There's entire philosophy for how good quality software should be written from typing, structuring, logging, building, releasing, dividing into and combining from services... however, all that depends on particular choices of formats and standards and short-medium-long term goals.

For example, not everyone has to stick to stringent engineering requirements in the research phase -- it's easier to rapidly build a half-baked rocket and try again, than to meticulously design a masterpiece, that lacks a key ability (e.g., ability to come back to land).

And so, wildly different requirements and principles may exist, when thinking of software:

• As research
• As art
• As exploration
• As tool-making
• As craft
• As engineering ...

I don't know exact answer how to resolve conflicts in each community, but they do get resolved inside healthy communities, thru communities cations and love and kindness. I think the best we can do is to organize society into a more granular structure of autonomous communities. Then, it'll just get better, from grassroots.

See also —— Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Something what we think of irreconcilable differences, in fact are clashes of value systems, because of the values that we assign to perceptions: a reptile may be extremely relaxed baking in a scorching heat, whereas a polar bear may feel the same kind of relaxation in a freezing cold: both have a need for the higher need -- "feeling relaxed" -- a difference reconciled by translation of concrete requirements to abstract ones.

Another way to fix that, is just by changing neural circuits that signal those senses the satisfaction of more abstract requirements like the relaxation or excitement, etc. Sometimes the feelings may be incompatible with physiology, and then the physiology needs to change too, if one wants enjoy the same things as another...

I think we should reject and distance ourselves from the mainstream public's understanding of productivity.

I spend a very large portion of my time in leisure doing precisely nothing but letting my mind wander. This is where my ideas come from.

Leisure is just as valuable as creating something for someone to enjoy. We should celebrate idleness because it means we are wealthy. If we can be idle we don't need to toil to survive.

Hustle culture and productivity are prescribed by news companies and influencers is to encourage people to spend their every last waking minute consuming and working making other people rich. This is wrong way to look at productivity.

I hate wage slavery. I shouldn't have to justify my life by working in a prison cell to make someone else rich.

Of course it's wrong. It's slavory. Fat rich people exploit sick and uneducated underclass. No one is happy

We could modify our bodies to grow foliage like a plant.

// Imagine trying to fit in when there's no one like you... //

But two identical people are rare, everyone is already different... And we already can't change the mating decisions of our ancestors. If we understand and deal with genomes like we deal with code and software engineering, there's going to be many ways to ensure that constraints are satisfied.

I favor the idea of collective engineering of offspring rather than the idea that only traditional two parents mate and then produce offspring like Marvin Minsky's explains.

Even if it's the future, I'm not a fan. There's no possible way to create oversight and rules about such a thing. The scariest part is dealing with irreversible mistakes. Every one of those genetic mods will be an irreversible experiment, with some individuals having to deal with consequences. Imagine trying to fit in when there's no one like you, besides knowing your misery came from someone specific, someone you know. Imagine being that person and having to confront your mistake. The range of moral issues is beyond me. I'd rather get off the subject. I'm sure it's coming tho. What I'm saying, this will destroy any notion of morality, as it evolved thru human history. What storm will hit us is unpredictable. I'm not ready.

All the ingredients of chocolate came from photosynthesis. That's how powerful it is.

Sure we would have to stay still like trees but our civilization would be far more stable and there would be less want.

Answering [skihappy]'s concerns from another topic, namely:

// Modifying genome will affect only the next generation, not the individual, but his offspring. What kinda motivation would we have to do that to our children? I'd guess, to produce slaves, highly specialized for some tasks. //

I think self-modification would actually increase the bio-diversity, a bit like sex has increased the biodiversity, and really, increase the competition between variants, leading to new wave of evolution. However, with these technologies, where being born of one phenotype would not mean staying with it, the evolution could happen not by death of variants, but by death of certain traits by replacing them with new ones -- continual morphing.

// Another scenario is rich people enhancing their children with super senses, creating a master race. How about creating a warrior subspecies of humans? Are you ready to fight them? //

Superhumans wouldn't be a problem, if society had rules and social norms that govern certain abilities, just like there are rules for the blind people, there could be rules for those with the vision of an eagle or an owl. I frankly would love to have the vision of an owl, as I could see the Andromeda galaxy in its full glory without a long-exposure. Why not? At the rate that these technologies are progressing (consider CRISPR), it's likely that they will be widely available, not just for the rich people.

