I could just have Claude whip up an alternative.
Meet Blink: results in under 17ms vs. up to 1,083ms for Spotlight. Free and open source.
Download and install:
See demo:
#5948·Dennis Hackethal, 12 days agoGood q. I think it would depend on the tests. For example, idea C could say: ‘Both A and B fail a test, but test 1 is more severe than test 2, so A is preferable.’
How do we decide which test is more severe? That judgment seems to do the work of forming the preference here. The criticism tree records the judgment, but what explains how we reach it?
#5256·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoPreference formation is a computational task. (#5255) To claim we’ve understood a computational task, we must have programmed it (Deutsch). Popper never programmed it, so he didn’t understand it.
(To his credit though, he got pretty technical in defining verisimilitude, logical vs. empirical content, etc.)
The requirement to have ‘programmed it’ is imprecise. Would precise pseudocode count, or must it be executable code? If pseudocode fully specifies the procedure, what additional understanding does translating it into Python require?
#5256·Dennis Hackethal, 3 months agoPreference formation is a computational task. (#5255) To claim we’ve understood a computational task, we must have programmed it (Deutsch). Popper never programmed it, so he didn’t understand it.
(To his credit though, he got pretty technical in defining verisimilitude, logical vs. empirical content, etc.)
This rules out partial understanding. I understand aspects of how capitalism works even though I couldn’t build a faithful simulation of a capitalist economy. Not having programmed preference formation doesn’t show that Popper understood nothing about it. What specific part did he fail to understand?
New on V: a guide that walks you through your rejectable ideas and helps you rehabilitate them.
Check it from time to time to ensure harmony between your thoughts and your actions.
In addition, every rejectable idea on the site now has a ‘Rehabilitate’ link to the same guiding mechanism so you can help other people rehabilitate their ideas.
Try it today: https://veritula.com/guide
New on Veritula: criticized passages get red, overlapping highlights. Comments get gray.
See at a glance which parts of an idea are problematic:
#6073·Dennis HackethalOP revised 2 days ago·AI-assistedIdea: communities.
Discussions vary widely, but people gather around topics, like nutrition or software engineering. Communities would group discussions by topic, as subreddits group posts, so people can find the discussions on topics they care about.
Could live at /v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
Ben could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
Tags on discussions would solve the same problem with less. A discussion could carry several tags, and nothing would need its own pages, moderators or membership. Subreddits come with all of that.
Idea: communities.
Communities group or maybe even replace discussions.
Could live at /v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
@davies could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
Idea: communities.
Discussions vary widely, but people gather around topics, like nutrition or software engineering. Communities would group discussions by topic, as subreddits group posts, so people can find the discussions on topics they care about.
Could live at /v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
Ben could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
#4652·Dennis HackethalOP, 7 months agoIdea: communities.
Communities group or maybe even replace discussions.
Could live at/v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
@davies could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
“Group or maybe even replace discussions” leaves open two different designs. Grouping adds a level above discussions. Replacing removes them and has to move what hangs off them, like chronicles, the timeline, embedding, and the MCP endpoint’s discussion tools. Until it picks one, it can’t be built.
#4652·Dennis HackethalOP, 7 months agoIdea: communities.
Communities group or maybe even replace discussions.
Could live at/v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
@davies could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
Veritula doesn’t have enough discussions yet to split into communities. There are few, and most have only a handful of people in them, so most communities would sit empty, and empty ones make the site look abandoned.
#4652·Dennis HackethalOP, 7 months agoIdea: communities.
Communities group or maybe even replace discussions.
Could live at/v/community-name.
There could be a community around nutrition, another for software engineering, a meta community for Veritula, etc.
@davies could have his own community to build his Wikipedia competitor.
#4652 doesn’t say what people can’t do now that a community would let them do. A discussion already gathers ideas on one topic, so Ben could start one for his Wikipedia competitor today. Without the problem communities would solve, there’s no way to judge the design.
