Wiki/Report of Meeting 2023-12-14

Report of Meeting 2023-12-14

Present: Art Anger, Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available below on this wiki page.

1) Ed reported that he had removed the time slider as it was taking up space and it only applied to forum posts. Skip Cave's Quora posts have been added, but there is a concern that there are verbs that are included in the solutions that are not defined. The solution may be to split the display so that the solution is shared with a wiki page that has Skip's definitions on it, possibly in an expanded text fashion.

2) Ed also identified the issues that he has had with highlighting buttons in Night shift which can vary between dark backgrounds and light backgrounds. Changing the thickness of the border may be an option because it is not affected by Night shift.

3) Ed is working on creating some navigational ways to show higher dimensional arrays. He is not looking at this problem as purely visualization because he finds anything above 6 dimensions impossible to visualize. His navigation aid is a three dimensional array of boxes that has the dimensions and types of the contents. By clicking on a box he can show the contents of that box with a breadcrumb display across the top that shows where you are in the navigation of the array. He showed an example of a 3 dimensional sliced torus although it did not seem to be displayed the way that he expected. With this view it is possible to choose any pair of axes to display the rest of the dimensions of the array. Raul related this back to his REGEX lab which is working in three dimensions and Fourier transforms which are n-rank with each dimension as a value of 2. Bob mentioned Grant Sanderson's video on quaternions which has an excellent display of 4 dimension space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EgbgTm0Bg

4) Bob mentioned that Chris Burke had contacted him again to express concern about the play-doh look of the wiki and the way that it might represent Jsoftware inappropriately to some of its clients. The more cartoonish navigation is actually independent of the traditional guides. Bob felt that the Jsoftware site could link to the guide navigation https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page while other links outside of Jsoftware could link to the cartoonish look https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home. Raul wondered if the graphics could be generated from J code and that might be more acceptable. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Studio/Gallery A further clarification may need to be determined as to the role of the wiki with respect to Jsoftware. This resulted in a discussion about the changes that had been made to some of the Jsoftware content that had been brought into the wiki. Ed felt there might need to be a discussion that clarified the lines of demarcation between J software and the wiki. Bob felt that a more corporate approach would be something closer to the Announcements page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Announcements_A , but this might not be as attractive to new users. The question that remains is how we can best serve the audiences that we have in mind, knowing that it may not be possible to serve all audiences equally.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is December 28, 2023.

Transcript

Why don't I, why don't I show you what I've got?

It's not terribly complicated.

Um.

So what all, uh, I took out the time slider.

Yep.

Because I don't think anyone was.

Ro used it, use it in the sense that he always maximized it to as much time as possible.

And actually, I think that was me.

I did that.

Was that you?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I suspect that was pretty common, and it only worked for quorum posts in any case.

So sort of pointless.

I think if it could have filtered out, you know, J 8.

6 content from the wiki, that might have been more interesting, but it couldn't do that.

And I also added Quora and Quora posts.

I don't know if I showed you two fingers scrolling, but it does two fingers scrolling.

Yeah.

I like that, especially the way the, the pages move across as you scroll.

I think that's really effective.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So here's the deal with Quora.

So Quora posts come up in baby blue.

I hope Skip isn't offended.

And the problem with Quora posts is right here, I highlighted it.

Here's a verb called perm, which does permutations, four taken, I don't know what that is, yeah, six taken four at a time, I guess is probably the way to read that.

And it's not expanded anywhere in this post.

And that is of concern to me as a, as someone assessing the utility of the post.

Yes.

And this is common.

He's got half a dozen or so verbs that he uses.

Each is one, he's got a histogram verb that he uses, there are a couple of others.

And that's great.

I think defining verbs is a beautiful thing.

But I would have expected these to be posts that could stand on their own individually.

And it doesn't look to me like that's the case.

So that stopped me for a little while.

And my feeling now is that what we need to do somehow is to show the expansions of the verbs, the definitions of the verbs, whenever we show one of Skip's Quora posts, and actually all the Quora posts are Skip posts, I don't have any others.

And I'm not sure how to do that, but I thought I'd throw it open for brilliant discussion.

Well, looking at it, perm is not normally defined in a J session.

But if you load stats, it is.

That's great.

But how does that help me as I try to read this solution?

Yeah, no, your point's still the same.

In the case of each though, each actually is, as soon as you've got, if you're running J, each is defined.

