It depends on the format of the text, the parser for that format, the language of the parser, and many other factors. Such a broad affirmative statement that text files are inefficient is tenuous at best.
Well, at least you are relatable in ways that Cloudflare generally cannot be. Your recent post on the Minitel conversion is just one example [0].
There is one key thing to keep in mind for those advancing uncharitable critiques of JGC and Cloudflare. It is entirely plausible that JGC is well-intentioned. Yet, Cloudflare has had to hire quite a few people recently.
There may not necessarily be a culture fit. Some new marketing hires may have thought that this dark pattern was fair game. And JGC can strongly disagree without really being aware of this dark pattern. Those two things can hold at the same time.
It looks a bit like a vague meandering piece trying to drum up interest for their investment syndicate. The user that submitted this piece seems to be leading a syndicate based on Africa with the author [0].
Investment in Africa would be better served by listening more to underprivileged Africans that have not had access to the same opportunities and capital. Microfinance to support this demographic would be more effective and impactful than investing in an angel syndicate supported by these sort of blog posts.
Perhaps exploring solutions can yield better outcomes if exploring with the ones that will benefit from those solutions. For example, if you are trying to develop agriculture solutions for Africa, a blog post promoted on HN and Angel is unlikely to be read by a subsistence farmer in Africa.
There is a cottage industry of people claiming to do projects to help Africa. With marketing via blog posts geared towards those with access to capital, these projects can be funded. And since it is about Africa, there is less scrutiny about how effective it really is. Superficial facile accolades along with wining and dining at global events can further obfuscate this reality.
Not translatable at the moment. Military command is obviously behind a closed curtain. Any public mapping efforts may help the enemy as much as Ukrainians, so so far they've been semi-private — e.g. official one-way sites / messenger bots to report enemy sightings / positions.
Paul does mention talking as an alternative to writing though. It is not that talking is not interesting to him. Writing is just a more efficient process.
For example, when editing video, there is a lot of friction due to the software you are using. Writing can have a lot less friction. You can literally just take a pen and paper avoiding a computer altogether.
That being said, one point Paul makes, is that finding a conversation partner that is willing to patiently listen to you as you explain ideas may be challenging. Filming a video and putting it out there can make it less challenging. And you can get some constructive feedback from many individuals. Although, I am not sure to what extent Youtube is the right medium for this exercise.
What is the neuroscience research upon which the techniques are based? Do you have any paper or book references? It could be insightful for a visitor to the site to be given more context.
Hey, I don't have any specific papers. And I think neuroscience makes it sound fancier than it maybe is in reality. But the primary concepts are spaced-repetition, elaborative encoding, and active recall. And the main focus is really on reducing friction with putting these practices into play.
I think the reality of neuroscience and behavioral research at this point in time is that it's just really difficult to translate neuro -> behavior and thought processes. There are some decently well researched learning methods, such as spaced repetition and enhancing depth of knowledge but we don't have a totally clear picture on why these things work well.
There are suspicions of course, such as how deeper knowledge of a subject is able to integrate the information into more parts of the network, but afaik the actual biochemical mechanisms and how those translate into network dynamics and recall for a lot of memory and learning functions are still fairly unknown.
If anyone knows of some solid studies (preferably using humans) I would be more than happy to read them, learning and memory is a fascinating area of neuroscience.
Hopefully, with relatively new equipment that allows more precise realtime brain sensing, we should have more insightful research in the years to come.[0] But the issue of defining learning itself will remain thorny.
