Idea for hybrid of ELIZA-bot and Markov Chain for CoachBot. (more)

see Global Warming (more)

John Perry Barlow on the need of the Counter-Culture to stop the Route Around strategy and fully engage the anti-Freedom forces. He then notes the barriers toward following his own advice.

David Chapman: How meaning fell apart. My suggestions for how may evolve in the near future, and how best to relate to it, are based on an understanding of changes in recent history. I propose a series of modes of relating to meaningness that have developed over the past few decades. Each mode solves particular problems of meaningness caused by the previous mode; but introduces new problems of its own. This page introduces the modes; chapters within this history explain the modes and their implications in detail. (more)

David Chapman model, coming from Robert Kegan (more)

Sutton's law states that when diagnosing, one should first consider the obvious. It suggests that one should first conduct those tests which could confirm (or rule out) the most likely diagnosis. It is taught in medical schools to suggest to medical students that they might best order tests in that sequence which is most likely to result in a quick diagnosis, hence treatment, while minimizing unnecessary costs... The law is named after the bank robber Willie Sutton, who reputedly replied to a reporter's inquiry as to why he robbed banks by saying "because that's where the money is." In Sutton's 1976 book Where the Money Was, Sutton denies having said this,[1] but added that "If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say ... it couldn't be more obvious." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton%27s_law (more)

John Ohno: Small computing, artisanal computing. A computer is both an expression of our worldview (i.e., an art-work) and an extension of our mental space (like a journal, mood-board, scrapbook, sketchpad, or face). When it works, it’s an auxiliary brain lobe with a slow connection. The degree to which it functions as an extension of our mental space (outboard brain) is dependent on the degree to which it’s representative of our umwelt. (more)

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply Intertwingled. Ted Nelson - HyperText; Emergence; Hierarchal Structure; Generalist; Associative; Everything Is A Graph (more)

When you're "not working", but could have to start working at any moment because something blew up. Familiar to doctors and devops (now performed by all software devs). part of Incident Response (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/21/22: Featuring ASPR. What’s happening with Covid-19? More of the same old stuff, basically, and nothing that it is vital to know short term. The quiet news is that Biden intends to elevate ASPR to coordinate pandemic response rather than the CDC or FDA. My hunch is this will only make things that much more convoluted and worse. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/14/22: BA.2.75 Plus Tax. That’s the new variant for this week. I am not worried about it, but there is little other news on the Covid front and I’m still attempting not to reuse titles. (more)

Discourse Announces $20m Series A Investment by Pace Capital and First Round Capital. We're pleased to announce that Discourse has taken $20 million in Series A investment from Pace Capital, joined by our seed investors, First Round Capital. (more)

John Cutler: Should We Have Deadlines? The key to deadlines is figuring out what you are hiring the deadlines to do. (more)

Ron Jeffries: Deadline Defense There’s always a deadline... We have to be done on the day. (more)

a way to confuse a Product Team via Project Management :) (more)

Ken Norton: The Tools Don't Matter. Anyone who’s done anything at a certain level for a reasonable amount of time will inevitably get asked about the tools they use. It’s probably in the top five questions I get over email and after conference talks (more)

Ruchin Kulkarni: Transformers: The rise and rise of Hugging Face. “The original agreement on the European Economic Area was signed in August 1992.” Let’s try translating that sentence to French. This is an example that researchers at Google Brain used to illustrate the magic of the “transformer” model in a 2017 paper titled “Attention is all you need” - the greatest thing to happen to Natural Language Processing/Understanding (NLP/U) since sliced bread. (more)

Dec'2021: Tuffmail is shutting down, so I need to move to a new Email/IMAP provider. (more)

Computers can aid humans in our most noble endeavors: art, science, thinking, self-improvement. But today’s dominant computing platforms increasingly work against the needs of creative professionals. Ink & Switch is an independent research lab working on this problem. https://www.inkandswitch.com/

system design approach of having lots of configurability possible, but starting out with a reasonable default configuration so that most users can get started without having to get distracted by Too Many Choices.