There is an absolutely beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa encoded at some point in the digits of pi. If you know the position, it's really easy to plot the image.
This is both simultaneously false, and true but largely meaningless. If you mean the Mona Lisa is somehow directly encoded somewhere in pi, then of course it’s not. It’s just a number.
If you mean that when you feed the numbers starting with some offset of pi into a specific algorithm you will get a rendering of the Mona Lisa, then yes, but so what? Allow me to introduce you to the PiMona algorithm. I won’t bother you with the implementation details, but it takes exactly one integer parameter. If it’s 3, it produces a beautiful rendering of the Mona Lisa. Anything else and it generates random garbage. Turns out, it’s really easy to find where the Mona Lisa is encoded in pi! It’s right there at the start.
But let’s say you meant that the digits of pi at some offset, when encoded properly and fed into any algorithm that is theoretically capable of generating the Mona Lisa will cause that algorithm to do so, then sure. But that’s also true of random noise, and says more about the algorithm and the nature of random numbers than about the Mona Lisa somehow being encoded into the fabric of the universe (which I’m sure isn’t what you meant, but I’m just saying there’s nothing really special about pi in that regard, except that as far as we know, it continues infinitely).
I think they're going for more of a 'monkeys will eventually produce shakespeare' thing here. Which you can apply the same argument to - monkeys do not know english, don't know what they're typing, and theoretically english could devolve to a state where every sentence could be qualified as shakespeare, right? Your argument just seems unnecessarily pedantic.
>What benefit is there to keep this antiquated method around, aside from just as an historical reference?
Analogue clocks are, by design, also visual progress bars. Digital clocks just give you the time. There's a little video talking about this by Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag
Many applications, from LibreOffice, Logseq to video players could all benefit from having social functions to compete with centralised solutions like Notion, YouTube etc. Expecting each of these to implement servers for comments and annotations is not realistic. However with a self-hosted annotation server, these apps would only need to implement one integration and users would only need to be connected to a single server.
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The code for both the client and server are open source (https://github.com/hypothesis/h) so this is possible. The server is designed to support the needs of large scale deployments, so this does come with some complexity compared to a system you would design for smaller scale usage.
The text on https://web.hypothes.is/ mostly targets schools and universities, because Hypothesis pays for itself by selling integrations with online learning platforms (Canvas, D2L, Blackboard etc.) and associated support.
My take on this was to get a boxy old ThinkPad that no longer functioned and fit it with Raspberry Pi, e-ink and LCD. https://github.com/wdbm/cyberDeck_2022
But first you have to find that position.
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