Just want to flag that, in addition to all this fun and exciting new tech for disabilities, we really do just need better basics.
As the partner of a wheelchair user, these exoskeletons are a great toy to have on the horizon – but the promise of this has been around for a long time, and while the hope of a better future is exciting, we need change on a much quicker time scale than this. (Not saying people shouldn't be working on this – it's rad that they are).
On a day-to-day level, my partner would much more benefit from:
- A better wheelchair (this will mean something different for every body – for them, someone who uses a wheelchair for chronic pain, an exoskeleton wouldn't even help – much more useful would be a wheelchair where every bump of pavement doesn't rattle your whole body).
- More accessible shops and public spaces. We don't really get to go out much – most often blockades include cracked sidewalks, friend's houses that require a step (or stairs), and inaccessible shops.
- Better safety nets for those with disabilities (it's VERY expensive to be disabled in America – consider how much more these exoskeletons will cost than already expensive wheelchairs).
tl;dr These technologies are exciting and deserve attention and energy – just keep in mind that the notion that these emerging technologies will someday wipe out all of wheelchair users' problems in one fell swoop is both false and does nothing for the many millions prevented from participating in society right now. We need better access today.
I agree. I think the problem is that most people don't see (why would they?) the problem areas.
Wheelchairs! What a pain. Try find one that answers a different need? It's impossible or super expensive. I have been pushing and pulling family members for years, across gravel, snow, rocks, stairs. Idea! Mountain bike.
I wanted to find one with mountain bike tires. Seems easy. Not at all. I finally bought a cheapo fat bike mountain bike, removed the wheels with the axles, and mounted them to a normal wheelchair. It's amazing. We go off road. Across rocks and gravel. Into creeks.
But you can't buy one.
> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art.
I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings).
For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves.
The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.
I've been studying storytelling for about five years, as a way to improve my writing. Here's what I've learned so far.
The simplest unit of storytelling consists of...
(a) A character who attempts to achieve a specific thing.
(b) A conflict standing in the way of that attempt.
(c) A conclusion to that conflict.
Together, these three things form a Simple Dramatic Unit. For example:
(a) Sally tries to swim back to shore.
(b) But two shark fins emerge from the water.
(c) She gets pulled under.
Do you notice how, even though there's nothing particularly inventive or original about the above scene, you're leaning in a little? Wondering what happens next? That's the power of the Simple Dramatic Unit.
Technically the above is a complete story, but it doesn't feel totally resolved because it doesn't have much of a punchline. We want to know what happens to Sally, and we even hope for a happy ending -- how might she get out of this situation?
As a storyteller, you continue to string together these Simple Dramatic Units til you reach the punchline of your story (also known as the "resolution").
Once you master the Simple Dramatic Unit, and tying multiple Dramatic Units together, there are numerous additional variables you can weave into your stories to improve your storytelling:
- Stakes (Sally is a mother of two children, both on the beach that day.)
- Strong Characters (Sally is a risk-taker who feels a strong command over nature. Not once in her life has she ever feared the elements.)
- Theme ("Those who don't fear nature are all the more at its mercy.")
- Tone (Her children watch the shark attack from the shore with keen interest, but without alarm.)
- Style ("The beach was placid that day, the smell of salt rendered sweet in the humid air....")
- Originality (The shark fins aren't grey, but a fluorescent pink.)
- Etc, etc.
But all those things are secondary to the Simple Dramatic Unit. Master that first. It will serve as a very solid foundation for any type of story you want to tell.
This single best book on storytelling that I've ever read is 'Invisible Ink' by Brian McDonald [1].
Of all the concepts in my comment above, the one it covers most in-depth is "theme" (the book calls it "armature," but same idea).
The main argument of the book is that storytelling is an evolved survival mechanism, and that every great story conveys a single piece of survival information (think the morals of Aesop's fables).
Every other technique discussed in the book is built atop that fundamental truth, and exists to help the storyteller prove that piece of survival information.
Wow, thank you for this detailed feedback! Some of this was on my list, but most of it wasn't even on my radar.
I've been planning to make it auto-select just the time for easy copying, but auto-copy may be better. I'm always somewhat hesitant to hijack the user's clipboard (what if they had some text copied that they needed?), but maybe it's expected enough these days that users wouldn't mind.
As someone who maintains an eCommerce WordPress site, I find writing code that deals with datetimes to be extremely onerous.
I’m always bopping between various conversion sites to debug my outputs. I wanted a simple, uncluttered page where I could do all my conversions in one place. I’m hoping https://time.lol becomes that spot.
I'd appreciate any feedback you have to offer!
