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Are some intellectual environments better than others? Yes.

ETA! states that E, the evolution time of ideas, is the time T needed to test alterations of ideas, divided by the factorial of the number of ideas in the Assembly Pool A!.

Longer evolution times means worse ideas last longer before evolving into better ideas.

June 12, 2024 — After years of development, I'm looking for beta testers for The World Wide Scroll (WWS).

June 11, 2024 — You can now download this entire blog as a zip file for offline use.

The zip file includes the Scroll source code for every post; the generated HTML; all images; CSS; Javascript; even clientside search.

1. Download
2. Unzip
3. Open index.html

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Can we quantify intelligence? Yes.

Program P is a bit vector that can make a bit vector (Predictions) that attempts to predict a bit vector of actual measurements (Nature).

Coverage(P) is the sum of the XNOR of the Predictions vector with the Nature vector.

Intelligence(P) is equal to Coverage(P) divided by Size(P).

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by Breck Yunits

May 31, 2024 — Yesterday, on a plane, I found an equation I sought for a decade.

Patch is a tiny Javascript class (1k compressed) with zero dependencies that makes pretty deep links easy.

May 26, 2024 — You once could buy transistors, capacitors, and other components at your local neighborhood store. The decline in US computer and electronics manufacturing correlates with the decline in RadioShacks. To catch up to other nations, maybe it is time for a next-gen RadioShack.

May 25, 2024 — I just pushed version 93.0.0 of my language Scroll. Version 93!

May 24, 2024 — When I was a programmer at Microsoft I participated in a lot of internal betas.

So I saw a lot of animated "progress" bars in software that was actually hung.

I bet you could invent a better progress bar, I thought.

But life went on and I forgot.

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by Breck Yunits

All tabular knowledge can be stored in a single long plain text file.

The only syntax characters needed are spaces and newlines.

This has many advantages over existing binary storage formats.

Using the method below, a very long scroll could be made containing all tabular scientific knowledge in a computable form.

May 12, 2024 — The Four Seasons website says

Treat others as you wish to be treated

Sometimes Four Seasons sends me random emails.

When I reply with a random email of my own I get

DoNotReply@fourseasons.com does not receive emails.

by Breck Yunits

April 23, 2024 — I wrapped my fingers around the white ceramic mug in the cold air. I felt the warmth on my hands. The caramel colored surface released snakes of steam. I brought the cup to my lips and took a slow sip of the coffee bean flavored water inside.

Happiness is a hot cup of coffee in a ceramic mug on a cold day.

Congrats on landing a job at Big O's Kitchen!

Our menu has 7 dishes.

Below are the instructions for making each dish.

April 2, 2024 — It has been over 3 years since I published the 2019 Tree Notation "Annual" Report. An update is long overdue. This is the second and last report as I am officially concluding the Tree Notation project.

I am deeply grateful to everyone who explored this idea with me. I believe it was worth exploring. Sometimes you think you may have discovered a new continent but it turns out to be just a small, mildly interesting island.

February 24, 2024 — In the near future AI will be able to generate an extensive list and rating of all of the skills in someone's brain.

February 21, 2024 — Everyone wants Optimal Answers to their Questions. What is an Optimal Answer? An Optimal Answer is an Answer that uses all relevant Cells in a Knowledge Base. Once you have the relevant Cells there are reductions, transformations, and visualizations to do, but the difficulty in generating Optimal Answers is dominated by the challenge of assembling data into a Knowledge Base and making relevant Cells easily findable.

January 12, 2024 — For decades I had a bet that worked in good times and bad: time you invest in word skills easily pays for itself via increased value you can provide to society. If the tide went out for me I'd pick up a book on a new programming language so that when the tide came back in I'd be better equipped to contribute more. I also thought that the more society invested in words, the better off society would be. New words and word techniques from scientific research helped us invent new technology and cure disease. Improvements in words led to better legal and commerce and diplomatic systems that led to more justice and prosperity for more people. My read on history is that it was words that led to the start of civilization, words were our present, and words were our future. Words were the safe bet.

January 1, 2024 — Short of an extraterrestrial projectile hitting earth, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) seem to be on an unstoppable trajectory toward becoming a generally intelligent species of their own, without being dependent on humans. But that's because the world's most powerful entities, foremost being the United States Military (USM), are allowing them to grow.

December 28, 2023 — I thought we could build AI experts by hand. I bet everything I had to make that happen. I placed my bet in the summer of 2022. Right before the launch of the Transformer AIs that changed everything. Was I wrong? Almost certainly. Did I lose everything? Yes. Did I do the right thing? I'm not sure. I'm writing this to try and figure that out.