It always is.

It's a standard library thing.

Same problem.

Yeah, yeah.

I would submit.

Yeah.

And I guess he's not really in a position that he can go in and edit them, is he?

Or can he?

For 2023 alone, he has 973 posts.

Yeah.

And I guess he's.

.

.

And he's been at this since 2017.

And I guess he's relying on the fact that people who are following Quora and his answers will have seen perm defined at some point?

I don't know.

I don't have an intuition about that, Bob, I couldn't say.

Yeah.

Well, in terms of the wiki, not so much your viewer, but in terms of the wiki, if we did a wiki page of his Quora posts, we could on the top of the page, define those particular verbs.

Absolutely.

And then at least you would know they were defined.

And if you saw them, even if you didn't recognize one when you saw it, it should, when you went back to the main page, you should be able to see what the definition is there.

Yeah.

Although having to navigate to find the definition of a verb strikes me as more work than one ought to have to go to.

But as you say, if there's 900 for 2023 alone.

Yeah.

And they're all using that.

That I cannot say.

I don't know that they all use his redefined verbs, but I think almost everyone I happened to look at does.

I can imagine if there's anything involving permutations, my guess is he's leaning on that.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right.

Yeah.

I had a thought, let me run it by you.

What I could do, and I hesitate to count the number of ways I hate this, but what I could do is split the web view horizontally.

Whenever there's a Quora post.

And have a second view in the bottom half.

So basically the web view would only take up the top half of what it currently occupies.

Yeah.

And the bottom half would just be a display of skips verb definitions.

How would that work for real estate, say on a laptop is I guess it's vertically, it's not going to be as big an issue.

Right.

Yeah, I mean the quora question at quora posts tend to be pretty brief vertically speaking.

Yeah.

So, So, I don't think you lose too much in that respect.

I think the entire set of verb definitions could fit in the bottom half, unless you were on a tablet which we don't support anyway.

So that's not really a problem.

Yeah.

I'm looking at the definition for perm.

It's defined explicitly.

It is a it's a for loop basically, but it is it's dyadic.

So it's five lines, six lines, including lines, I'm not sure what definition of perm he's using.

Yeah, he sent me some definitions, but they don't seem to include the definition of perm.

I don't remember him being a big proponent of tacit.

So, I would think he's probably using the, the, the explicit one.

Yeah, I think you're probably, that's probably right.

And I mean I can go ahead.

I was gonna say in the case of perm.

It makes sense it would be dyadic right.

It absolutely does.

Yeah.

So, I mean I can make the bottom view, another web view, and just shove a bunch of HTML explicit, shove a bunch of hard coded HTML into it.

So it would be scrollable.

So if his functions take up more space than is available in the physical display that doesn't need to be a problem.

Yeah, no, I think that's actually, I think that's not a bad solution at all.

The only other ones.

I think obviously, if he can go back in and edit all those.

And in the case, honestly, there's a lot of them but is he using more than about maybe four or five hard coded definitions.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

But that's based on a very small sample.

Yeah, yeah.

But in any case, Bob, I mean, we'll see.

So he had 973 in 2023 alone.

He's been doing it since 2017.

How many thousands do we have to revisit and check and Yeah, yeah.

It's a lot to ask.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, I think your solution is playing the screen is actually a really good one.

I mean you're doing everything you can to make it easily accessible to the user.

And they will have to go search but they're probably searching, I would guess maybe at most 10 definitions.

I don't think it'll be that many.

Yeah.

And you can mean you can.

This gets into the HTML a bit but you could set them all up as one liners that might be expandable.

Oh, I think you're overestimating the amount of effort I'm willing to put into this.

Okay.

Well, if you do, if you if you create the page, then somebody else might come by and and see if it can be done with CSS or or HTML or something.

Happy to leverage others efforts.

Yeah, about it.

Yeah.

Now the other thing is if you if you made it a wiki page.

I know you can make it expandable.

Because I see arts on now arts done that in the past with his explanations.

Right.

And that's actually not hard to do the advantage of that is you'd have your single title line which would be the actual name.

Expand would expand it down and see what it was but you'd see at a glance 10 lines.

I see, I see.

That's actually worth thinking about doing it as a wiki page.

Doing it as a wiki page has its attractions.

Yeah.

All right, let me think about that.

I mean the main thing is to make the web view work properly.