Planned improvements:
- Make copying outputted dates easier
- Add a timezone picker for the input
- Add an output row that allows you to see the date in any timezone you wish
- Make the design more legible / aesthetically pleasing
Thanks! Never heard of timefhuman, but now I'll look into it.
To parse human-written dates, time.lol currently uses a combination of the JavaScript libraries Day.js [1] and Sugar [2].
If Day.js can't determine a valid date from the given input, then Sugar is invoked to try even harder :) Seems to work well so far, but indeed it falls short with complex input (e.g. "The Tuesday after July 4th").
> Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it?
Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online?
It seems like one solution to this problem would be a document that stores an editable copy locally and a revision hash in its metadata, then decides whether to serve up the local or cloud copy depending on whether the user is connected to the internet.
Sure, this could cause conflicts between online / cloud files if someone else edits the file at the same time as you, but that's true of any cloud sync service like iOS Notes.
I guess in retrospect I'm just describing Dropbox which, while it's more a container for standard files than a file format in itself, has largely the same effect.
Yes, filesystem sync protocols like rsync do it at the FS level and if you want to go deeper than the FS level, you get into the realm of operational transform and other rather complex algorithms.
A very insightful comment up thread observes that filesystem-centric computing worked for as long as collaboration was very limited. Once apps needed to move beyond that to collaboration at a finer grained level it fell apart and apps started needing databases, and in particular, databases that could link data from different users together, implying a shared privacy domain.
Was this change inevitable? The long since exiled and forgotten Hans Reiser wrote about this problem a lot back in the day (he murdered his wife and obviously his ideas lost any traction at that point). His thesis predated a lot of the concerns about privacy and central control that we see today, but briefly, he argued a part of why this was happening was that filesystem technology was not good enough because it couldn't handle very small files and because POSIX had some unnecessary limitations. Due to this lack, apps were constantly forced to invent filesystem-within-a-file formats, e.g. OLE2 and OpenDoc were both centred around this concept, SQLite obviously is one too, ZIP yes, but really most file formats can be viewed as a collection of small files within a file.
The idea was, if you upgrade filesystem tech, you can radically change how apps are written.
The problem is that operating system tech on servers and desktops has been stagnant for years. Microsoft and Apple lost interest in their primary operating systems and the open source world has never really been interested in going beyond 1970s design ideas, largely because cloning and adding small elaborations to commercial designs is the way the community stays unified. Look at the mass hysteria that followed systemd, which is one of the only upgrades to the core UNIX OS design patterns in decades. Actually making changes to the core of POSIX isn't something that's going to come out of that community. It'll probably take some company that wants to innovate on the core ideas again.
> > Finally, the file system paradigm fails with shared content; you can't save a Google Doc to disk because then how can your friends or coworkers update it?
> Just curious, does anyone know of any hybrid file formats that store information both locally and online?
I'm sure there are better ways to do it, but MS Office can, AFAICS, at least kind of do that: Documents stored in -- wossname, OneNote? SharePoint? One of those, I think -- can be edited in-place by Office Web apps, or downloaded for editing in the regular desktop apps and then saved back on-line and/or locally. If they can do that, I'm sure other apps can also do it (and probably better).
This is madness! I love it. I'd thoroughly enjoy an addition to the demo where you play back audio the mouse has captured – I think many would be interested to hear what kind of fidelity gets captured.
Exactly! The idea here is to formalize the already intuitive way many of us use plain text. Once the syntax is formalized, it can be utilized by applications. This way your data remains in a portable, non-proprietary format that can be reliably parsed - whether you choose to use notepad.exe or a Margin-specific application, you already have everything you need.
As the partner of a wheelchair user, these exoskeletons are a great toy to have on the horizon – but the promise of this has been around for a long time, and while the hope of a better future is exciting, we need change on a much quicker time scale than this. (Not saying people shouldn't be working on this – it's rad that they are).
On a day-to-day level, my partner would much more benefit from:
- A better wheelchair (this will mean something different for every body – for them, someone who uses a wheelchair for chronic pain, an exoskeleton wouldn't even help – much more useful would be a wheelchair where every bump of pavement doesn't rattle your whole body).
- More accessible shops and public spaces. We don't really get to go out much – most often blockades include cracked sidewalks, friend's houses that require a step (or stairs), and inaccessible shops.
- Better safety nets for those with disabilities (it's VERY expensive to be disabled in America – consider how much more these exoskeletons will cost than already expensive wheelchairs).
tl;dr These technologies are exciting and deserve attention and energy – just keep in mind that the notion that these emerging technologies will someday wipe out all of wheelchair users' problems in one fell swoop is both false and does nothing for the many millions prevented from participating in society right now. We need better access today.