i came across supertasks while reading “bangs crunches whimpers and shrieks” by john earman.

a supertask is an infinite sequence of tasks that occur within a finite amount of time. how do you fit an infinite number of tasks into a finite interval? assume a one second interval. perform the first  task at time 0.5 seconds, the next at time 0.75 seconds, the next at time 0.875 seconds, and so on—always dividing the remaining time in half. mathematically, you’ll end up with an infinite number of tasks in a one second interval.

zeno's paradox articulates a supertask—the task being to cover half the previous distance at each step. luckily, evidence refutes zeno's assertion that motion is an illusion.

other supertasks are not so easily analyzed. the thomson's lamp puzzle toggles a lamp on or off at each step and asks if the lamp is on or off at the end of the interval. it must be one or the other, right?

imo, a supertask feels a bit like finishing a software project. call it the generalization of the 80/20 rule.

#supertask #software

i'm happy with how typeahead now works in ktistec. it took a surprising amount of effort to get it to feel right.

#ktistec

the most useless keyboard combination in osx has got to be taking a snapshot of the taskbar

how my family rolls

i've got meetings on my calendar i just don't remember scheduling...

commits 52d849d through 8cd8f3b implement draft posts, a feature that makes it easier to use ktistec to compose longer posts. one big change in the set of changes is support for incremental edits and saves of posts, as they are being written. this change also gets us very close to federated updates to published posts—a feature that mastodon, unfortunately, only supports for polls.

#ktistec

i started reading Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes (Earman, 1995). my first revelation was that the point-like singularity caused by gravitational collapse (a black hole) is not the only possible type of space-time singularity, at least in the mathematical, if not physical, sense.

at least someone enjoys the snowstorm!

a couple interesting crystal language projects i came across recently:

• crystalizer - serialization of any crystal object
• crystal-byte-protocol - a byte protocol for crystal

the former, in particular, is an annotation free, monkey-patch free solution for quickly serializing/deserializing objects into JSON, YAML or other formats.

23 points. best game ever.