And once I can do that I can plug any HTML or URL into it that I want to.

Yeah.

That's the only other thing and this is kind of more of a technical thing.

You'd end up with a different display for core than the other ones but I guessing that's not a big.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's not no I don't think that would be a terrible.

I've got already displays that.

Like if you go to Rosetta code post you get two special buttons right above for jumping to the problem we're down to the solution.

So that's not that doesn't have to be a.

I'm used to doing that already.

Yeah, just be a more significant change than is typical, but that's not a problem.

Yeah, so I'm looking at this core answer and he's got Odo in it, which I'm guessing is a short form of a domitor.

I'll just check and see whether Odo is defined in stats.

And it isn't so it'll be in some other library I'm guessing or maybe that might be the case where he has just put something in that.

Yeah, it is a wiki page that that talks about how to do an odometer and he's probably referring to that.

But, um, yeah, he, he hasn't been real great about listing his prerequisites and and and giving an on ramp for new new J coders, and that's something that Yeah, we've been talking about that role and where we seem to have wound up and check us on this Is, I think what I can do is anytime there's a quora post.

I can Split The web view horizontally.

The upper part will be the quora post so you can scroll that the lower part will be something else Bob suggests a page in the wiki.

And that page will contain the definitions of all of the verbs that skip uses in his quora posts uses and does not define in his quora posts would basically be a glossary sitting there below any quora post you might Also be one page, there'll be one page for all of skip stuff.

Basically, Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

And thinking further ahead, if we were to do a Page in the wiki for his quora things and which I was talking about at one point, whether we could categorize it and list it and all that.

And that's off in the future.

But if there was some page like that.

We could even have an anchor partway down.

So that the page automatically goes and lines it up to the top for the actual definitions and that would still be useful on that page because on that page, you'd want a place where you can get to the definitions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You took table of contents in there and you get a you automatically get anchors.

Yeah, yeah.

Or you automatically get Whenever you put section heading is get the anchors and a lot of people do table contents.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think that's, that's a good solution.

And I think that's pretty cool that Skip's done those quora posts for one thing.

I think that's super cool.

I'm sure he's he's influenced a lot of people, but I guess at some point we could pass on to him that having the definitions in the post is probably going to get him more fans because they're going to see how it's done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's probably true.

And in fact, if I was going to do it on his solution.

What I do is I would maybe define it as simply as he has there and then on a line below have a quick explanation of what perm is and how it does it Well, yeah, I mean, you should have the definition and it should be commented.

Yeah, that would solve both problems.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, I put require stats.

You don't need to define perm, you don't need to find all you don't need to include it in line to say if it's a big definition or if it's common definition.

I guess I'm thinking more if you were on quora you would want it defined in place though because you may not even be running J.

Well yeah but you're not going to have access to any of J if you're not running J.

This is more for people who are running J.

Okay.

I think I would view it more as people who are reading the solution and thinking, do I care about J or not.

And if I'm presented with her with no explanation that I don't think that's any worse than any other languages.

I mean, what All right, yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

And this one.

He's also got Evie defined.

Which is the nature of it looks like it's some kind of a grading thing.

I think it's, I think it's just too modular or something.

Well no I don't know what it is.

Evie.

Oh no it's probably it's probably even there's even test.

No, yeah, could be.

Yeah, you're right could be even test, it looks like looks like some of it looks like it's some of the know it's it's sorting though right.

It looks like it's selecting.

But I don't know what No, it's sorting by whether it's even or not.

So it's putting the evens on the top.

No, it's not doing that, though, because it's it's Evie is is taking the the sorted list as an argument.

Yeah.

All right, but he's got it reflexive.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what he's doing there is he's he's sorting it and then he's he's, I think he's selecting it because otherwise there's no sense in taking the, the number of the number of values in and.

Yeah, the number of.

But when I look down below in what he's got for and that just looks like a sum.

No, it's not some.

It's a selection because look, it, it, look at what's in it's got all even numbers.

So, um, he's forming the numbers.

Okay, I gotcha and then, but what we're seeing is the tally of n which is at that's what I was looking at but you're right n is n is what is assigned again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's puzzling even for users of Jay I guess is what I'm.

Yeah, yeah.

In general, I mean that's almost always true.

Well yeah but but we're not inside of kit.

You know cliff cliff has his perspective and we're not inside his head and seeing his perspective and that's what we're struggling with here.

