Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 6, mechanic or bust. Regarding the actual mechanism of this so-called game I am making, my initial strategy was basically to ignore it. Seriously: this was a considered strategy! The main attraction of Perils of the Overworld, I figured, would be the writing, and the basic push-pull of making choices—the “what next?” of a Choose Your Own Adventure book—would be mechanism enough to keep the player tapping. I still think there’s a kernel of truth there—“what next?” is one of the most powerful forces in the universe—but the no-strategy strategy did not work. Here’s why (more)

Robin Sloan: The master tapes. Well, I am enjoying the browser extension called Fraidycat, which presents a lovely, anarchic opportunity: follow all the people you like, no matter what platform they’re using, without having accounts on those platforms. Basically, it’s an “RSS… or whatever” reader. (more)

Darius Kazemi: Launching something I've been working on for four years... Basically this is a small federated social media server that is only for bots. Not only is it bot-only, but it's designed for bots. The primary way to interact with it is not through a web interface but through an API. (more)

Robin Sloan: Super sweet spots. Here is a demonstration of William Blake’s innovative printing process. If you have ever wondered what I mean when I use the term “media inventor”, this is your answer, definitively. Blake was totally vertically integrated! (more)

Robin Sloan: Cloud study. The website you’re reading is mostly static HTML, just web pages on a CDN, but for newsletter subscribers, it does offer a few bits of interactivity, and those bits require code to run somewhere other than your browser. For my projects, that “somewhere” has lately and reliably become cloud functions (more)

Noah Smith Interview: Ramez Naam, futurist, author, and investor. In 2011 he wrote a guest post for Scientific American entitled “Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?” that alerted the world to the startling, consistent, and seemingly unstoppable cost declines for solar energy. (more)

Amazon Removes Purchase Feature From Kindle for Android. Amazon has removed purchases from the Kindle app for Android devices in accordance with a new Google Play App Store policy that requires developers to implement Google's billing system.

OnDeck cuts 25% of staff, scales back accelerator... has laid off 25% off its staff... 72 people... mostly operations and investing roles were impacted by layoffs. (more)

Robin Sloan: OverWorld Week 3, oblique. Here’s one of my key references for the look of the map in Perils of the Overworld—and the game’s whole visual approach, really: (more)

Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 5, imagination engine. I made a system to aid in the generation of locations beyond this first one. That will be the focus of this week’s edition (more)

Anne-Laure LeCunff: Control your time to free your mind with the founder of Akiflow. Nunzio Martinello is the Founder and CEO at Akiflow, a powerful tool that allows you to consolidate all the apps you use into one place so you can block time for your tasks and see everything you need to get done in your calendar. (more)

Robin Sloan: Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network. Concluding my notes on Web3, I wrote that Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of the internet, because it proves, powerfully, that new protocols are still possible. (see (2021-11-11) Sloan Notes On Web3) (more)

Robin Sloan: The Truth About the East Wind. This a short story about curiosity, obsession, and one of the greatest cover-ups of all time. Also, Greek gods (more)

A human-scaled database as an extension of your brain. Unigraph provides an alternative approach - “what if we create software or digital spaces that treats users as holistic beings?” We believe that the human experience is irreducible: we cannot take anything we created away from the original context and expect it not to lose some of its meaning. A contact is not just some phone numbers and email addresses - it’s an experience with every message and email you exchange, every meeting you have and related meeting logs, every Tweet and LinkedIn updates they sent, and every time you mention them in your notes. (associative PIM) (more)

Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 4, ladder of abstraction. Perils of the Overworld aims to be an adventure game in which you set out on a grand, dangerous quest but then, as you aid others and are aided in return, find yourself enmeshed with them: and so, your quest ends not in the jaws of a dragon but in the grip of a community. In the vise of actually caring! Which is, of course, wonderful, and which sets up a tension, I hope, between “winning” the game and “losing” the game. Losing will be pleasant and interesting. You’ll do it over and over. (cf CoachBot, infinite game) (more)

author, Software Craftsmanship https://www.mcbreen.ab.ca/ (more)

Applying Craftsmanship Value to Software Development. (more)

The Difference Engine: Interview with Bruce Sterling. I guess I’ll start by asking where the term ‘slipstream’ came from. BS: It was invented by my friend the late Richard Dorsett while the two of us were discussing a category of non-genre fantasy books that we had no name for. “They’re certainly not ‘mainstream,'” I said, and “Why not ‘slipstream?'” he suggested, and I thought it was a pretty good coinage. (more)

The GraphQL Cloud Platform https://dgraph.io/ (more)

Pacifica launches a new online therapy service that integrates with its self-help app. Pacifica’s self-help app was created to make cognitive behavioral therapy exercises accessible to more people. Now the startup is launching a Therapist Directory for users who want to take the next step. The service allows them to find a provider, attend consultations online using Pacifica’s platform and complete exercises as part of their treatment. (more)