#bootstrapping — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bootstrapping, aggregated by home.social.
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J'aurais pu prendre du financement. J'ai dit non.
Pas parce que c'est héroïque, mais parce que j'ai compris la mécanique : un investisseur dans une business de confidentialité, ça pousse à monétiser les données. Pas par malice, c'est le design du modèle.
Alors on reste bootstrappés, nos utilisateurs sont nos clients, pas notre produit.
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J'aurais pu prendre du financement. J'ai dit non.
Pas parce que c'est héroïque, mais parce que j'ai compris la mécanique : un investisseur dans une business de confidentialité, ça pousse à monétiser les données. Pas par malice, c'est le design du modèle.
Alors on reste bootstrappés, nos utilisateurs sont nos clients, pas notre produit.
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I could have raised money. I said no.
Not because I'm a martyr. Because I understand the mechanics: an investor in a privacy business creates structural pressure toward monetizing data. Not out of malice. By design of the model.
So we stay bootstrapped. Our users are our clients, not our product.
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I could have raised money. I said no.
Not because I'm a martyr. Because I understand the mechanics: an investor in a privacy business creates structural pressure toward monetizing data. Not out of malice. By design of the model.
So we stay bootstrapped. Our users are our clients, not our product.
-
I could have raised money. I said no.
Not because I'm a martyr. Because I understand the mechanics: an investor in a privacy business creates structural pressure toward monetizing data. Not out of malice. By design of the model.
So we stay bootstrapped. Our users are our clients, not our product.
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This time I managed to make the video short enough for other platforms (but in turn it seems very rushed :/). But: Presenting the output and a mini-overview of the stages to get there of Morsel, our prototype to find problems in technical documentation :).
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This time I managed to make the video short enough for other platforms (but in turn it seems very rushed :/). But: Presenting the output and a mini-overview of the stages to get there of Morsel, our prototype to find problems in technical documentation :).
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This time I managed to make the video short enough for other platforms (but in turn it seems very rushed :/). But: Presenting the output and a mini-overview of the stages to get there of Morsel, our prototype to find problems in technical documentation :).
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This time I managed to make the video short enough for other platforms (but in turn it seems very rushed :/). But: Presenting the output and a mini-overview of the stages to get there of Morsel, our prototype to find problems in technical documentation :).
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Many programming languages were originally written or are even still partially written in C. Rust was originally written in OCaml.
Are there any languages that were originally written in Ada?
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Many programming languages were originally written or are even still partially written in C. Rust was originally written in OCaml.
Are there any languages that were originally written in Ada?
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Many programming languages were originally written or are even still partially written in C. Rust was originally written in OCaml.
Are there any languages that were originally written in Ada?
-
Many programming languages were originally written or are even still partially written in C. Rust was originally written in OCaml.
Are there any languages that were originally written in Ada?
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Many programming languages were originally written or are even still partially written in C. Rust was originally written in OCaml.
Are there any languages that were originally written in Ada?
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AI is reducing startup overhead at an unprecedented scale. Solo founders now have access to tools that automate coding, design, customer support, and marketing workflows. In 2026, efficiency is shifting from team size to tool leverage. Will solo-led AI-native startups outperform traditional venture-backed teams? #Solopreneur #StartupFounder #AItools #Bootstrapping #Entrepreneurship
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Steady Hand EEPROM Programmer
https://piefed.world/c/electronics/p/1038881/steady-hand-eeprom-programmer
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Steady Hand EEPROM Programmer
After about 6 months, my project is finally complete. It’s the first significant circuit that I’ve designed myself, rather than just implementing someone else’s design:
https://codeberg.org/interrupt_tv/steadyhand
Steady Hand is a digital circuit for programming EEPROMs by hand. It’s inspired by this video by Ben Eater, where he creates a circuit for programming an EEPROM using DIP switches and jumper wires. Steady Hand is much more ergonomic than his design, though it is somewhat more complex.
While Ben Eater provides the “how” inspiration, the “why” inspiration comes from Jeremiah Orians’ stage0 project, and the general concept of bootstrapping: creating a computer software environment from nothing. When building a homebrew computer, one would typically use a significantly more complex modern computer to write the homebrew computer’s software to an EEPROM. I created Steady Hand as a first step towards resolving this problem.