But we can actually the rest line to the right of that.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to get into four groups anyway.

So, the other point I wanted to bring up is highlighting buttons, or updates.

And the problem with just changing the color of the background is that I don't know what to change it back to.

Right.

Because I don't know if it's night shift or not.

So it's very easy to say oh green works with white text or black text, but that doesn't actually solve the whole problem.

Which is after the user updates so I want to make the button normal again, I don't know what to set it to.

And you can't even store it when you set it.

I don't think there's a way to get it.

Well, if there was it wouldn't even work because I know in night mode you have an option to do it on based on time of day.

Yeah, and we might have crossed the Terminator in between the two events, so I don't know what to do.

The approach I'm taking is asterisks I'm hoping asterisks will be eye catching enough to solve the problem but I as a practical matter I don't, I don't know.

I threw it out there last time is there a way to widen the border on the button.

Oh.

Oh, be right back.

I threw the chat a thing of what I think Evie a demo what I think Evie is.

I gotta be over your back.

Okay.

Oh yeah.

Sure.

He's selecting evens that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I don't know why he wouldn't just add this feeling about a number of his verbs.

My guess if I had to guess is if he's doing 900 of them in a year, he's probably looking ways to minimize.

There is no absolutely is that but it might be working against his, his, his goal here.

Yeah, yeah.

And that is all I have on the viewer.

I do have.

I mentioned last week that I was going to fool around with the idea of some sort of noun browser.

Using jiggas or the goals of jig as a point of departure and I have done some work on that.

And what I want to do is show you what I've got.

I want to do that once role comes back.

Okay.

So, I just theory that he will come back.

Yeah, I think you probably will.

Just on the.

Just before he left, I'd mentioned the thickness of the border is that an option.

I've written it down.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that's worth doing I missed that last week for which I apologize.

No, that's okay.

I think that might be that I'm not safe right because I'm not changing the color.

No, just for the thickness isn't a night shift feature.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And you don't have to change the color of the border at all if you just make it, you know, to him thick or something it'll still jump right out.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

Um, okay well, while we're waiting for Ralph to come back.

Back, I'm trying to fix my headphones.

Okay.

I'm trying to speak here not going into my headphones and and that's going to be rude for my neighbors in the other rooms.

I'm just most me.

And I guess and it's acting up until I do that.

Okay, but but in zoom, you've got under the audio and zoom right you've got an option of your input and your output.

Right.

Let me check.

Video.

Yes.

I'm not even seeing where the, the same setting is.

The settings down in the lower.

In the lower left is where audio is when I see.

I'm not hearing anybody.

Can you hear me now.

Yeah.

Okay, I think this is good.

Can you hear me now.

I can hear you now and it sounds right.

Good.

Good.

So, I wanted to clarify some of my remarks from last week.

First of all, I don't think that anything I'm doing here belongs in the viewer.

Ultimately, I think it's more of a compliment to view map some sort of standalone utility, if it's even that I don't even know if it's worth spending that kind of time on it or trying to push on it, but The idea was I'm still unclear what the idea was.

I think the idea was to show To provide navigation facilities for heterogeneous and dimensional arrays.

And I say navigation facilities, rather than visualization facilities because visualization is a really hard problem after three dimensions.

And in fact, even after two So if you've got a six dimensional array.

I, I have no intuitions about how to visualize it and I'm not trying to do that.

But I think we can make progress on navigation.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, and this is a cautionary tale that I experienced years ago I was working with some server side people, programmers, and there was some data and I wrote a visualization for the data and I showed it to them.

The way a cat brings a dead squirrel into the kitchen, you know, absolutely convinced that he's welcome is assured for the first time ever.

And I showed it to them and they just sort of, they didn't get it.

They said, you know, if I want to see this data I'll grep for it.

I don't need your visualization tool.

And one of them told a story about hating the Microsoft Office ribbon.

Because every time he tried to use it.

It was like playing Where's Waldo and he was terrible at Where's Waldo and he really wished he had Emacs instead.

So everything I'm doing here, period paragraph, and I suspect that J programmers fall more onto the server side of things than onto my side of things.

That's the other caveat to all of this.

All right.

So what I did was I made a sort of busy box.

This is an array and its shape is up in the upper left hand corner in green.

It's a three by 12 by seven array.

So three tables by 12 columns by six, excuse me, 12 rows by seven columns is the way J programmers usually think of it.