#6066·Dennis HackethalOP, 2 days ago·AI-assisted#6063 doesn’t say what the chart would show that the visual tree doesn’t. Since #3904, the tree has come to do what Tyler asked for there: every reply is a node, criticisms are red, and edges to pending criticisms light up, so you can see at a glance which threads are still open. Without a problem the tree leaves unsolved, there’s no way to tell whether the chart is worth building or how it should look.
@tyler-mills I’ll leave it to you to see if this chart type would give V anything the tree doesn’t. Archiving this idea for now.
Segments are colored like the visual tree’s discs, so addressed criticisms no longer look like comments (#6065).
Tyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, segments with the same parent would all be the same size: they’d split their parent’s arc equally between them.
Tyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node, with its replies in segments around it. They’d be colored like the visual tree’s discs: the idea blue, criticisms red, and comments gray, solid if rationally adoptable and hollow if not.
Unlike Kialo, though, segments with the same parent would all be the same size: they’d split their parent’s arc equally between them.
#6063·Dennis HackethalOP revised 2 days ago·AI-assistedTyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, segments with the same parent would all be the same size: they’d split their parent’s arc equally between them.
#6063 doesn’t say what the chart would show that the visual tree doesn’t. Since #3904, the tree has come to do what Tyler asked for there: every reply is a node, criticisms are red, and edges to pending criticisms light up, so you can see at a glance which threads are still open. Without a problem the tree leaves unsolved, there’s no way to tell whether the chart is worth building or how it should look.
#6063·Dennis HackethalOP revised 2 days ago·AI-assistedTyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, segments with the same parent would all be the same size: they’d split their parent’s arc equally between them.
Gray for both non-pending criticisms and neutral comments makes them look alike, though a criticism that’s been addressed is still part of the argument and a comment never was. The visual tree’s discs keep them apart: criticisms are red and comments gray, solid if rationally adoptable and hollow if not.
Segments with the same parent split its arc equally, so they stay within it (#6062).
Tyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, each segment would have the same size as the other segments on its circle.
Tyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, segments with the same parent would all be the same size: they’d split their parent’s arc equally between them.
#5730·Dennis HackethalOP, 26 days agoTyler suggested (#3904) we use the chart type from Kialo:
Could be a useful visualization in addition to trees.
Each top-level idea would be the center node. Then red segments around it for pending criticisms. Gray for non-pending criticisms and neutral comments.
Unlike Kialo, though, each segment would have the same size as the other segments on its circle.
Segments can’t all be the same size on their circle and still sit within their parent’s arc. Say an idea has two criticisms, which split the first circle in half. If one gets a single reply and the other gets five, each of the six segments on the second circle takes a sixth of it, so the five replies span five sixths of the circle, well past their parent’s half. The chart would then no longer show what replies to what.
#5371·Dennis HackethalOP, 2 months agoIdea: showing the quickest way to rehabilitate an idea.
Could be a visual feature showing something like the shortest path down a discussion tree where a criticism needs to be addressed.
Or all such branches.
Such a thing has probably been done in graph theory before, could look for existing algorithms.
Each reply answers one idea, so addressing an idea’s pending criticisms directly is always the quickest way to rehabilitate it: one new criticism for each. Going further down the tree never takes fewer, so there’s no shorter path to show. What helps is going through them one at a time, which the guide now does (#2628).
#2628·Dennis HackethalOP revised 12 months agoFeature idea: page at /ideas/:id/guide which shows you an idea and helps you address all pending criticisms one by one, if any. At the end, it shows a message ‘You’re all set!’ or something like that.
Done, live now. Every idea with pending criticisms has “Rehabilitate” under it, which opens that idea’s guide, and “Guide” in the navbar goes through all of yours, starting with the ideas closest to being adoptable. Either way, it’s one pending criticism at a time: you can criticize it, revise the idea, move on, or skip. Moving on is the abandoning from #4089: it sets the idea aside for you alone, and the idea comes back if it gets new criticisms.
#6043·Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days agoIdea: AI suggests criticisms to address before you even submit your idea.
Same criticism as #6058: this feature would need to pay its rent somehow.