Having a gun today is more dangerous than any "warrior subspecies", and guns are generally regulated in most countries. However, I agree that there should be limits set though -- it may be that certain characteristic are not socially acceptable.

There's definitely limits to the diversity of species that modern society would be ready and willing to deal with.

// It's like software that can modify its own code. Maybe by some rules at first, but then those rules will be subject to change. It's just too confusing. Also, how would you deal with unfortunate, but inevitable mistakes. Woops, we just created a species in f monstrous phycopaths, for ever to deal with. Good luck. //

Good point. Perhaps the features of self-modification would have to be publicly known and legal-coded, and there would have to be both legal and illegal features to acquire through self-modification. For example, it may be illegal to grow very large muscles meanwhile destabilizing certain cognitive functions, etc.

The genetic modification should have a separate topic. I've started such topic here on self-modifcation.

finally, being born a dog doesn't mean that you'll have to be a dog for the rest of your life, finally, we will be able to supersede our genetic limitations.

Modifying genome will affect only the next generation, not the individual, but his offspring. What kinda motivation would we have to do that to our children? I'd guess, to produce slaves, highly specialized for some tasks. Another scenario is rich people enhancing their children with super senses, creating a master race. How about creating a warrior subspecies of humans? Are you ready to fight them? These are not hard predictions to make.

It's like software that can modify its own code. Maybe by some rules at first, but then those rules will be subject to change. It's just too confusing. Also, how would you deal with unfortunate, but inevitable mistakes. Woops, we just created a species in f monstrous phycopaths, for ever to deal with. Good luck.

Yeah, there's a reason why we evolved passed plants, to consume high energy foods. This is why trees don't move. It's out of their energy budget. We are free to move, but burdened by necessity to find high energy food. Can't have it both ways. If there was, we would see some critter doing it

// I'm highly opposed to altering human genome.

Why so? I'm actually for freedoms and rights of self-modification at genetic and higher levels.

// It'll be the end of the world as we know it,

It already is the end of the world as we know it, it's great that this technology exists -- finally, being born a dog doesn't mean that you'll have to be a dog for the rest of your life, finally, we will be able to supersede our genetic limitations.

But we gonna be something else, not human any more. I wanna stay human. I don't think tinkering with our genome and splitting us at n subspecies is a good idea. It's complicated enough just being split into races of different skin color. I'm highly opposed to altering human genome. It's a very scary thought of having this tech available. It'll be the end of the world as we know it, and I hope I'll be gone by then, but it's prbly inevitable

Well, yeah, given that solar power is approx. 1.36 kW/square meter, and the area of human shadow is say, 0.2 m^2, you'd be getting 270 W of power at max., and you'd have to save for the night. The problem is that maximum overall photosynthetic efficiency is of 3 to 6% of total solar radiation, which is then equivalent to 0.016 kW of power. So, unless there's a better photosynthetic chemistry, being like a tree doesn't seem very nice. A 100 g bar of chocolate, that I've just eaten, has 2202 kJ (0.6 kWh) of energy, so, I'd need to sit under the sunshine for 37.5 hours straight to get equivalent amount of energy via photosynthesis.

Oh, and where is my electric battery instead of stomach? :)

// Think ? = Other Thing" sounds like a framework for problem solving through creativity.

Yeah, well, replace "Other Thing" with 'Desired Thing' (Y), and the first "Thing" with current circumstances (F), and the question mark with "X", and you get essentially "F(X)=Y".

[Mindey] , I wonder, how would this look like as a Lesson / Learning Experience? Can you give some example?

"Think ? = Other Thing" sounds like a framework for problem solving through creativity. Would a learner define the "other thing" or a teacher facilitating a lesson?

What's new?

• With [malü] we formed a partnership to work together on creating an ecosystem of organisations that provide a creativity training across different locations in the world and to have a different website (and a business registration) in each location: KOKONO ("kokonolab.com") in Ireland/Europe, Instinto Creador in Argentina/South America, X in Lithuania.

• We're committed to be open organisations and share our process here. If anyone seeing this page would like to collaborate with us and to pursue our mission together, just make a comment here. :)

• In Ireland, KOKONO LTD will also offer exciting services for organisations under "kokono.ie"

Life is too complicated for the average person.

