Shlomi Fish’s Random Ideas

Objectivists can tell you only too much about the evils of public education. They are right. But being a bit proactive, I think the solution is to create a network of private schools that will compete (and eventually out-compete) with the public schools. As opposed to traditional private schools, they should aim to be affordable.

With enough schools like that, that would still offer a superior education, the need for public schools would be very much decreased and eventually completely eliminated.

I hate going to discotheque because the music is so loud and I don’t like to ruin my ears. (which happen for discotheques patrons all the time). I believe a discotheque that would make it its policy not to play music too loudly can actually make a lot of money from people like me.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said once that A serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes. Well, stand-up philosophy is based on the opposite conjecture: that philosophy is good enough to be funny or at least entertaining. Moreover, there is no reason why philosophy and comedy cannot be mixed and matched, including at the same session.

There is also the education = entertainment = conception hypothesis, ( also known as “Love / Knowledge / Creativity” and by other names ).

Also see the “Stand-up Philosopher” skit / captioned-image.

It is well known that to accommodate with today gaming “standards”, computer games became more and more pricey to produce. However, while having better graphics and special effects, they are by no means better. Hell, they are all pretty much the same.

Instead of producing one $2,000,000 game, isn’t it possible to produce 5 $400,000 with lesser graphics, audio and effects, but better playability? I think it is possible and that this course of action would be better in the long run. Think about it.

An idea for a community site for the collection of quotations.

From a conversation I had with TDDPirate on IRC, we came to the conclusion that it would be desirable to have a framework that will enable code written in a certain high level language (say Perl) to make use of code written in a different high level language (say Python) and that from every high-level language to every other high-level language.

Currently there are:

1. SWIG - enables writing one interface that will eventually generate bindings to a C library for any high-level language. However, it cannot interface a pure-Perl code into a pure-Perl code.
2. Parrot - a virtual machine for dynamic languages. Its main problem is that it requires all such languages to implement compilers for its bytecode (along with any bindings they have to C).
3. The GIMP contains a procedural database that allows registering functions in any language and calling them from any other language. However, this is limited to the GIMP and uses custom GIMP datatypes.

It may be a good idea to use YAML and/or dbus to implement Tucan.

An integrated documentation framework for UNIX-like systems.

Qantor (short for "Qantor ain't no TeX/troff - oh really!") - a post-modern typesetting system to provide a saner alternative to TeX and LaTeX (and other typesetting systems).

libeatline - a BSDLed alternative to GNU Readline, that will eventually also overcome some of its philosophical limitations, such as:

1. Use libtickit.

2. Provide a way to be embedded in GUI/etc. backends.

3. Client/server model.

4. Database backend. See (list)

Package management for Microsoft Windows. See Chocolatey.

A better Web-based email system, because even GMail is not too good..

Note that we're likely to provide paid hosting for a service of it, despite the fact our client will be free for other users to install, and for competing services to provide data.

The Yonathan Job Board - Yonathan will be a new and actually usable and fun job board for hiring freelancers. See the current documentation for more information.

Spark Lisp - a modern and usable dialect of Lisp inspired by Arc, Perl 5/6, Ruby, Smalltalk, and other languages.

Peque - short for "Personal Questing Engine" - a vertical engine for computerised adventure games that will allow building more and more sophisticated games from the same source. Part of our vision is to also set up "PQAN - the Personal Questing Archive Network" which will contain re-usable code and media for such games.

An extended version of the C preprocessor which will provide:

1. Multi-line blocks

2. inner block conditionals using if/else/etc.

3. for/while/foreach loops

4. blocks as arguments.

5. functions

6. utility built-ins

7. Objects/structs/records / dictionaries, methods, and inheritance.

I like CMake and find its scripting language usable for the kind of tasks for which I need to use it. However, a more expressive language with capabilities closer to Python 3 or Perl 5 will still likely improve the user-experience.

Note that Vincent Damewood expressed interest in implementing such a language in the future too, so you may wish to keep him in the loop.