After I’d wired everything up, I was a little afraid something would melt when I plugged it in. While the schematic is separated into smaller modules, the breadboard layout ended up being pretty monolithic. I didn’t do any testing as I was assembling it, so it seemed likely there would be a mistake somewhere. No magic smoke escaped though, and it mostly worked on the first try. There were a few bugs:
The address display was connected backwards, with the most significant digit on the right instead of the left. Easy enough to fix, but the relevant wires were no longer the right lengths to neatly reach their connection points. This trend continued as I had to do further circuit surgeries, leaving things messier than I’d like.
The auto-skip function would cycle endlessly if the byte value to skip matched what was in the write registers. The write registers’ output lines are connected to the EEPROM’s I/O lines in order to be able to write to it. The comparator is also connected to these so that it can compare the EEPROM’s output to the skip value. When it’s time for the multiplexed display to show one of the write nibbles, the EEPROM’s output is disabled and the write registers’ output enabled. This meant that the comparator would now be comparing with the write value instead of the value read from the EEPROM, and would give the signal to skip to the next address.
Disabling the comparator when it’s getting invalid input would have required some additional logic, and at the time I didn’t have any extra gates available. I solved this by using one of the display digit enable lines as the auto-skip function’s clock signal, instead of having it hooked directly to the clock. This ensured that the rising edge would only occur when the comparator had a valid input.
After writing a byte or when auto-skipping past a large number of addresses, the EEPROM would occasionally output
FFinstead of the byte that was actually stored at that address. It wouldn’t do this with any kind of consistency, but theFFwould persist until the address was changed. I thought this was a power issue, but no combination of decoupling capacitors or pull-up resistors would make it go away. After wrestling with it for a long time, I eventually concluded that the AT28C256 just doesn’t like being always enabled. Once I added proper logic to control both the output enable and chip enable lines, the problem went away.
Since I needed at least one more logic IC to solve that last bug, I decided to add a 74HC7266 quad XNOR IC. This allowed me to add a search function alongside the auto-skip function, by just using an XNOR gate to invert the comparator’s output.
I used dupont cables to group related signal lines together, but I’m not sure how I feel about them now. I thought that they’d result in a cleaner layout than if I’d used several additional layers of solid core wire, but I still ended up with a rat’s nest. That was likely inevitable with how densely packed the components are. If I were to redo everything, I’d probably spread them out onto more boards, group them into individual modules, and allow for more redundancy in the glue logic.
Still, I’m happy with how the project turned out overall, and that I can now move onto the next one.
-
Steady Hand EEPROM Programmer
https://piefed.world/c/electronics/p/1038881/steady-hand-eeprom-programmer
-
Steady Hand EEPROM Programmer
After about 6 months, my project is finally complete. It’s the first significant circuit that I’ve designed myself, rather than just implementing someone else’s design:
https://codeberg.org/interrupt_tv/steadyhand
Steady Hand is a digital circuit for programming EEPROMs by hand. It’s inspired by this video by Ben Eater, where he creates a circuit for programming an EEPROM using DIP switches and jumper wires. Steady Hand is much more ergonomic than his design, though it is somewhat more complex.
While Ben Eater provides the “how” inspiration, the “why” inspiration comes from Jeremiah Orians’ stage0 project, and the general concept of bootstrapping: creating a computer software environment from nothing. When building a homebrew computer, one would typically use a significantly more complex modern computer to write the homebrew computer’s software to an EEPROM. I created Steady Hand as a first step towards resolving this problem.
After I’d wired everything up, I was a little afraid something would melt when I plugged it in. While the schematic is separated into smaller modules, the breadboard layout ended up being pretty monolithic. I didn’t do any testing as I was assembling it, so it seemed likely there would be a mistake somewhere. No magic smoke escaped though, and it mostly worked on the first try. There were a few bugs:
The address display was connected backwards, with the most significant digit on the right instead of the left. Easy enough to fix, but the relevant wires were no longer the right lengths to neatly reach their connection points. This trend continued as I had to do further circuit surgeries, leaving things messier than I’d like.