I had an idea whereby economic decisions could be made on your behalf to automate all the complexity of investing, life insurances, pensiona, savings, finding work through economic abstractions.

Someone else works to allocate you to a job based on your skills.

https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Economic_20abstraction

One more I'd like to add. Utility companies should not be automated to strictly online services. That's horrible, cold and impersonal. It should be going the other way, where most of energy needs are provided internally by the community, not relying on some monstrous energy Corp outside. Its impossible to plan the transition to a better culture. But there are patterns to follow and encourage. The structure should be more granular,

The solution is prbly keep doing what's already there. Change is gradual and should be towards community based living. So, I would not put function of assisting computer challenged people into the gov hands. It should be provided by local community. However, successful models of organizing these efforts can be provided online, or even by gov in it's facilitating role. Then, people will figure out how to apply it in their communities. But, there should be community first, not gov first. Btw, that's a general approach, a recipe to most of issues. And, as you mentioned, human contact is most important. We not building a machine, but a human culture of caring and sharing, with the help of machines. We def don't wanna exclude older and poor folks. Imo, the online tools we building should focus on community needs, rather then enabling an individual rise above community. Once communities are formed, they will figure out the fine grain inside, and take care of weak members. This is the natural flow. So, in summary, online tools help communities, communities help its members, as humans help humans. And, don't expect much help from gov, we building a parallel structure.

Human contact is still so important, in moments of info overload. There is google for "find what you need" but when I don't know the keywords, I find more mess.

Instead of "searchbox", one phone number or one chatroom to get answers to all questions would be cool!

It could work like a "Problem Solvers" network, a network of people who have those "maps" of what are the key public services and utility services organisations in specific countries, and they would be available for a call or a chat in a realtime. It'd be cool that these people would have mini offices across the country too, maybe in supermarkets, so that anyone can access this service, even those without a phone.

This should be a government funded initiative, because government exists to care for its citizens, and if people cannot access basic services for a living, so government functions poorly.

It's possible to calculate how many Problem Solvers would be needed to do such a public service job: from a census data take a number of older people, people with longterm health conditions, etc and assume each citizen would need such a problem solving consultation once a month, then compare that with 6 hours working day of a problem solver, and there is some number to start with estimating a budget needed.

This service could help with a loneliness epidemic too!

I agree with you complexity is a huge factor.

Most codebases start simple but then become over encumbered with lots of mess and become spaghetti.

I want everything to read like psuedocode or a reference implementation. In other words it is so simple it is readable.

The problem is that code accretes features and those features are poorly namespaced from the core algorithm.

A btree is actually quite simple! But a database needs lots of features that make a btree complicated because it has to handle locking, security etc.

My idea for a layered problem language is to separate features from each other and layer the code together automatically. Like an intelligent subclassing. But for automatic code accretion.

It could be a browser plugin and some GUI to build a walk search with the GUI.

In Excel we have a feature called What If which is very powerful. It can change cell values intelligently to find a goal value.

I used socioprofitable in another post but I am sure someone can think of a better word.

Beneficial is too light meaning.

Well I thought of formalising a syntax for defining a hill walk that includes URLs.

If the servers do the work, then it requires the servers themselves change to support the protocol.

Metadrive could execute the data collection locally too. It would just result in more data transfer.

I see, but how will it walk? I think it would require something like the Metadrive to walk easily.

I think we had talked about the formats for describing target queries for conditions (for example, Ansible's roles define target states of machines, these roles are examples of objective functions -- a kind of queries for conditions to auto-satisfy), when we talked about the "wants files".

It's interesting, how program synthesis and program search boils down to walk optimization.

The goal is that any website tab can be cross referenced with another tab. So people can walk any information that is publicly available.

My previous post implied there would be a special way to offload walking to servers. I envision this being a common endpoint which lets you upload the walking problem as a set of variables and enumerations. You would have to provide the URL of other web pages too for the server to make requests on your behalf.

You would only be interested in the top N results - not the full result set as that would be lots of data to transfer.

You could combine this walk optimisation with the knapsack problem to schedule healthy meal recipes according to a calorie, fat, carbohydrate, protein budget. If you had a restaurant site with a menu or a recipe website or a grocery shopping website - they can all be combined!!

