Dercuano

Dercuano is a self-contained downloadable HTML tarball containing a book’s worth of disorganized notes I’ve made over the last few years. Buried among the errors, red herrings, and ratholes, there are numerous wonderful insights (perhaps even a few of them original), many fascinating facts about the world (many of which are true, and a few of which are original observations), and a wide variety of inventive ideas about what is possible and what could be done, in particular ideas about how to improve the world with new hardware and software — a few of them workable. I’ve published little of it previously.

Disclaimer, preface, and warning

Mostly, I made these notes for myself, though with the intention of someday getting most of them into shape for publication, but lacking the discipline of regular publication, that’s probably not going to happen. It may not happen anyway. So, fuck it! Here it is, incomplete as it is — I hope you enjoy it!

Beware, this is (almost) all wrong

Much of what is written here is wrong in a variety of ways.

Most of these notes are about things I barely understood, or didn’t really understand at all, when I wrote the notes. In some cases, I later came to understand them better, but in other cases I’ve lost even what understanding I had. Nearly every note is incomplete; of those that are complete, very few have been checked for correctness or revised for readability. So, beware.

Many of the dates are only approximate.

Size and public-domain dedication

On 2019-05-05 as I write this, the Dercuano tarball is 1.5 megabytes and contains some 570,000 words in 256 notes, about 2000 paperback pages’ worth of text. This is about a third of the total amount of text I have here and intend to include. I’m still importing notes to add to it.

As far as I’m concerned, everyone is free to redistribute Dercuano, in whole or in part, modified or unmodified, with or without credit; I waive all rights associated with it to the maximum extent possible under applicable law. Where applicable, I abandon its copyright to the public domain. I wrote and published Dercuano in Argentina.

Notes

Topics