The auto-skip function would cycle endlessly if the byte value to skip matched what was in the write registers. The write registers’ output lines are connected to the EEPROM’s I/O lines in order to be able to write to it. The comparator is also connected to these so that it can compare the EEPROM’s output to the skip value. When it’s time for the multiplexed display to show one of the write nibbles, the EEPROM’s output is disabled and the write registers’ output enabled. This meant that the comparator would now be comparing with the write value instead of the value read from the EEPROM, and would give the signal to skip to the next address.
Disabling the comparator when it’s getting invalid input would have required some additional logic, and at the time I didn’t have any extra gates available. I solved this by using one of the display digit enable lines as the auto-skip function’s clock signal, instead of having it hooked directly to the clock. This ensured that the rising edge would only occur when the comparator had a valid input.
After writing a byte or when auto-skipping past a large number of addresses, the EEPROM would occasionally output
FFinstead of the byte that was actually stored at that address. It wouldn’t do this with any kind of consistency, but theFFwould persist until the address was changed. I thought this was a power issue, but no combination of decoupling capacitors or pull-up resistors would make it go away. After wrestling with it for a long time, I eventually concluded that the AT28C256 just doesn’t like being always enabled. Once I added proper logic to control both the output enable and chip enable lines, the problem went away.
Since I needed at least one more logic IC to solve that last bug, I decided to add a 74HC7266 quad XNOR IC. This allowed me to add a search function alongside the auto-skip function, by just using an XNOR gate to invert the comparator’s output.
I used dupont cables to group related signal lines together, but I’m not sure how I feel about them now. I thought that they’d result in a cleaner layout than if I’d used several additional layers of solid core wire, but I still ended up with a rat’s nest. That was likely inevitable with how densely packed the components are. If I were to redo everything, I’d probably spread them out onto more boards, group them into individual modules, and allow for more redundancy in the glue logic.
Still, I’m happy with how the project turned out overall, and that I can now move onto the next one.
-
Steady Hand EEPROM Programmer
https://piefed.world/c/electronics/p/1038881/steady-hand-eeprom-programmer
-
Are "loooong" videos about building digital products something that has a place on Mastodon? Let us find out and shout into the void 😅. #bootstrapping #startups
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Are "loooong" videos about building digital products something that has a place on Mastodon? Let us find out and shout into the void 😅. #bootstrapping #startups
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Are "loooong" videos about building digital products something that has a place on Mastodon? Let us find out and shout into the void 😅. #bootstrapping #startups
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Are "loooong" videos about building digital products something that has a place on Mastodon? Let us find out and shout into the void 😅. #bootstrapping #startups
-
Are "loooong" videos about building digital products something that has a place on Mastodon? Let us find out and shout into the void 😅. #bootstrapping #startups
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“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
###
As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
#bootstrapping #conceptualModels #culture #Godel #HermannRorschach #history #interpretation #KurtGodel #mentalModels #Physics #projection #RorschachTest #Science #stringTheory #theoryOfEverything -
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
###
As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
#bootstrapping #conceptualModels #culture #Godel #HermannRorschach #history #interpretation #KurtGodel #mentalModels #Physics #projection #RorschachTest #Science #stringTheory #theoryOfEverything -
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
###
As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
#bootstrapping #conceptualModels #culture #Godel #HermannRorschach #history #interpretation #KurtGodel #mentalModels #Physics #projection #RorschachTest #Science #stringTheory #theoryOfEverything -
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
###
As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
#bootstrapping #conceptualModels #culture #Godel #HermannRorschach #history #interpretation #KurtGodel #mentalModels #Physics #projection #RorschachTest #Science #stringTheory #theoryOfEverything -
“For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the empire of reason.”*…
A “theory of everything” (a Grand Unified Theory on steriods)– a (still hypothetical) coherent theoretical framework of physics containing and explaining all physical principles– is the holy grail of physicists. Natalie Wolchover checks in on the most recent front-runner in the hunt…
Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder said on her popular YouTube channel in 2024.
String theory is a “failure,” the mathematical physicist and blogger Peter Woit often says. His complaint is not that string theory is wrong — it’s that it’s “not even wrong,” as he titled a 2006 book. The theory says that, on scales of billionths of trillionths of trillionths of a centimeter, extra curled-up spatial dimensions reveal themselves and particles resolve into extended objects — strands and loops of energy — rather than points. But this alleged substructure is too small to detect, probably ever. The prediction is untestable.
