Known for his Brave New World, which seems to me his most simplistic book. (more)

Taylor Pearson: A Brief History of Existential Terror (more)

Venkatesh Rao: CEOs Don’t Steer (more)

Zeynep Tufekci (/ˈzeɪnɛp tʊˈfɛktʃi/ ZAY-nep tuu-FEK-chee; Turkish: Zeynep Tüfekçi) is a Turkish[1] writer, academic, and techno-sociologist known primarily for her research on the social implications of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data in the context of politics and corporate responsibility. She is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Tufekci is a monthly contributor for The New York Times op-ed page on topics related to technology's social impact... She worked as a computer programmer before becoming an academic and turning her attention to social science.[4] Her research and publications include topics such as the effect of big data on politics and the public sphere,[5] how social media affects social movements, and the privacy and security vulnerabilities exposed by the coming Internet of Things. In general, she has sought to outline the potential negative societal consequences of social media and big data, while not rejecting these phenomena outright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeynep_Tufekci

Mesh Network-over-WiFi vendor (more)

Experiment without Limits, a self-improvement book by Chris Sparks. http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2019-08-13-SparksExperimentWithoutLimitsInsideTheCreativeProcess (more)

Data + Intuition: A Hybrid Approach to Developing Product North Star Metrics (at LinkedIn). We present a five-step framework for developing quality metrics using a combination of machine learning and product intuition. Machine learning ensures that the metric accurately captures user experience. Product intuition makes the metric interpretable and actionable. (more)

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read email. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

Was a Netscape browser developer, then Mozilla evangelist. It was big news when he left the Mozilla project. Coiner of Zawinski's Law. (more)

Jamie Zawinski on the horrors of GroupWare. "Groupware" is all about things like "WorkFlow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from "unchecked" to "checked", and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review." Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy... So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing Social Software (and these days, almost all software is social software). (Compelling) (more)

Philip Gerrans & Chris Letheby: Psychedelics work by violating our models of self and the world. Just what do these (psychoactive) drugs do? Psychedelics reliably induce an altered state of consciousness known as ‘ego dissolution’. The term was invented, well before the tools of contemporary neuroscience became available, to describe sensations of self-transcendence: a feeling in which the mind is put in touch more directly and intensely with the world, producing a profound sense of connection and boundlessness. (more)

An altered state of consciousness (ASC),[1] also called altered state of mind or mind alteration, is any condition which is significantly different from a normal waking state. By 1892, the expression was in use in relation to hypnosis[2] although an ongoing debate about hypnosis as an ASC based on modern definition exists. The next retrievable instance, by Dr Max Mailhouse from his 1904 presentation to conference,[3] however, is unequivocally identified as such, as it was in relation to epilepsy, and is still used today. In academia, the expression was used as early as 1966 by Arnold M. Ludwig[4] and brought into common usage from 1969 by Charles Tart.[5][6] It describes induced changes in one's mental state, almost always temporary. A synonymous phrase is "altered state of awareness". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_state_of_consciousness

Chris Sparks releases Experiment Without Limits: Inside the Creative Process — The Forcing Function. After three years of coaching, I had no idea why they hired me. (more)

Self Tracking for Self Improvement? (more)

communication skill - cf Debate, Toastmasters

Rusty Guinn: A Modern Vocational Curriculum. When I wrote Starry Eyes and Starry Skies a few weeks back (2019-04-29-GuinnStarryEyesAndStarrySkies), I made the argument that adequate vocational (votech) training for just about every financial services job I could think of would take several months (at most). A few readers asked me why I didn’t think that a longer, more in-depth liberal arts education had value. They clearly didn’t read the piece. Still, it’s worthy of an answer: I do think it has value. But its value is caught up in the conflicted mess of the three products being sold by American universities: mind-expanding liberal education, vocational training and credibility signaling. (more)

A Read-it-later app. https://getpocket.com/ (more)

John Cutler: The North Star Playbook. Tia was feeling burned out. Her company seemed caught in a perpetual cycle of shiny objects, success theater, false starts, and vague pivots-by-PowerPoint. Just when they hit their stride, something would change. It felt like they were always talking past each other... A team using the North Star Framework identifies a single, meaningful metric and a handful of contributing inputs...

Jason Fried: Announcing “Shape Up”, a deep dive into how we (BaseCamp) work. (more)

Y.K. Goon proposes a GTD Playflow. Here we use GTD to guide us on how to play, to pursue life outside of work, life inside your work, inject vitality and maybe even surprises (more)