theory, Model (more)

John Ohno: The ideal chatbot is not a butler or a puppy, but an elder god. (more)

Leonard Richardson: "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt" (more)

Dan Hon: s09e28: Point, Click, Adventure. (more)

Google admits chatbots were a bad idea. The new version of Google Assistant–available now on Android, and coming to the iPhone in a few weeks–emphasizes visual response cards that you can interact with, and that stay on the screen even as you ask follow-up questions... The overall experience is less like texting and more like, well, using an app. (card deck) (more)

human for OutSourcing you tedious work to (more)

John Ohno: *you can kind of break the history of hypertext into three lineages, with different lenses: (more)

In mathematics, ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system, either a dynamical system or a stochastic process, will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense. This implies that the average behavior of the system can be deduced from the trajectory of a "typical" point. Equivalently, a sufficiently large collection of random samples from a process can represent the average statistical properties of the entire process. Ergodicity is a property of the system; it is a statement that the system cannot be reduced or factored into smaller components. Ergodic theory is the study of systems possessing ergodicity... Ergodic systems capture the common-sense, every-day notions of randomness, such that smoke might come to fill all of a smoke-filled room, or that a block of metal might eventually come to have the same temperature throughout, or that flips of a fair coin may come up heads and tails half the time. A stronger concept than ergodicity is that of mixing, which aims to mathematically describe the common-sense notions of mixing, such as mixing drinks or mixing cooking ingredients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity

Cybertext was coined by speculative fiction poetry author Bruce Boston. It was the title of a book he published in 1992, which contained science-fictional poetry... Cybertext is the organization of text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic, as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997. Aarseth defined it as a type of ergodic literature where user traverses the text by doing non-trivial work... The concept of cybertext offers a way to expand the reach of literary studies to include phenomena that are perceived today as foreign or marginal.[3] In Aarseth's work, cybertext denotes the general set of text machines which, operated by readers, yield different texts for reading.[6] For example, in Raymond Queneau's book Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, each reader will encounter not just poems arranged in a different order, but different poems depending on the precise way in which they turn the sections of page.[7] Cybertext can also be used as a broader alternative for hypertext, particularly as it critiques the critical responses to the latter. Aarseth, together with literary scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, maintains that cybertext cannot be applied according to the conventional author-text-message paradigms since it is a computational engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybertext (more)

Raymond Queneau (French: [ʁɛmɔ̃ kəno]; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor[1] and co-founder and president of Oulipo[2] (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), notable for his wit and cynical humour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Queneau (more)

John Ohno: What people get wrong about Xanadu. Links are separate from documents. They aren’t IN documents. The author of a document doesn’t have any greater authority over links than anybody else — they can create a bunch, and users can choose to apply them or not. (more)

Karen Kaun: The Benefits of Ill-Structured Problem Solving Through Making. Maker Kids engages students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through actively engaging them in their own learning through creation (more)

Wikiversity: Introduction to Ill-Structured Problems. In order to understand what an ill-structured problem is and to design a collaborative environment to facilitate solving one, it is important to distinguish ill-structured from well-structured problems. (more)

person who does Product Management (more)

Evgeny Morozov: The Meme Hustler. The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. (more)

Robin Sloan self-description. It turns out a Media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container. Does WikiLog count? WikiEbook? cf new media (more)

Jackson, Mississippi’s water system is failing and water across the city is entirely unsafe to drink, officials said at an emergency briefing Monday night. State leadership have warned all residents of Mississippi’s capital city to boil water before drinking or even brushing their teeth (clean water)... “This is a very different situation from a boil water notice,” Reeves said at a press event tonight. “Until it is fixed, we do not have reliable running water at scale. The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to flush toilets and to meet other critical needs. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the state’s lead on distributing drinking water and non-drinking water to residents of the City of Jackson.”... Following a month without clean, drinkable water, Jackson has now mostly lost water pressure, with operational collapses at O.B. Curtis reducing the flow of water through the city’s distribution system to the degree that residences and businesses across the city have little or no water at all. (more)

aka heuristic

Andy Matuschak: Ratcheting progress in tools for thought. There are some people trying to develop tools for thought, but there isn’t yet a meaningful field around tools for thought. The difference is that a field is about ratcheting: developing a growing shared corpus of general knowledge and methods which allow projects to meaningfully build on each other, across researchers and across years, on and on in an upward cycle. (compounding) (more)

Michael Nielsen: Thought as a Technology. Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world? (ThinkingTools) (more)