Sundar @digital_carver@qoto.org

@urusan
As someone who uses a language with a phonetic alphabet, it is so weird that you can see a word in English written down and still have potentially no idea how it should be pronounced. Definitely one of my least favourite things about English.

@freemo
actually, it's weirder than that. It's there if I reload the page and let it load, but if I scroll down while it's loading, the "A" shows up at a normal size and the issue doesn't occur. If I don't scroll down, I can see that the "A" that's rendered is actually larger in size, and that's why it messes with the bullet below it.

This is such a heisenbug it's probably not worth hunting down, especially if it doesn't happen on Chrome.

@freemo
Just looked at the article page, looks pretty good. The contrast between the smallcaps first line and the tiny subsequent lines looks a bit messy, so the page should look even better once the fonts are fixed. Also, IMO there's a bit too much margin space, both on the left and the right (beyond the margin notes column). Just 10-20% more content would make the page feel less empty.

There's a weird rendering issue with the stylized first lines (in Firefox on Linux), the "A" plunging into the first bullet, pic attached. It's transient - it goes away if I zoom in or out, and doesn't come back even if I get back to the original zoom value. But it's there if I reload the page.

@freemo
It looks clean and beautiful, the design itself gives a sense of clarity and reliability that works to counteract the vague distrust a lot of people feel just from a mention of cryptocurrency.

The logo is stark and simple, maybe too stark for the general public. (Also, I have a vague feeling I've seen a similar logo somewhere else - a documentation page, a mathematical site, a wiki, something like that. But I can't find which one.)

Like with your personal site, the fonts seem too small to me, the announcements almost look like footnotes.

Btw, the graph on the top left (pretty neat!) doesn't load if we have JS disabled, and instead there's just empty space. Perhaps a fallback static image for the noscript case there?

(to the tune of: https://youtu.be/zqIVv877UMM)

🔔 ☎️ 🔔 ☎️ 📞 hello qoto🎵 🎶 🎼 🎵 🎶 🎼

@urusan
There’s also a transcript at https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/07/12/155-stephen-wolfram-on-computation-hypergraphs-and-fundamental-physics/ (which is where I copied the quote from), though the timestamps are slightly different for some reason

@urusan
In Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bMYtEKjHs0
Full context starts at 01:22:32

it seems that you can never win with quantum computing, that is that when you branch out in all these different ways, the effort to corral things back together is at least as great as the gain that you get from things branching apart.
(at 01:26:15 in the YouTube video)

@urusan
I was surprised to hear Stephen Wolfram say on a podcast that it likely won’t work. It’s not an opinion we hear very often, but falsifiable predictions like this are nice to have.

@urusan
Every important thing becomes world changing eventually via accretion of progress (for eg. the quantum simulations QC enables would likely lead to some amazing tech), but on a relative scale I vote at the Important level

Vacation photos of a model (who’s had drug problems in the past), two Instagram comments below it:

Have fun. Just take care of yourself first.

Great tits

Summary of social media really.

@lydiaconwell
First!!!!!

@freemo
This is on Firefox by the way, in case it matters

@freemo
also, speaking of fonts, the font size used for the rest of the site seems too small IMO. And zooming in for some reason doesn't wrap the text automatically like in other sites, leads to the dreaded horizontal scroll bar instead (I'm too much of a CSS dunce to offer anything more than this "it no worky" comment though.)