Paul Lutus

The problem with traditional Websites is that search engines don't index them in a way that attracts visitors. I know this because my archaic, out-of-date, 34-year-old static-page Website https://arachnoid.com/ has no advertising or other features that might cause it to be given priority by a search engine. My occasional use of JavaScript only supports technical animations, specialized calculators and real-time LaTeX rendering, not dynamic page generation or dark patterns. From a modern perspective, my Website is actually a museum. The proof? While I once directed Website visitors to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@lutusp), I now find myself directing YouTube viewers to my Website. Not our topic, but one reason is kids can't read: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/american-childrens-reading-s… Apropos, here's one of my favorite jokes. I visit a bookstore. On the wall is a poster: "The tragedy of illiteracy -- now available as an audiobook."

It's on his site as well in HTML and eBook form: https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html I read it years ago and still think of it from time to time. It's a great read. HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901072 His site never gets much love from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=arachnoid.com

I still have the predecessor, the N810. Keep meaning to dig it out and see what the latest Linux I could get to boot is. I'd love to have a pocketable physical querty messaging client. Debian has been booted on the N810 and Postmarket OS on the N900: https://arachnoid.com/linux/nokia/ https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)

This is so cool and I would have loved to have had this while I was still an academic for diagrams and interactively playing around with setups. For real design, of course the maths gets harder and the software get more expensive. The closest alternatives that I found before were optgeo[1] and OpticalRayTracer[2] but an inkscape plugin like this is much more useful for making diagrams for article, posters and presentation. [1] http://jeanmarie.biansan.free.fr/optgeo.html [2] https://arachnoid.com/OpticalRayTracer/

Interesting classic story of a software engineer who bought a boat... "An account of an around-the-world solo sail in a 31-foot boat, 1988-1991" https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html

Two of my favorite books about sailing are: Sailing Alone Around the World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_Alone_Around_the_World about Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail around the world alone Confessions of a Long Distance Sailor https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/ about Paul Lutus sailing around the world alone from 1988-1991 Both are interesting kind of like Maidentrip (which I haven't seen, will have to check out) - visiting different cultures, limited technical means (although Paul did have a computer, TV, VCR...).

The feedback is a worthwhile read: http://arachnoid.com/psychology/feedback1.html

Paul's cousin was my colleague a few years ago. He had so many stories to tell about him. He has a personal web site at http://arachnoid.com/ I hear he spends most of his time now sailing.

It's interesting to look back on how idealistic the early web was: http://www.arachnoid.com/freezone/ I think it's actually still the case that the best quality content on the internet isn't on commercial sites.

It's a semantic nit-pick about the definition of 'science'. He seems to have written an article about it here if you're curious: http://www.arachnoid.com/psychology/index.html Take it with a grain of salt though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194296 Either way, this argument is rather orthogonal to whether-or-not the situation is actually 'worthy' of future investigation. So it could still be useful, however the relative maturity of the field limits how accurately we can assess that.

Glad you brought him up. I learned about him reading his book about solo sailing around the world in a 31 foot boat. Good read even if you aren't interested in sailing. Free ebook here: http://www.arachnoid.com/sailbook/

I really appreciate your vocality about this, lutusp. It's important stuff, and you tell it well. http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus/index.html is a great read.

IDEs are useful for helping you match tags, see what part of your page is affected by which tags, and checking your HTML. They're also just handy as editors, e.g. they allow you to open multiple files simultaneously (e.g. your html file in one tab and your stylesheet in another.) Not that there's anything wrong with vi. I use it and an IDE. You might want to give Arachnophilia a try. It's simple, configurable, multiplatform, and does more than HTML/CSS: http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/ Amaya is prettier, and focused on web page design: http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Neither one breaths fire like the big IDEs, but both do a great job on what they do. ;)

https://arachnoid.com (Paul Lutus)

You can sprinkle into my comment stream. It's already generated mock confusion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23980312 (The thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006393 shows that GPT-3 can already pass my screening turing hurdle, one which many actual people arguing on the internet fail.) ==== stolen from https://arachnoid.com/jokes/index.html : Two academics, Albert and Bill, are sitting in a bar waiting for their friend Charlie. Albert: "Charlie thinks women don't know any math, he might be right, but I want to play a trick." Albert calls the waitress over. Albert: "Delia, my friend Charlie is going to arrive in a bit, and I want to play a trick. When he arrives, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer, 'X cubed divided by three.' Can you remember that?" Delia: "Sure, no problem, I can remember that." Charlie arrives and Albert raises his favorite topic. Albert: "I think you're wrong, I think women can learn math. Just as a test, let's ask the waitress a math question." Albert calls Delia over. Albert: "What's the integral of x squared, derived with respect to x?" Delia: "Umm, that would be ... x cubed divided by three" Delia: "... plus a constant."