I envision using this feature to find hard drives that are simultaneously high performance, cheap and have low error rates. (Back blaze publishes hard drive failure stats)

I'd love this kind of thing. In fact, it doesn't end with the path -- take our dietary choices and nutrition -- they are a parameter in window walk optimization -- where to rent may depend on the kind of products and services we walk to, and that sequence of products and services to be engaged with in social circumstances may be sub-optimal -- why not to correlate them across different people (healthy or not), and suggest better ones (e.g., "Steve has been walking to gym, and his blood hemoglobin levels, and other parameters are good, and there are many such 'Steves' that I know, maybe you should consider that gym nearby your apartment?"), and then, based on them as a parameter, the "window walk optimization" would be adjusted.

In fact, walk-to product/service optimization would be easier if customers were to get the digital receipts (instead of paper ones) with data about their purchase details down to supply chain details about each product/service item purchased... It could be easily done preserving privacy (even for cash payments) with a URL (or QR code) printed on the paper receipt to fetch data details. It could easily be done with loyalty cards, that people use for discounts, not to speak with mobile banking apps (which, I guess, generally don't get the products details data). If it is not being done, the consumers are left data-poor. The category is: how to get back the shopping receipts data?

I thought about the practical concerns of executing the enumeration and walking of data.

I think the walking of data can be distributed for efficiency. It doesn't make sense to walk each record one at a time. It's a lot of data to download.

I think a continuation style can be used so that the provider of the data walks each sub iteration.

So the walking of data is continuations between collaborating servers.

It's about complexity. Any complex system has those problems. Solution is modularity, commonality, composability, reusability. We need common standards, we need true and tried solutions to become basis for those standards and commonality. It's an incremental process. But, imo, there's another side of the coin. It's about people and about their work culture. The corps are driving us into very narrow roles, and that is driving software to be highly modularized. At extreme, it's not healthy either. There needs to be more architects, more visionaries that can see across divisions. It's a happy Ballance that matters, but right now there's not enough of jacks of all trades and to many of the follow the old pattern type of people. It's the people that write software, in their own image.

In most open source projects there is someone who does most of the work, understands the code and contributes the most.

Then there are a group of small contributors who contribute little fixes.

I think part of the problem is making code understandable. Ruby on Rails and Django get you part way there by providing a mechanism to accomplish most things.

The problem I have is that mature codebases are very hard to understand and read. The reference implementation or happy path is polluted by all sorts of exceptions or added feature concerns

The cornerstones of software such as Postgres, Linux and web servers like nginx are all hard to understand and read because they are so feature packed. You cannot see the forest for the trees.

I avoid using open source libraries that dont have good documentation - I expect examples of each API and example code in the README or in the documentation.

A very important category, actually. Off-top of my head, there are a few approaches:

(A) writing small highly reusable and tested modules (when they are small, others can easily understand)

(B) rewriting with a team (after the complex concept system is done, rewrite from scratch together)

There are other heuristics, like the SOLID, that I've heard of from a friend, can definitely help here, but it doesn't help with boosting development of legacy code, as what it implies is that the legacy code would have to be refactored into lots of small bits (libraries), and then combined again, which is not a small feat.

I assumed there was always multiple operators in the problem and they are applied in order.

This as you say is programming. We can have computers programming themselves if they can do operation search.

I dont know if sequence to sequence neural networks can help. They are used for translation problems and sentence trees.

You mentioned Github's OpenAI Codex on additive GUI page, I think that is relevant on this idea.

I want systems that programs themselves such as the following function -

F(database state 1, request) = (output HTML, database state 2, network calls)

The program can search for references for information used in the request to create the concatenated strings of HTML and database inserts. If you specify that order_number in the request corresponds to Orders table in database state 1 then the computer can probably work out what data needs pulling out into the output HTML.

Skihappy I suspect it can be used to find any multi faceted multi variable problem. If there is a database of communities then in theory those database providers should provide an API to interrogate the data.

The problem is Google doesn't categorise websites unless the website uses the term "community".

I've written a very simple interpreter that works with the example. It uses React. The rendered HTML is ugly but Todo adding works.

The hard part is what you say, providing a flexible enough language that can support most GUIs.

My goal was for IDEs to be representable with this format of GUI.

I dread to look at the code for IntelliJ I bet it's very very very complicated.

// If APIs can return a highly dense definition of how the GUI should work and be rendered, then we can remove a lot of custom code.

