Loose Comments

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…continued…

How it’s built

As I work and study, I make a note of things I want to learn or remember; later, I look them up and add them to the most relevant discipline’s ❪✺❫ Concepts ○ page. As concepts accumulate, patterns appear, and I use those patterns to group things sensibly.

It’s like raincatching — I take it as it comes.

Other

• What is a class?
  • Identifying a class apart from a common concept — the distinction isn’t always clear or meaningful, but basically, they’re countable nouns. I use the “s-test”: I call it a class if the thing in question tends to be introduced in the plural or with an indefinite article (“Things are…” or “A thing is…”) rather than in the singular or with a definite article (“Thing is…” or “The thing is…”). Pulling these out of the common pool is a low-cost, low-effort way to cut the number of things hanging off of the root shell roughly in half, easily justifying the tension it creates when an idea doesn’t fall cleanly on one side of the line.
  • The distinction from sets — a class may be a set in a sense, but often a complete listing of all class members would be impossible or extremely difficult, so I make a distinction between the two: a set implies a listing of its members, while a class has no such obligation. If needed, a concept can be double-added to cover both senses; otherwise, I choose whichever makes more sense at the time with no preference for one over the other.
• What is a circular parent/child?
  • Yes, it’s strange, but it makes sense in a few situations:
    • Classes and the constructor which creates them, like str ⚬ᵖʸ and str() ⚬ᵖʸ.
    • Roughly synonymous words, where the distinction is unclear, so as to keep both visible to each other at all times and avoid cleaving intution unnecessarily:
      • ❪⎇❫ Branches ○ and ❪✺₂❫ Domains ○,
      • ❪𖣐₃ₑ❫ Libraries ○ and ❪֎₅❫ Modules ○,
      • ❪֎₁ₐ❫ Command-Line Tools ○ and ❪𖣐₃ⱼ❫ Utilities ○.
• This page intentionally left blank entries and ﹏𓊝﹏ entries are filler for concepts which are sufficiently understandable by inference (by their relationships and/or their name) and therefore don’t need a definition. See Record of definitions, filler.
• Entries which have an associated URL but for which the definitions routine fails take a diminished form of the title they would otherwise have.
• Works in progress…
  • …the html-scraping program used for definitions has a few known formatting issues, and it outright fails for some websites. This is why the quality of definitions is flagged as Bronze in the directory structure. I’m waiting for the time to turn my attention back to it. Known issues include…
    • …footnotes get split between appendages and the definition itself, so if a footnote is introduced in an appendage and then again referenced from the definition, the information is missing. Easily fixed by printing the full footnotes in both places — Obsidian’s markdown parser will hide those footnotes which are unused.
  • …several large content backlogs, including…
    • …months worth of study from the winter, spring, and summer of 2026, when I paused new additions so as to not overwhelm the system while making structural changes.
    • …planned routes through some old textbooks and papers dating to before I had the idea.
    • …years worth of vocabulary items, on the other side of things.
  • …Types of entries.
  • …partial-set itinerary. Because the primary channel for additions takes the as-needed order described above, many of the sets listed are only partially represented. To fix this, each opened set gets added to a “partial-set itinerary” which will hopefully be finished some day. :’-)
  • …gathering and publishing a definition, explanation, reference, or other, for all of the concepts with a placeholder definition.
  • …adjusting the search to index bullets.
• Replace left with right in the URL for an easter egg.

Thanks, have fun.

— Cal

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Really Loose Comments are reminders for myself, not published.