Dataspace 2023

Happy New Year 2023! Let’s try this blogging thing again. Is WordPress usable yet? First off, been reading this article here: https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445 from this 2021 Quora post: https://www.quora.com/Should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers and the Hacker News discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34304655 It’s both surprisingly and dismayingly difficult to get people — especially computerists — to criticize the web and the web…

The Dataspace Vision, 2021

The idea that I’ve given the name “Dataspace” has been hovering around my head since the 1980s, but came back in force around 2006 when I was first playing with the interactive fiction language Inform 7. I7 is… a complicated language, which I have complicated feelings about, but it at least tries to do a…

Fexl

A little language called Fexl (Function EXpression Language) is doing some interesting things that I like. It’s basically just a very thinly syntax sugared lambda calculus, but some of those sugar choices seem quite important. For example it has a ; (semicolon, ‘pivot’) syntactic operator that lets you drop a final enclosing parenthensis from an…

Minimalist Semantic Web

This is a Mastodon tootstorm ( Chartodon diagram here) which, on request, I’ve turned (partially) into a blog post. I think perhaps another name for the idea I’ve been chasing for years is “minimalist semantic web“. I like the Semantic Web idea but I want a *tiny* concretization of it. General enough that it could…

Reactivation

Around June 2017, I shut down this scratchpad blog to focus on my homepage, rebooting my Dataspace musings there in a more focused format, intending to only post firm results rather than speculation. That hasn’t really achieved what I’d hoped. I’ve got as far as describing the “term-expression” model, and an array representation (AR4) for…

Logical Relations

I find myself still turning back to logic as a guide to the meaning of set-relation structures. Starting with term-expressions: () asserts empty truth or completeness; it usually means the end of a statement (A . B) might represent a logical statement, with A the predicate and B the subject, but this interpretation is too context-specific.…

Unifying NIL and NULL

I think I can unify the two nulls in T-expressions: NIL () and the more dubious NULL (.), which is a big win. However this is only the case if I abandon the idea of T-expressions being unions, and move back one step to a more direct representation of sets and relations. Thaf’s perhaps a…

Mail As Publish-Subscribe

The general unifying vision I keep angling toward is a distributed data publish-subscribe-compute network roughly like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. (With the strong caveat that I’m very concerned about the privacy danger of distributed computation: any practical distributed-computation fabric must have the ability to restrict computation to trusted locales in that network). For the primitive data…

Everything In Language Is A Noun

An odd little idea which may or may not have some merit: What happens if we think of every kind of natural language utterance and its component parts of speech as, essentially, a noun? This is basically taking the object-oriented view of information, and pushing it to see how far it will go. After all,…

Curry’s Paradox, again

Curry’s Paradox is a fun toy. In short: using the standard deductive rules of logic – and the crucial ability to name ‘this sentence’ as a logical element – you can deduce any X from ‘if this sentence implies X, then X’. This is obviously wrong and unhelpful. But what part of standard logic does…