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Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 28 2021 at 09:06):The nlab seems to be down. Anyone have info on this?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 28 2021 at 09:31):It's back... for now :smiling_devil:
Nathanael Arkor (Apr 28 2021 at 11:07):I've noticed this happening several times in the recent past.
fosco (Apr 28 2021 at 11:24):
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 16:29):The right place to talk about this is here:
If you can say when you saw it happen, that'd be good.
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 16:34):Talking about it here is like chatting about a burning building with your neighbors, instead of calling the fire department.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 28 2021 at 19:40):Duly done. Since I had to search for it, the relevant thread is:
https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/859/nlab-down/#Item_0
Apparently no other outage had been reported there since 2018!
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 28 2021 at 19:42):John Baez said:
Talking about it here is like chatting about a burning building with your neighbors, instead of calling the fire department.
Then this must be the analogue of screaming "What are you doing!? CALL [emergency number]!!!" :stuck_out_tongue_wink:
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 19:52):But just saying "the nLab went down a while back" would have been less useful than someone telling them when it was down.
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 19:53):Besides, I want people here to stop treating the nLab as something scary and remote, run by some other crowd of people.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 28 2021 at 19:57):I'm hoping that knowing it was down will be useful information if that outage wasn't intentional.
Speaking as a young researcher, it does sometimes feel like the nLab is run by the generation of category theorists above me (and certainly the aesthetic of both nlab and nforum don't help!), but I too want to help dispel that impression.
Fawzi Hreiki (Apr 28 2021 at 20:01):By aesthetic do you mean for example explaining school arithmetic in terms of cohomology of infinity groupoids?
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 20:02):Good! I'm in that generation above. The n-Cafe was just three folks who wanted to talk about n-categories when it started, and then we - mainly Urs - set up the nLab to record the facts that got dug up there. My wife made up the name "nLab".
Later other people showed up. It's always important to keep pulling new people into these projects. For example Mike Shulman was a grad student at Chicago when I was lecturing about (-2)-categories and stuff, structure and properties there. Now he knows a lot more category theory than I do, and he's much more active on the nLab than I am.
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 20:03):The "aesthetic" of the nLab is a function of who contributes. Since Urs writes more than other people, it tends to sounds like him. When I write things, I aim at being easy to understand. He's more interested in recording whatever he just learned.
Fawzi Hreiki (Apr 28 2021 at 20:04):I've seen people complain about the 'abstractness' of the nLab but truth be told I like it. There are thousands of other down to earth mathematical resources (books, wikis, etc..). The nLab fills a niche which is missing anywhere else.
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 20:04):I've heard many more people complain of the abstractness of first-year calculus. Math is abstract.
Fawzi Hreiki (Apr 28 2021 at 20:05):It's nice to know that there's somewhere you can go for the most general definition possible, if only for completeness sake
Fawzi Hreiki (Apr 28 2021 at 20:05):(Not that that's the only purpose it serves)
John Baez (Apr 28 2021 at 20:05):I like what Steve Lack said: "the problem with math is that it's not fucking abstract enough". (Emphasis his.)
Mike Shulman (Apr 28 2021 at 21:18):I'm actually not very active on the nLab these days -- it seems for some reason nowadays I tend to spend my time writing papers instead. But I go back now and again.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 29 2021 at 08:51):Fawzi Hreiki said:
By aesthetic do you mean for example explaining school arithmetic in terms of cohomology of infinity groupoids?
I literally meant the visual aesthetic. It looks its age, more or less..!
Nick Hu (Apr 29 2021 at 11:14):I would love to have a local archive of the nLab, so I can read it on my ereader or when I'm on a plane
Wikipedia has a project called openZIM (https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/OpenZIM) which facilitates this, allowing you to store the entirety* of Wikipedia on a USB stick
Last I checked, there was some nForum post about downloading a tarball which essentially contained the contents of the nLab, but it didn't actually work or something like that
Spencer Breiner (Apr 29 2021 at 17:21):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Fawzi Hreiki said:
By aesthetic do you mean for example explaining school arithmetic in terms of cohomology of infinity groupoids?
I literally meant the visual aesthetic. It looks its age, more or less..!
If you run firefox, you could try the Kan extension. It improves the CSS a bit, but I especially like the pop-ups when you hover on a definition.
Unfortunately, the permissions ask for access to all sites, which I'm a bit uncomfortable with. The code is on github and it's probably an easy fix. Does anyone here knows the author, Jake Bian?
Valeria de Paiva (Apr 29 2021 at 21:51):Nick Hu said:
I would love to have a local archive of the nLab, so I can read it on my ereader or when I'm on a plane
Wikipedia has a project called openZIM (https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/OpenZIM) which facilitates this, allowing you to store the entirety* of Wikipedia on a USB stick
Last I checked, there was some nForum post about downloading a tarball which essentially contained the contents of the nLab, but it didn't actually work or something like that
Hi, the Topos Institute has a version of the nLab contents in plain text (from Nov 2020, I believe) that anyone can download from our GitHub repo https://github.com/ToposInstitute/nlab-corpus. We want to do experiments with this data, as part of our Networked Mathematics project, so our use case is very different from being able to put it on a USB stick or read it offline. But you can use it for that, if you don't mind reading plain text and 'latexing it' on your mind.
As you know the nLab keeps improving and we are not promising to keep it update, but 15K pages of the nLab is a lot to read in a holiday, it would work for a while.
Jens Hemelaer (Apr 30 2021 at 07:19):Thanks for the link! I'm surprised by the readability... there is no LaTeX but it helps a lot that plenty of unicode characters are used (such as 𝔤).
Valeria de Paiva (Apr 30 2021 at 16:50):yep, I was surprised too! thanks for confirming it