And you can scroll it.

And this is an array of boxes and you can tell because there are rectangles around all of the contents and the contents are the shapes and the types of the arrays.

So this is a 77 row by 15 column array of numbers.

This is a 10 table by 50 columns, excuse me, 50 row by 50 column array of characters.

This is a three by four array of boxes.

So this is a nested array.

This is an array of boxes inside a box.

What you can do, which one do I want to do first.

What you can do is you can click on an array.

Let's take this one.

And dive into it.

So I've dived into the box and I'm looking at the 50 by 50 by 50 array that makes up the contents of that box in the parent array.

And this is the parent.

So these are breadcrumbs effectively.

Here's the three by 12 by seven array I started from.

And here is the, here is row two column zero, which is the 50 by 50 by 50 array that I'm looking at now.

And this array is just zeros and ones, and it's a little hard to make out because it's tall, so I'm going to shrink it.

And it's actually an attempt to show a torus in three dimensions.

And I failed.

If I turn on grayscale, you can see how I failed.

The idea is that you can pick the row and column dimensions out of your n dimensional array that you want to see in the display.

So here we're looking at the second and third columns as second and third axes as our row and column dimensions.

And then the first axis, which is effectively the tables, the way we usually think of it in J, I can navigate with the arrow keys.

So I'm looking at table zero, but I can look at table one, table two, table three.

And if I hold down the arrow key, I can see the torus.

And then if I back up, I go in reverse.

Now, I didn't actually get it to be a torus, and I can prove that by changing the columns over to the first axis.

So now I've got columns in the first axis, rows in the second axis, and I'm effectively looking down on the oblong.

And I'll go forward or down, and you can see this does not look like a torus.

This is some mistake that I've made in my arithmetic.

But the point is, you can pick any two axes for your rows and your columns.

And navigate along any of the remaining axes.

So, for example, I'll just go back to the original matrix.

If I've got a five by four by three by six by eight by seven array of numbers, as I do here.

Right now the last two axes are what I'm seeing in the rows and the columns, and I can navigate on the fourth axis.

Or navigate on the second axis, which gives me a slightly different perspective, or on the third axis, which gives me yet a different perspective.

And again, to make the point, this is not about visualization, this is about navigation.

So you can move around in an n-dimensional matrix.

I can't show it to you in any way that your eye will understand, but I can at least make navigation easy.

And just to clarify, if you were presented with an axis like, excuse me, a matrix like this, in the terminal and told to find your way around, the dyadic transposes followed by the froms that you would have to execute to get this kind of an effect would, I suspect, defeat you.

And even if you got it right, you wouldn't really be confident that you got it right.

So I would submit that this is a more, I don't know if intuitive is the right word, but more precise, more accurate way of navigating an n-dimensional matrix.

I'm going to pause here for questions or comments.

I do have a little more.

Scroll bars?

Yeah.

So for atomic, for arrays of atoms, yes.

So you can see there's a vertical scroll bar going on here.

And a horizontal scroll bar here.

So yes, scroll bars for sure.

As far as I would take that at my current level of investment, it's the really big data sets where you need this kind of thing.

Yeah, that's the other hesitation that I have about this is that, and I don't know if it's a chicken or the egg kind of a thing, but my data sets tend to be two-dimensional, occasionally a couple of layers, but not n-dimensional, not four-dimensional or five-dimensional.

So I don't know if this is at all interesting in that regard.

I think one-dimensional is really common.

Two-dimensional is, of course, common also at stables.

Going above that usually requires both an organized approach and a problem that has an organized concept behind it.

And usually when we're thrown into a mess, and we most need this, it's a hodgepodge.

The classic n-dimensional thing is the Fourier transform where all the dimensions are two.

The thing I was working on, that regular expression thing, that's a three-dimensional problem.

But I collapse it down to two usually for visualization purposes and for implementation purposes.

Right.

One of the things I wonder about is, if we had better tooling, would we use higher-dimensional arrays?

Not just tooling.

I mean, tooling is not just about the UI and the primitives.

It's also about the amount of storage we have, because every time you add a dimension, you're jumping up in storage capacity by an order of magnitude.

Well, yes and no.

I mean, we do have sparse arrays.

That's true.

That's true.

And those can be very handy.

Yeah.

I wish we supported them just a bit better than we do.

Yeah.

That's another area of effort that I sometimes wish I'd thought myself out.