A further problem is that uncountably many different configurations of dimensions and strings are permitted at those tiny scales; the theory can give rise to a limitless variety of universes. Amid this vast landscape of solutions, no one can hope to find a precise microscopic configuration that undergirds our particular macroscopic world.
These issues are profound indeed. Yet in my experience, the typical high-energy theorist in a prestigious university physics department still thinks string theory has a good chance of being correct, at least in part. The field has become siloed between those who deem it worth studying and those who don’t.
Recently, a new angle of attack has opened up. An approach called bootstrapping has allowed physicists to calculate that, under various starting assumptions about the universe, a key equation from string theory naturally follows. For some experts, these findings support the notion of “string uniqueness,” the idea that it is the only mathematically consistent quantum description of gravity and everything else.
Responding to one bootstrap paper on her YouTube channel, mere weeks after the “undead” comment, Hossenfelder said it was “string theorists do[ing] something sensible for once.” She added, “I’d say this paper strengthens the argument for string theory.”
Not everyone agrees, but the findings are reviving an important question. “This question of ‘Does string theory describe the world?’ has just been so taboo,” said Cliff Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the paper discussed by Hossenfelder. Now, “people are actually thinking about it for the first time in decades.”
Getting wind of this work, I wanted to drill down on the logic and examine how the string hypothesis is faring these days…
And so she does: “Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?” from @nattyover.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Compare/contrast with: “Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals.”
* Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
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As we grapple with Godel, we might spare a thought for Hermann Rorschach; he died on this date in 1922. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
Perhaps his insight that we humans tend “to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli” can inform our understanding of physicists trying to construct mental/conceptual models of our reality, which they’ve been doing for a very long time, and of the limitations of that quest.
#bootstrapping #conceptualModels #culture #Godel #HermannRorschach #history #interpretation #KurtGodel #mentalModels #Physics #projection #RorschachTest #Science #stringTheory #theoryOfEverything -
SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336/1/sbcl.pdf
#HackerNews #SBCL #CommonLisp #Bootstrapping #LispProgramming #PDF
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SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336/1/sbcl.pdf
#HackerNews #SBCL #CommonLisp #Bootstrapping #LispProgramming #PDF
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SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336/1/sbcl.pdf
#HackerNews #SBCL #CommonLisp #Bootstrapping #LispProgramming #PDF
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SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336/1/sbcl.pdf
#HackerNews #SBCL #CommonLisp #Bootstrapping #LispProgramming #PDF
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SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336/1/sbcl.pdf
#HackerNews #SBCL #CommonLisp #Bootstrapping #LispProgramming #PDF
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Feeling lonely, exhausted, and stuck relying on someone actually reading and getting the full picture.
#Startups #Entrepreneur #FounderLife #StartupLife #Burnout #EntrepreneurBurnout #VC #Solopreneur #MentalHealth #RealTalk #GlobalSouth #Bootstrapping #CreatorEconomy
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Feeling lonely, exhausted, and stuck relying on someone actually reading and getting the full picture.
#Startups #Entrepreneur #FounderLife #StartupLife #Burnout #EntrepreneurBurnout #VC #Solopreneur #MentalHealth #RealTalk #GlobalSouth #Bootstrapping #CreatorEconomy
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Feeling lonely, exhausted, and stuck relying on someone actually reading and getting the full picture.
#Startups #Entrepreneur #FounderLife #StartupLife #Burnout #EntrepreneurBurnout #VC #Solopreneur #MentalHealth #RealTalk #GlobalSouth #Bootstrapping #CreatorEconomy
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Feeling lonely, exhausted, and stuck relying on someone actually reading and getting the full picture.
#Startups #Entrepreneur #FounderLife #StartupLife #Burnout #EntrepreneurBurnout #VC #Solopreneur #MentalHealth #RealTalk #GlobalSouth #Bootstrapping #CreatorEconomy
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Feeling lonely, exhausted, and stuck relying on someone actually reading and getting the full picture.