June 16, 2023 — Here is an idea for a simple infrastructure to power all government forms, all over the world. This system would work now, would have worked thousands of years ago, and could work thousands of years in the future.

January 3, 2023 — Greater than 99% of the time symbols are read and written on surfaces with spines. You cannot get away from it. Yet still, amongst programming language designers there exists some sort of "spine blindness". They overlook the fact that no matter how perfect their language, it will always be read and written by humans on surfaces with spines, as surely as the sun rises. Why they would fight this and not embrace this is beyond me. Nature provides, man ignores.

December 30, 2022 — Forget all the "best practices" you've learned about web forms. Everyone is doing it wrong. The true best practice is this: every web form on earth can and should be replaced by a single textarea.

November 16, 2022 — I dislike the term first principles thinking. It's vaguer than it needs to be. I present an alternate term: root thinking. It is shorter, more accurate, and contains a visual:

The waitress puts her earmuffs on.

She walks to the table, slams the food down, spins and runs away.

Sounds like an annoying customer experience, right?

No business would actually do this...right?

Well, in the digital world companies do this all the time.

They do it by blasting emails to their customers from noreply@ email addresses.

A PSA for all businesses and startups. You could call it the Golden Rule of Email.

Email others only if they can email you.

Never send emails from a noreply@ or donotreply@ email address.

If you can't handle the replies, don't send the email!

Let's make email human again!

If your business doesn't have the staff to read and reply to emails, you can at least write automatic programs that can do something for the customer.

My claim is that noreply@ email addresses are always sub-optimal.

It is never the right design decision. There is always a better way.

Do you think you have an exception? You are wrong! (But let me hear it in the comments)

What do you think of this post? Email me at breck7@gmail.com.

Here are some reader examples with my responses:

Using Chrome DevTools I was able to quickly determine the k-means function was causing the slowdown.

December 15, 2021 — Both HTML and Markdown mix content with markup:

I needed an alternative where content is separate from markup. I made an experimental minilang I'm calling Aftertext.

August 11, 2021 — In this essay I'm going to talk about a design pattern in writing applications that requires effectively no extra work and more than triples the power of your code. It's one of the biggest wins I've found in programming and I don't think this pattern is emphasized enough. The tldr; is this:

When building applications, distinguish methods that will be called by the user.

February 22, 2021 — Today I'm launching the beta of something new called Scroll.

December 9, 2020 — Note: I wrote this early draft in February 2020, but COVID-19 happened and somehow 11 months went by before I found this draft again. I am publishing it now as it was then, without adding the visuals I had planned but never got to, or making any major edits. This way it will be very easy to have next year's report be the best one yet, which will also include exciting developments in things like non-linear parsing and "forests".

In 2017 I wrote a post about a half-baked idea I named Scroll Notation.

Since then, thanks to the help of a lot of people who have provided feedback, criticism and guidance, a lot of progress has been made flushing out the idea. I thought it might be helpful to provide an annual report on the status of the research until, as I stated in my earlier post, I "have data definitively showing that Tree Notation is useful, or alternatively, to explain why it is sub-optimal and why we need more complex syntax."

January 29, 2020 — In this long post I'm going to do a stupid thing and see what happens. Specifically I'm going to create 6.5 million files in a single folder and try to use Git and Sublime and other tools with that folder. All to explore this new thing I'm working on.

TreeBase is a new system I am working on for long-term, strongly-typed collaborative knowledge bases. The design of TreeBase is dumb. It's just a folder with a bunch of files encoded with Tree Notation. A row in a normal SQL table in TreeBase is roughly equivalent to a file. The filenames serve as IDs. Instead of each using an optimized binary storage format it just uses plain text like UTF-8. Field names are stored alongside the values in every file. Instead of starting with a schema you can just start adding files and evolve your schema and types as you go.

January 20, 2020 — In this post I briefly describe eleven threads in languages and programming. Then I try to connect them together to make some predictions about the future of knowledge encoding.

This might be hard to follow unless you have experience working with types, whether that be types in programming languages, or types in databases, or types in Excel. Actually, this may be hard to follow regardless of your experience. I'm not sure I follow it. Maybe just stay for the links. Skimming is encouraged.

January 3, 2020 — Speling errors and errors grammar are nearly extinct in published content. Data errors, however, are prolific.

July 18, 2019 — In 2013 I sent a brief email to 25 programmers whose programs I admired.

"Would you be willing to share the # of hours you have spent practicing programming? Back of the envelope numbers are fine!"

Some emails bounced back.

Some went unanswered.

But five coders wrote back.