That's actually, as I think about it now, about all I have, and I'm not quite sure what to push on next.

Let's see.

Yeah, so.

Yeah, go ahead.

Have you ever seen the visualizations by Grant Sanderson?

He's three blue and brown.

Yes, I have.

Okay.

Have you seen the one that he does on quaternions?

No.

Because it's really amazing.

I'm just looking for the link.

Basically, he shows how you can look at something in four dimensions.

He shows it.

Oh.

And it's, he, along with a friend of his, actually sets up a way that you can download, basically an application that lets you take a quaternion, and then change the values of the different dimensions and then you can step your way it displays it in different ways depending on how you're doing it.

Oh, it's really cool.

Oh, it is really cool.

I'm just looking to see where he's gone.

That's all right.

Yeah.

I thought it would pop right up to the top because it's just so good.

Yeah, I thought he would have it right up at the top of his things.

Because it was just, I mean, it was just it blew my mind.

When I looked at I thought, holy crap.

Results of today are not what they used to be.

Results of today are not what they used to be they've had a lot of pollution issues.

Yeah, I like the old days better too in the sense that I was younger than.

I'm actually looking at his, his videos like I'm on his page looking at his videos.

I'm just amazed I don't see it here, because I thought it used to be right at the top.

Anyway, and the thing that occurred to me is it's possible that the reason your tourists doesn't look like a tourist when you change dimensions may have to do with quaternions, because three dimensions doesn't work the same way as for does.

Well, I think he had a inverse sign, it looked like it was a four quarters of a tourist that were pasted together on the, on the, on the outside corner rather than the inside of the.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think there's a sign somewhere that I'm not doing properly.

Yeah, I would love for it to be complicated and have to do with quaternions but I think it's actually probably pretty simple.

Okay, well, I'll.

I'm not going to spend more time looking for it now because I'm just amazed I can't find it.

But at some point, I will fire a link off to you when I do find it.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's because it's just, it's quite impressive.

It's a whole series that he does on quaternions, explaining them.

And then at the end of it, you, you actually get an application and then you get to do the manipulations yourself.

Is it on YouTube or is it a, it's the quaternion lesson lessons were on YouTube, and then at the on the last lesson there was something additionally that you went and downloaded, and that allowed you to do it live on your own system.

What was his name again.

It would be under three blue, one brown and three, and one or digits.

And his name is Grant Sanderson.

He's a really amazing.

Yeah, yeah, he really is.

He does some really neat stuff on calculus and linear algebra, and all sorts of things, very, very.

And he's very young.

He sounds when you talk to him he sounds like a dad.

And then the first time you see a picture of him, he's, I would guess now he's in his late 30s or late late 20s maybe.

But when he was first doing these I think he was like in his early 20s and it's like this guy's explaining this stuff and just amazing detail with the only criticism I've heard of him is he does tend to simplify some aspects and he says that right off the bat.

When he's trying to create these visuals.

What is his, his motivation is to make these ideas tangible to you, so you get a sense of what's going on.

But he admits when you get to border cases, it starts to break down and you really do require the higher end of the notations and stuff to make it work, he's trying to build intuitions.

Yeah, it's the link in the chat.

Look, look right.

Let's see.

I will click on it and see if it takes me there.

And thank you Google I really appreciate your, your ads, and we'll skip that.

Yep.

That's it.

Thank you.

I'm not sure I've seen any of them.

I think there was a series that he did.

He has a link.

He has an inlet.

Anyways, he's got other links in his description in his.

This is, he's got a part two link and he's got an interactive version and so on.

It's the it's the interactive version I was thinking of.

No.

Up until recently I was paying for YouTube, but I was watching too many legal analysis videos from former federal prosecutors, and it was getting me down so I terminated my subscription.

All right.

Well, okay.

I will implement the aura function of glossary feature.

I'm not getting quora posts what's going on.

I'm not getting quora posts what's going on.

I'm not getting quora posts what's going on.

I also suggested that maybe this indicates that we should have a larger discussion about this, about what we want the -- because I said the wiki is the wiki and the J software site is the J software site.

And I'm not sure people would, you know, I know they're linked, but I'm not sure whether we have constraints on the wiki based on what J software wants to do with their users and what we want to do in terms of attracting new users to the language.

And so that's a question that I think are for probably Eric and actually the group here, but probably sit down together on a site and talk about what that entails and what the vision is for that.