#Startups #Entrepreneur #FounderLife #StartupLife #Burnout #EntrepreneurBurnout #VC #Solopreneur #MentalHealth #RealTalk #GlobalSouth #Bootstrapping #CreatorEconomy
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A discovery of these #Guix Days, thanks to @janneke, is Germ:
https://ngyro.com/blog/germ-as-a-c-compiler.htmlThis blog post is the #bootstrapping equivalent of “BTW I wrote an operating system last week-end.”
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A discovery of these #Guix Days, thanks to @janneke, is Germ:
https://ngyro.com/blog/germ-as-a-c-compiler.htmlThis blog post is the #bootstrapping equivalent of “BTW I wrote an operating system last week-end.”
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A discovery of these #Guix Days, thanks to @janneke, is Germ:
https://ngyro.com/blog/germ-as-a-c-compiler.htmlThis blog post is the #bootstrapping equivalent of “BTW I wrote an operating system last week-end.”
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A discovery of these #Guix Days, thanks to @janneke, is Germ:
https://ngyro.com/blog/germ-as-a-c-compiler.htmlThis blog post is the #bootstrapping equivalent of “BTW I wrote an operating system last week-end.”
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A discovery of these #Guix Days, thanks to @janneke, is Germ:
https://ngyro.com/blog/germ-as-a-c-compiler.htmlThis blog post is the #bootstrapping equivalent of “BTW I wrote an operating system last week-end.”
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Nhà sáng lập Đức ơi, bạn có muốn chia sẻ hành trình khởi nghiệp của mình trên podcast không? Mình đang sản xuất chuỗi phỏng vấn với các founder tự lực (bootstrapped) về sản phẩm phần mềm sinh lời và những bài học thực tế. Nếu bạn đang vận hành một sản phẩm SaaS thành công và muốn trò chuyện thân mật, đừng ngần ngại nhắn mình! Founder ngoài Đức cũng rất được chào đón. #Founder #SaaS #Startups #Podcast #KhởiNghiệp #SaaS #Bootstrapping
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1qt3e6t/german_founders
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#SaaS #B2BSaaS #Startup #DoanhThu #HuyĐộngVốn
Sau 14 tháng, startup B2B SaaS trong lĩnh vực xây dựng đạt 272k AUD ARR, 35 khách hàng, ACV $7,700, NRR cao, lợi nhuận từ phí thiết lập & IoT. Đang cân nhắc huy động vốn hay tiếp tục tăng tốc lên 1M ARR. Câu hỏi: Nên gọi vốn bây giờ hay chờ thêm bằng chứng tăng trưởng ACV & tốc độ bán hàng?
#KinhDoanh #CôngNghệ #KhởiNghiệp #SaaS #Bootstrappinghttps://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1qspm52/272k_arr_after_14_months_in_b2b_saas_what_are/
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Mô hình SaaS đa ngành (Horizontal SaaS) liệu có còn đất sống cho các founder tự thân (bootstrapped)?
Nhiều ý kiến cho rằng thị trường này đang bão hòa, chi phí quảng cáo và SEO quá đắt đỏ để cạnh tranh. Trong khi đó, các mô hình SaaS ngách (Vertical SaaS) tập trung vào một lĩnh vực cụ thể (luật, bất động sản, gym) hoặc sản phẩm thuần AI lại đang lên ngôi. Để vượt ngưỡng $50k MRR, liệu đã đến lúc phải từ bỏ sự đa năng để tập trung vào thị trường ngách?
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Xây dựng SaaS phụ để tài trợ cho SaaS chính có phải là ý tưởng hay? Bootstrapping thông minh hay trì hoãn? #SaaS #Bootstrapping #Solopreneur #.Startup #KhởiNghiệp #PhátTriểnSảnPhẩm
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1qs5fg4/is_it_normal_to_build_a_side_saas_just_to_fund/
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The 2026 Entrepreneurship Breakthrough: AI-Driven Bootstrapping. 🚀
We've moved beyond "lean" into "accelerated." Solo founders are now leveraging AI agent networks to act as their entire C-suite, allowing for rapid validation and "systems-driven" scaling without traditional VC dependency. The barrier to entry has vanished, but the speed of execution has become the ultimate differentiator.
#Entrepreneurship #AI #Bootstrapping #Startup2026 #Innovation