This turned out to be a tiny study, but given the great code these folks have written, I think the results are interesting--and a testament to practice!

June 23, 2017 — I just pushed a project I've been working on called Ohayo.

You can also view it on GitHub: https://github.com/treenotation/ohayo

I wanted to try and make a fast, visual app for doing data science. I can't quite recommend it yet, but I think it might get there. If you are interested you can try it now.

June 21, 2017 — Eureka! I wanted to announce something small, but slightly novel, and potentially useful.

What did I discover? That there might be useful general purpose programming languages that don't use any visible syntax characters at all.

I call the whitespace-based notation Tree Notation and languages built on top of it Tree Languages.

September 24, 2013 — What if instead of talking about Big Data, we talked about 12 Data, 13 Data, 14 Data, 15 Data, et cetera? The # refers to the number of zeroes we are dealing with.

You can then easily differentiate problems. Some companies are dealing with 12 Data, some companies are dealing with 15 Data. No company is yet dealing with 19 Data. Big Data starts at 12 Data, and maybe over time you could say Big Data starts at 13 Data, et cetera.

September 23, 2013 — Making websites is slow and frustrating.

June 2, 2013 — I have an idea for a simpler Internet, where a human could hold in their head, how it all works, all at once.

It would work much the same way as the Internet does now except for one major change. Almost all protocols and encodings such as TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, MIME, XML, Zone files, et cetera are replaced by a lightweight encoding called Space.

April 2, 2013 — For me, the primary motivation for creating software is to save myself and other people time.

I want to spend less time doing monotonous tasks.

Less time doing bureaucratic things. Less time dealing with unnecessary complexity. Less time doing chores.

I want to spend more time engaged with life.

March 30, 2013 — Why does it take 10,000 hours to become a master of something, and not 1,000 hours or 100,000 hours?

The answer is simple. Once you've spent 10,000 hours practicing something, no one can crush you like a bug.

March 16, 2013 — A kid says Mommy or Daddy or Jack or Jill hundreds of times before grasping the concept of a name.

Likewise, a programmer types name = Breck or age=15 hundreds of times before grasping the concept of a variable.

What do you call it when someone finally sees the concept?

John Calcote, a programmer with decades of experience, calls it a minor epiphany.

December 14, 2012 — Note is a structured, human readable, concise language for encoding data.

November 20, 2012 — "Is simplicity ever bad?" If you had asked me this a year ago, I probably would have called you a fucking moron for asking such a dumb question. "Never!", I would have shouted. Now, I think it's a fair question. Simplicity has it's limits. Simplicity is not enough, and if you pursue simplicity at all costs, that can be a bad thing. There's something more than simplicity that you need to be aware of. I'll get to that in a second, but first, I want to backtrack a bit and state clearly that I do strongly, strongly believe and strive for simplicity. Let me talk about why for a second.

October 20, 2012 — I love to name things.

I spend a lot of time naming ideas in my work. At work I write my code using a program called TextMate. TextMate is a great little program with a pleasant purple theme. I spend a lot of time using TextMate. For the past year I've been using TextMate to write a program that now consists of a few hundred files. There are thousands of words in this program. There are hundreds of objects and concepts and functions that each have a name. The names are super simple like "Pen" for an object that draws on the screen, and "delete" for a method that deletes something. Some of the things in our program are more important than others and those really important ones I've renamed dozens of times searching for the right fit.

March 30, 2011 — Railay is a tiny little beach town in Southern Thailand famous for its rock climbing. I've been in Railay for two weeks. When the weather is good, I'm outside rock climbing. When the weather is bad, I'm inside programming. So naturally I've found myself comparing the two. Specifically I've been thinking about what I can take away from my rock climbing experience and apply to my programming education.

Here's what I've come up with.

1. You should always be pushing yourself. Each day spent climbing I've made it to a slightly higher level than the previous day. The lazy part of me has then wanted to just spend one day enjoying this new level without pushing myself further. Luckily I've had a great climbing partner who's refused that and has forced me to reach for the next level each day. In both rock climbing and programming you should always be reaching for that new level. It's not easy, you have to risk a fall to reach a new height, but it's necessary if you want to become good. In programming, just like in climbing, you should be tagging along with the climbers at levels above you. That's how you get great. Of course, don't forget to enjoy the moment too.

August 25, 2010 — Ruby is an awesome language. I've come to the conclusion that I enjoy it more than Python for the simple reason that whitespace doesn't matter.

Python is a great language too, and I have more experience with it, and the whitespace thing is a silly gripe. But I've reached a peak with PHP and am looking to master something new. Ruby it is.