The mid-ninties: It was innocent and simple, but you felt so technologically advanced to be able to publish something online. It wasn't about making millions. No one was judging your code. You used Java Applets to make dynamic menus and that was the pinnacle achievement. No one turned on Javascript. You only worried about Netscape and eventually IE, but you really didn't worry that much about either. You didn't think about domain squatting because you weren't sure how to get a domain and it really wasn't worth the cost, whatever it was. If you did, you got your name from Network Solutions or that startup, Register.com. CGI was for professionals. Perl was for scientists. You kinda checked email every couple weeks. You may have even shared an email address. You were ahead when you had a separate phone line for dial up. You were a big shot when you got DSL (from Phoenix). Your DSL was bought out every six months. It was Phoenix, then Earthlink, then... You got AOL CDs in the mail weekly. You remember gmail invites. Edit: And this was your editor: http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. -- From the movie "Fight Club", based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis Advertising is the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket. -- George Orwell Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it. -- Will Rogers There is one thing you absolutely must know about modern advertising. No matter how true any single advertisement is, modern advertising itself, taken as a whole, tells a lie - that you need the thing being advertised. It is a lie because consumer goods of real value do not need to be advertised - such goods are part of a natural market that flows "beneath" the [consumerist] marketplace, although as time passes these basic necessities represent a shrinking percentage of the total flow of goods. -- "Consumer Angst", http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/consumerangst.html* Virtually all consumer products, above a rudimentary level of complexity, have accessories and "enhancements." One can easily imagine a graph of products with the simplest (fewest accessories) on the left and the most complex (most…

I was reminded of this book today when I read some comments here about the popularity of “sailing log” manuscripts. This one is written by Paul Lutus, of Apple Writer fame. https://arachnoid.com/administration/index.html

The site is filled with cool stuff. I wanted to learn more about optical lenses and found https://arachnoid.com/blender_graphics/index.html to be very useful.

If you go through the trouble of trying one of these ancient distributions, use a mode line calculator (e.g., https://arachnoid.com/modelines/index.html ) for your XFree86.config. With that, it's straightforward to get it working on a 16:9, 16:10, or any other resolution.

This was a question I gave as a post grad TA to third year physics students. In three classes totaling 43 students exactly one got it right and he was a double major from CS. This is Latex, it renders nicely to: https://arachnoid.com/latex/?equ=%24%20%5Cfrac%7B%5Cfrac%7Ba%7D%7Bb%7D… Which is the question I posted all those many years ago.

that was a fascinating read. here is another "interview with an extraterrestrial" writing from him https://arachnoid.com/lutusp/alien.html

It has been a very long time since I even thought of this site, and the related CareWare license. I am happy to have the opportunity to bring it back into my mind! For further good feelings please see the author's Acracnophilia license. https://arachnoid.com/careware/index.html

https://arachnoid.com/latex/?equ=%0Ap(y_i%7Cy_%7B-i%7D)%3D%20%5Cint%20… for if you can't parse latex in your head

readme.md links to this and wow! https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/index.html

Indeed. Computing the exact polynomial going through all noisy points also doesn’t make sense because adding or removing a data point wildly changes the polynomial. So, you can’t claim any of your polynomials really describes your problem. Even if your data isn’t noisy and the point added lies exactly on the previous polynomial (making the problem degenerate) chances are float rounding and numerical stability of your code can have that effect (https://arachnoid.com/polysolve/#x_limits)

Those of us who've calculated our own modelines are familiar with that caution. It was part of the documentation of standard tools at the time, though I've never personally encountered a damaged display or knew of anyone else who had. Though one turns up in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33093385> A typical modeline calculator warning: It is also important to say that some seemingly reasonable modelines can damage monitors, so this method of hand-crafting monitor descriptions includes a certain amount of risk. <https://arachnoid.com/modelines/> My understanding is that monitors and/or graphics cards/drivers would reject potentially harmful configurations.

That's because there are fewer letters. In wordle, ignoring the fact that the word need to exists, you could make 5 guesses with 5 new letters each time and still not quite exhausting the letter space. With the math one, in two guesses you can figure out the digits. Also, I play wordle in the hardest mode, which forces you to always reuse known letters, which makes it a lot harder. (I also playu in a clone with an extended vocabulary here: https://www.arachnoid.com/wordgame/index.html)

> "the general public who lack those skills will still eventually lose access to the original independent Wordle." The original one, yes. Paul Lutus[1] has made "Word Game" an open source Wordle clone on his website: https://arachnoid.com/wordgame/ Mobile friendly view: https://arachnoid.com/wordgame/mobile-display.html ; Announcement thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/wordle/comments/s69nma/word_game/ . [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp