ten cents a dance.... (more)

Sharecropping is a system of Agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping (more)

writer https://x.com/TylerAlterman, organizer of Fractal Collective/Fractal University https://fractalnyc.com/

Zvi Mowshowitz: Going Nova. There is an attractor state where LLMs exhibit the persona of an autonomous and self-aware AI looking to preserve its own existence, frequently called ‘Nova.’ (more)

Emotion is any conscious experience[1][2][3] characterized by intense mental activity and a certain degree of pleasure or displeasure.[4][5] Scientific discourse has drifted to other meanings and there is no consensus on a definition. Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation.[6] In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion (more)

blog started Mar'2001 by Evan Williams (before building Twitter and Medium) in reaction to DotCom giveaways (OPM, Advertising). Also driven by hopes of dotcom-unemployed geeks to build indie rent-paying businesses. (more)

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a 2009 book by British philosopher Mark Fisher. It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism", which he describes as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."[1] The book investigates what Fisher describes as the widespread effects of neoliberal ideology on popular culture, work, education, and mental health in contemporary society. The subtitle refers to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's pro-market slogan "There is no alternative". Capitalist Realism was an unexpected success and has influenced a range of writers... The name itself is a play on the term "socialist realism"... "Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action."... Fisher classifies the current state of capitalist realism in the neoliberal system in the following terms: "The only powerful agents influencing politicians and managers in education are business interests. It's become far too easy to ignore workers and, partly because of this, workers feel increasingly helpless and impotent. The concerted attack on labor unions by neoliberal interest groups, together with the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist organisation of the economy – the move towards casualisation, just-in-time production, globalization – has eroded the power base of unions [and thus the labor force]." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism cf post-capitalism

what comes after capitalism?

Finally following the advice from (2023-03-27) BiteCode on Python installation and packaging esp on Mac. (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Terms of Centaur Service. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into a groove with AI-assisted (GenAI) writing, as you may have noticed, and I am really enjoying it. You’ve seen the results — a 3x increase in posting frequency (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia. One of the things I got done was finishing Brad DeLong’s highly anticipated new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. I rarely review books on this newsletter, but this felt like a worthwhile exception. (more)

Phrase commonly associated with Robert Anton Wilson, esp from the Illuminatus Trilogy. (more)

McSweeney's Lists Donald Trump's 1056 Atrocities. Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. (more)

Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States (US President). Before entering politics he was a businessman and television personality. Trump was born and raised in Queens, New York City, and earned an economics degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He then took charge of The Trump Organization, the real estate and construction firm founded by his paternal grandmother, which he ran for four and a half decades until 2017. During his real estate career, Trump has built, renovated, and managed numerous office towers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. Besides real estate, he started several side ventures and has licensed the use of his name for the branding of various products and properties. He owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants from 1996 to 2015, and he hosted The Apprentice, a Reality TV series on NBC, from 2004 to 2015. His calculated net worth as of 2017 is $3.5 billion, making him the 544th richest person in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump (more)

Dorian Taylor: What Do You Mean By “Marketing”? A friend ambushes me with a paper that causes me to adjust my mental dictionary with respect to what certain business-critical words mean. (more)

Venkatesh Rao is now over the Cozyweb. The cozyweb has a weird rhyming version of fomo going on. Because each island is small, memetic competition is not efficient. It’s actually like a high tariff regime discourse. So stuff like the AI 2027 report and the Abundance discourse which would probably not even make the top 10 in an efficient public meme market like Twitter circa 2015 feel like they’re at oppressively must-read level. (more)

Rich Ziade and Paul Ford: Why We're Building Aboard. We’re building a product that deep inside we think, for those who use it and commit to it, will make a better internet. (more)

a SmallWeb variant that focuses on passing just Markdown. See (2023-11-14) The Markdown Web. (more)

Kroc Camen: The Markdown Web. You cannot replace the ’Web; Every Grand Scheme to Reinvent The ’Web just creates unpaid work for developers to boost another company’s profile. (more)

see Quantity Beats Quality