Oddbean new post about login | logout This type of complexity is a common problem in object oriented programming. "This" type has a method that accepts a "that" type, and it works well until there are too many combinations of types. Any time a new "that" is created, the original code needs to be updated. This is where OOP reaches for interfaces, so the "that" type can be anything that claims to be a "that". This works well for even longer, but it still tends to fail at scale. Any time a new behavior is require, the interface changes and now every implementation needs to be updated. I have a soft spot for old systems, and one of them is Common Lisp. CL was standardized before OOP, and one of the ways it deals with this is multiple dispatch. Instead of "this" type of object having a method operating on "that" type, the function is declared abstractly in a namespace. "Intersect" would be a function that finds the intersecting parts of its arguments. Now when someone makes a new "that", they include code that knows how to intersect "that" with as many "this" types as they find useful. No original code needs to be changed. Later, someone working on "other thing" needs to intersect two types that no one has written intersection code for, so they write their own implementation that is applied to these two other pieces of code, and neither of them needs to be updated. Complexity can quickly get out of hand, but it's also something that we've been thinking about for a long time. The more we learn about history, the more opportunities we have to find good solutions to new problems.
The organic graph idea is interesting because it goes in that direction and just keeps right on going because why the fuck not?
I guess it's like constant structure refactoring through manual or robotic means. So, you're reaching into the structure, from all over and saying this-goes-with-this, whilst someone else is over someplace else saying that-goes-with-that, and someone else is going over to their this-goes-with-this and removing it and replacing it with this-goes-with-that. But constant and from n number of actors simultaneously, and entire lists of events can be linked to other lists and....
And then think about this: because it's organic, it has no rigid structure and doesn't need to be complete. You could lift any random set of the data and define a new graph.
I mean, think about what that means, for analysis. You don't have to know anything about the actual data, to be able to find useful data. You just have to know how intricate that part of the graph is. The density of the edges. And you could find novel connections, by looking at seemingly randomly connected nodes. Nodes connected over a bizarrely wide space, by few edges. Why did that npub connect these? They don't seem related at all. 🤔 But they are related! Someone saw them and said, "These two things are alike." Figure out why.
This would be an interesting LLM-bot task. Use graph analysis to find statistically interesting nodes, then see if a few hundred Claude tokens can figure out what the connection might be and post a note with the results.
The problem right now is that we're only paying attention to the new entries. We need clients that explore the graph in deeper ways. Nostr has that early web energy.
That's part of the goal of our project.
Nostr is a deep data pool. People and machines can just write little snippets of data and throw them randomly into the pool, and the actors define the connection _after_ the data is written and tossed in. That means that you don't have to even know what the data is useful for, when you start collecting it. Just throw it in and the connections will slowly appear between things. Just move all of the data onto Nostr and let the Nostriches sift through it. They'll tell you what it's good for.
How would such data pools work in practise?
We already have one. I'm describing what Nostr already is. People take seemingly random data (usually, whatever they are thinking about, at the moment), write it down, and throw it into the pool. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people do that every single day. It all seems noisy, but there are relationships beween the random shitpost and news and countries and food and memes and... Humans aren't always rational, but they're always reasonable. I.e. they aren't random. They always have a reason for what they do or so, even if they aren't aware of it and the reason seems incidental. Well, all forms of data are like that, but we can't see the reasons. It just looks random or uninteresting. We could just throw it all in and see if we can see the reasons.
From Snow Crash: “The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database — the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word “congress” means. And even the word “library is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old one. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeros. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid.”
Such a great note. It is kind of how science liberated us from autheriterian Regimes from states and the church. Hopefully we will do the same with snakeoil theories that are around a lot these times. nostr:nevent1qqs0788ns6yuwj7y4tmmpee7zmz7sjyfhyv7gp6uhrvdqwgxapundcgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgrqsqqqqqp97khjm
Such a great note. It is kind of how science liberated us from autheriterian Regimes from states and the church. Hopefully we will do the same with snakeoil theories that are around a lot these times. nostr:nevent1qqs0788ns6yuwj7y4tmmpee7zmz7sjyfhyv7gp6uhrvdqwgxapundcgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsd6ejdteqpvse63ntf7qz6u9yqspp4z7ymt8094urzwm0x2ceaxxgrqsqqqqqp97khjm nostr.fmt.wiz.biz
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