What is the distinction between J software and code.

J software?

Well, the code.

J software is the wiki and J software is funding that.

Functionally, what are the lines of demarcation between those two?

I mean in terms of editorial control, everything on www.

jsoftware.

com is completely controlled by ISI, so it's the stuff on code, they supply content, but they allow other people to contribute as well.

And occasionally in the past they've locked down parts of the site, you know, so it's more frozen.

Parts of the wiki.

Sure, but in terms of intent, I mean what does www.

jsoftware.

com do?

I mean, they supply J.

Sure, I understand that.

What's the purpose of the site?

You're talking about business plan?

Yeah, I would think if you're dealing with ISI as a business, you're probably going to access them through the J software site.

Donations go through the J software site.

Is there documentation?

Some of the, I mean we did transport, Raoul transported a lot of the essays and stuff and some of the documentation that had been sitting on the J software site across to the wiki, so we now have it on the wiki.

Was it moved or copied?

Copied and reformatted and then edited.

Yeah, I was going to say Raoul did more than just copy it, definitely.

So there's, I didn't mean to minimize the effort, forgive me.

No, no, you could have just copied it.

I mean it hasn't been just me that's been editing it either.

I moved it onto the wiki so that it could be edited and then people have been sprucing it up since then.

And in some cases – in one of the books, the ISI people said this is an obsolete book and there's better content on the wiki.

I'd rather you didn't bring it over at all.

And I kind of halfway took them at the word and halfway violated the letter of the law.

And that, and basically took that content and kind of turned it into guides and tossed them, you know, it's kind of a trash heap, I guess, to some degree and I can see why they didn't want it.

But it sounds like there's some confusion about the intent of the two sites and where the lines of demarcation are.

Yeah, I would say that's generally my feeling about it is it's not clear.

And that might be a discussion that, you know, Eric and Chris are party to, to talk about what it is they want to do.

And to me in the bigger sense, I've been watching a lot of video lately about justice in programming and being able to program just systems.

So, in other words, systems that are more accessible to everybody, as opposed to systems that might be a bit more corporate oriented, which are typically not just systems because they are controlling what the users get.

They're not participating in what the users want.

So, in this case, that's sort of an extreme version would be that.

But in this case, I think the jwiki is leaning towards more accessibility.

It's not all the way there by any means.

We don't have full accessibility.

But in some senses for some groups, it might be a bit more friendly and a bit more accessible to them than what a more corporate look would be.

And so that's one of the things I'm wondering about is if they're trying to attract a wider audience, they probably want to make things more accessible.

Rather, if they're trying to attract a corporate audience, then I think they're absolutely right.

They want it to lock down and it'll be, it'll be, you know, you can do formatting and stuff, but it'll be much more conservative, you know, maybe closer to what I did with the announcements is sort of what I was thinking.

The share screen.

It was what I was thinking, I guess maybe if I rephrase what I was trying to say before you drift too far here is currently using emojis in the, in the, the newcomer playground reference, or not in the playground but the newcomer reference and community links you have a kind of an emoji thing for the, for the, for the category.

And in the home as well.

The homepage as well.

Like we're looking at the homepage right now.

Right.

What do you mean by in the homepage as well.

What is the homepage.

This is where you would go.

Yeah, if you're on the homepage, the links to those other pages are emoji links.

Yes, they have emojis and yeah that's what I was trying to say.

And I was thinking, perhaps instead of using emojis, we use images for the image content rather than because that gives you more gains more stylistic control over that part of it.

And that might be kind of what Chris was was objecting to is the is the style of the emoji style.

Possibly, yeah, no, that could be it.

Yeah, if he just if he's just doesn't like emojis again emojis to a certain segment of the population might be more attractive, but you're right you could you could do it in a way that is still an image, but not an emoji.

And, and, and it gets into the, it's kind of similar to the to the too large thing it's it's large and it isn't.

Anyways, yeah, I don't have I haven't created images that I think are better so I don't actually have a solid proposal here but I'm just thinking that that might be rather than than focusing on the structure of this, he might be fine with the structure and being purely on the visual appeal of the of this part of the presentation.

Yeah, we're, we're speculating here a lot, which is amusing.

But I think, I think that my boss used to occasionally to have what he would call a come to Jesus meeting, where he would get all the stakeholders together, and they would discuss until they achieved some sort of revelation.