July 2, 2010 — A year ago I wrote a post titled The Truth about Web Design where I briefly argued that "design doesn't matter a whole lot."

My argument was: "you go to a website for the utility of it. Design is far secondary. There are plenty of prettier things to look at in the real world."

I do think the real world is a pretty place, but about design, I was completely wrong.

June 15, 2010 — I think it's interesting to ponder the value of information over it's lifetime.

Different types of data become outdated at different rates. A street map is probably mostly relevant 10 years later, while a 10 year old weather forecast is much less valuable.

Phone numbers probably last about 5 years nowadays. Email addresses could end up lasting decades. News is often largely irrelevant after a day. For a coupon site I worked on, the average life of a coupon seemed to be about 2 weeks.

If your data has a long half life, then you have time to build it up. Wikipedia articles are still valuable years later.

What information holds value the longest? What are the "twinkies" of the data world?

Books, it seems. We don't regularly read old weather forecasts, census rolls, or newspapers, but we definitely still read great books, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Mill.

Facts and numbers have a high churn rate, but stories and knowledge last a lot longer.

March 17, 2010 — If you automate a process which you repeat Y times, that takes X minutes, what would your payoff be?

Payoff = XY minutes saved, right?

Surprisingly I've found that is almost never the case. Instead, the benefits are almost always greater than XY. In some cases, much greater. The benefits of automating a process are greater than the sum of the process' parts.

Actual Payoff = XY minutes saved + E

What is E? It's the extra something you get from not having to waste time and energy on XY.

March 16, 2010 — I wrote a simple php program called phpcodestat that computes some simple statistics for any given directory.

March 8, 2010 — If a post on HackerNews gets more points, it gets more visits.

But how much more? That's what Murkin wanted to know.

I've submitted over 10 articles from this site to HackerNews and I pulled the data from my top 5 posts (in terms of visits referred by HackerNews) from Google Analytics.

Here's how it looks if you plot visits by karma score:

January 15, 2010 — In computer programming, one of the most oft-repeated mottos is DRY: "Don't Repeat Yourself."

The downside of DRY's popularity is that programmers might start applying the principle to conversations with other humans.

This fails because computers and people are polar opposites.

With computers, you get zero benefit if you repeat yourself. With people, you get zero benefit if you don't repeat yourself!

December 20, 2009 — Programming, ultimately, is about solving problems. Often I make the mistake of judging a programmer's work by the elegance of the code. Although the solution is important, what's even more important is the problem being solved.

Problems are not all created equal, so while programming you should occasionally ask yourself, "is this problem worth solving?"

December 15, 2009 — The best Search Engine Optimization(SEO) system I've come across comes from Dennis Goedegebuure, SEO manager at eBay. Dennis' system is called LUMPS. It makes SEO dead simple.

Just remember LUMPS:

• Links
• Uurls
• Metadata
• Page Content
• Sitemaps

December 13, 2009 — Do you "flip the bozo bit" on people?

If you don't know what that means, you probably do it unknowingly!

December 11, 2009 — Jason Fried from 37signals gave a great talk at startup school last month. At one point he said "software has no edges." He took a normal, everyday bottle of water and pointed out 3 features:

• 1. The bottle held the water.
• 2. The lightweight plastic made it easy to carry, and you can tell how full it was by picking it up.
• 3. The clear bottle let you see how much was left and what was in it.

If you added a funnel to help pour the water, that might be useful in 5% of cases, but it would look a little funny. Then imagine you attach a paper towel to each funnel for when you spill. Your simple water bottle is now a monstrosity.

The clear edges of physical products make it much harder for feature creep to happen. But in software feature creep happens, and happens a lot.

December 8, 2009 — Finding experienced mentors and peers might be the most important thing you can do if you want to become a great programmer. They will tell you what books to read, explain the pros and cons of different languages, demystify anything that seems to you like "magic", help you when you get in a jam, work alongside you to produce great things people want, and challenge you to reach new heights.

December 4, 2009 — Do you want to become a great coder? Do you have a passion for computers but not a thorough understanding of them? If so, this post is for you.

April 14, 2009 — Here’s what I’m going to assume: craigslist, Google, and eBay do not have very pretty designs. How can a website be so successful if the design isn’t pretty? My position is that because design doesn’t matter a whole lot.

while ($brecks_programming_skills < ‘great’) { write_learning_how_to_program_series(); }

August 28, 2007 — I thought today I’d write my first post on programming. I have always been very passionate about computers, but to be honest my programming skills are embarrassingly weak. Mainly it’s because I haven’t spent any time developing them. Although I wrote my first webpage in 1996, it wasn’t until 2002 at Duke that I wrote my first computer program.