I see. To simplify the matters, the problem then is fully-defining such declarative language, and then constructing the mapping between specification of such language and the implementation via the (HTML, JS, CSS) triplets as components, that is what defines reactive UI elements, regardless of whether its in pure or virtual DOM. The state space of each such triplet as component then corresponds to what you define as the dimension, and state space of entire UI as the Cartesian product of the codomains of those components, each particular state of entire UI being a "multidimensional plane".

I see this concept go, and being important, but to get it actually working, I see a lot of work being required to define the exhaustive set of terms, and then the browser-bound interpreter for this to run.

Yes Mindey Additive GUIs is based on the concept that a GUI is a query that splices multiple dimensions multidimensional plane. Where each dimension is a widget and the points are states of that widget. There is a function that defines the relation of the points of each dimension to another set of points for each dimension, perhaps by human interaction or server interaction.

If APIs can return a highly dense definition of how the GUI should work and be rendered, then we can remove a lot of custom code.

Most interaction with data orientated GUIs like infinity are just verbs against items in lists. They are reactive in response to data collections. Or add items to collections.

For drawing GUIs like diagram tools like PowerPoint or paint I think you need a different model.

I wonder, is the OpenAI Codex making an internal representation similar to your formalism of Additive GUIs, when being instructed informally, like in this video?

I think it would be great simplification for defining UIs more rigorously. We could just provide such compact UI specifications as an API response, and if all browsers just had the certain libraries preloaded (e.g., by someone making an nmp preloading browser extension), it could render the UI very fast, without extra web requests, basically, making the front-end development unnecessary, and replacing it by standardized API views of such declarative statements.

What is described here, is really not new: solving operation search equations can be shown to be equivalent to search for ground terms to solve truth equations made from truth functions, where symbol = is a requirement for both sides of it to be equal.

An "operation" then can be said to be a "ground term" or a "solution" to an operation search equation.

I think the novelty here is only in simplification of description to make it relevant to education systems to catch up in the levels of abstraction and pragmatics with the modern day thinking: i.e., instead of asking kids to regurgitate existing functions or operators to plug in to solve problems given to them, -- allowing them to imagine possible operators to apply to the resources to resolve a problem that they care about: for example:

• writing a computer program is a kind of operator search, where the program written is the operator found,
• making an instrument like a drill, is a kind of operator search, where the instrument (the drill) made is the operator found,

etc.

Maybe this idea could be extended to any content published on the web?

Is it the location that is important, or the actual text snippet being annotated? Maybe you can somehow hash the text snippet, and then process any document (mostly in any format, just extracting the text) and produce the set of hashes of snippets that could ever be annotated in it (using some clever form of rolling hash or so). Then use that to fetch all the annotations ever created for it using some form of content-addressing system.

Your idea reminds me a bit of Xanadu.

This is also related to forward chaining and backward chaining logical inferences.

To calculate towards an end value you need a distance function and a direction.

While distance(current_value) greater than 0 {

For function in next_functions(function) (

 Candidate = Function(current_value)

 If distance(candidate) Less than distance(current_value) (

 Directions.append(function)

Current_value = Candidate

 Break

)

)

)

This idea is also related to Automated API traversal - Program synthesis.

I think this idea is related to advice engine.

Life is a bit of a decision tree.

You can't just go to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge an exclusive university at step 1. You need to do other things first.

I also had an idea for achieving guided browsing. Which is on half bakery. The idea is you go through a set of pages before concluding your search. Like a tutorial that is reactive to what you have done so far.

https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Guided_20web_20browsing

Good idea. However, I'd like to use this to find a community to join. Looking for a job is a very depressing proposition, but that's what the web is full of. It's very telling that no one is framing this issue in terms of community search. Granted, it'll do the same search using same or similar constraints, but using different lingo. Language is all we got to shape and express our thoughts

I see problem as lack of commonality. I agree that typing is a good way to go. I'm working on the a way to use typing as the infrastructure of composition of functionalities, a way to create consistent logic systems reusing other types. There's a lot of natural commonality between composable typing systems. They can be easily translated from one to another. As long as type of structures are available, they can be composed in a synergetic way. So, I believe typing is way to go. To me, typing is the first thing that happens in any project. It creates reusable solutions, rather then a quick fix, usually to address the bottomline dollar. Types are helpful in encapsulating a lot of functionality common to the snapshots they represent. They are also declarative, making code better structured and more readable