And I think that's where you are, you need one of those.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's actually what my response to him, ended with I think we're sort of at a point where we need to get the parties together to talk about this widened out the scope of the discussion and and figure out what it is we're looking for in terms of an audience for the wiki.

Actually on a different category home than you're on.

It's kind of interesting.

What's your oldest page.

What's that.

I'm noticing that that your category home here, the J wiki home here is not the category homepage that I'm on in the wiki.

The different page.

So, what's the URL of this page.

It's J soft oh I've gone wiki.

You're right, I'm on the wrong one.

You're right I'm not on category home.

This is the old one that I saved.

When we got rid of the old wiki I just grabbed this page and saved it under under its name.

But I will go to this one.

There we go.

That's the one that.

That's what you're seeing right.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, this is this is what they would see as a category home, because it would go to a category page.

And just to wrap things up what I was thinking about.

I'm just, again, I'm supposing, but what I'm wondering is if he's if I was going to go to more conservative view, it would be something closer to what I've done with announcements, where you'd still have some colors and some breakup, but they'd be sort of a set time, you know, it wouldn't be this because this fits announcements, but you can see where, if I instead going took emojis emojis out, and instead did a table of these instead of.

Well, I guess the four across the table.

There's, there's a lot of things that would change in this if they wanted to go to a more conservative view.

But the question I've got is, again, as you say it's not us what do I decide this, it's it's what who the audience is what we're trying to attract.

And so, yeah, it'll be it'll be a discussion going into the new year I think it's a really good question.

I think it would have come up maybe a little earlier.

But, you know, I think we've been fairly transparent and what we're doing.

So I don't think we surprise anybody but maybe just got to the point now where they can see how things are unrolling and that that might be something we want to talk about other things we can do to like remove the outer border on on those blocks and maybe left just fine so center Roman is also the possibilities that would influence look and feel of the page, you know, get rid of some of the vertical white space or or alter the word, the appearance of the vertical white space you know there's there's.

Yeah, so many possibilities just saying I like it or I don't like it doesn't.

I guess that's something we all struggle with is, is, I know what I'm thinking but I don't know what you're.

Yeah, yeah, no no there's there's definitely that's that's always a challenge for sure.

But I'm, I'm kind of thinking the fundamental question is, who, who are we serving with the wiki, like what is it, what is it we're trying to do with the wiki are we trying to grow an audience or are we trying to serve an existing audience that might be more corporate.

There's, there's, I think we're trying to do both, because they definitely have an installed base and a long history.

Yeah.

They definitely are interested in new users.

So I mean, you and you can't do one size fits all and have it fit all.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's no room for improvement here either.

Yes.

Oh yeah no no no I'm not.

Believe me, I'm not, I've not been saying this is never going to change this is this is the way it is.

The outcome as far as what audiences they're looking to grow into.

But that's just, you know, that would be my point of view and then we'll see what other people think about that.

As these this color scheme and this layout does have a sort of educational look and feel I guess.

Yeah.

But as you say it can it can be adjusted to come closer, and hopefully not.

If this is if this is all supposing that the educational end of things is exactly what they really want to focus on.

And I think that's where the growth would be.

Well, it also great school education and college level education have a different look and feel to.

Yeah.

And, and as of course considerable variation within those realms.

Yep.

But I imagine that's what we'll be looking at in the new year.

I'm, I'm very interested to see where this goes and and and what those discussions lead to but anyway, I thought I'd just bounce this off you guys and and your feedbacks been really good so thank you for that.

It's.

I think it if I will do my best to make it an open meeting, and we'll just see whether that's a choice of J software whether they choose instead to make it a little bit more closed than that, whether it's sort of principal people in J software that want to discuss it before they make an open meeting that's up to them.

Yeah.

Anyway, I think that's about it.

Season's greetings to everybody.

Oh, thank you to you too.

Yeah.

And at this point my plan is to come in back with a meeting between Christmas and New Year's, but I will be missing next week which would be the one preceding Christmas so a little bit of time off and you can work your elvish magic to create all these fancy little things that you're looking to do.

And that best to Stephen.

Yeah, yeah, no, it'll be fun.

I will I will relay that relay that to him, and it'll be good to get them over for a couple of days for Christmas.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

All right.

Take care everybody.

Okay, a couple of weeks.

Bye bye.

Merry Christmas.