Archive - Amadeus Pagel's Newsletter

New

Top

Discussion

The Limits of the Existence Proof Argument for General Intelligence

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. — Carl Sagan The existence proof argument for general intelligence…

Sep 19 •

The Sheet Music Tradition

Classical composers from J. S. Bach to Philip Glass published sheet music. That is what makes them classical composers. They have nothing else in…

Sep 6 •

August 2023

Moralizing Convenience

Before Spotify, it was common for people to convince themselves that they were pirating music to stick it to the labels, who were supposedly treating…

Aug 19 •

July 2023

Why Germany Quit Nuclear Power

When the Fukushima disaster happened, germany was ruled by a center-right coalition out of the conservative CDU and the liberal FDP. Only half a year…

Jul 20 •

Dark and light mode are not symmetrical

The terms dark mode and light mode sound symmetrical. If dark mode means that every background is dark, light mode must mean that that every background…

Jul 3 •

June 2023

Apple is Still Sabotaging Offline-First Web Apps

Today it's possible to build web apps that work offline, that store data client side, that one can use without sending any data to the server. A server…

Jun 9 •

April 2023

Infinitely Nested Window Management

Because any directory can contain subdirectories, the file system can be arbitrarily deep. This organization of nested directories and files is called a…

Apr 29 •

Data Imperialism

Imperialism as in "computer science imperialism" or "economics imperialism". Data as in "code is data" or "data type". Data might have connotations of…

Apr 11 •

Privacy Law is Unenforcable Against Foreign Adversaries

A computer can run any software, and via the internet it can send any data, anywhere. The software that a computer runs at any given moment may be…

Apr 3 •

January 2023

Bring back tab-to-search

Start typing the URL of a website. When a suggestion appears, press "tab" to search the website: That is/was tab-to-search. I'm not sure I should speak…

Jan 20 •

Can browsers make it easier to use other search engines?

We take for granted that browsers have a default search engine, that users are incapable of using another search engine, for example adding "reddit" to…

Jan 5 •

November 2022

Twitter and the Perils of Learning from Users

When people used the @-symbol to mention other users and the hashtag to refer to topics, twitter build features to support these conventions—linking…

Nov 26, 2022 •

#nojs-banner { position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0; padding: 16px 16px 16px 32px; width: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; background: red; color: white; font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; } #nojs-banner a { color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; } This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts