Venkatesh Rao: The Meaning Crisis Conspiracy. The meaning crisis was a psyop invented in a secret Murdoch-funded lab in 2015 to distract younger Millennials and Zoomers from the fact that the rent was too damn high, and it worked. (more)

see MetaLevel or Facebook

Payment Processing Financial Institution acquired by EBay in 2002. (more)

Martin Cagan: The Nature of Product. When a product person, or especially a product coach, has not yet had the good fortune to work on a strong product team at a strong product company, then one of the most essential concepts of all, is to try to convey the fundamental nature of technology-powered products. (more)

How to quantify the ventilation rate of an indoor space using a cheap CO2 monitor. The ventilation rate can change enormously between different spaces, and these changes are very important. (more)

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop cross platform applications for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia,[4] and the web from a single codebase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutter_(software) (more)

Dart is a programming language designed for client development,[8][9] such as for the web and mobile apps. It is developed by Google and can also be used to build server and desktop applications. It is an object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected language with C-style syntax.[10] It can compile to either native code or JavaScript, and supports interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, reified generics and type inference.... Google has introduced Flutter for native mobile app development on Android, iOS and Windows.[29] Flutter is a mobile app SDK, complete with framework, widgets, and tools, that gives developers a way to build and deploy mobile apps, written in Dart.[30] Flutter works with Firebase[31] and other mobile app SDKs, and is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)

Jonathan Edwards programming language project. https://www.subtext-lang.org/ (more)

Steve Yegge on developing with JavaScript and Mozilla. JavaScript is probably the most important language in the world today. .. For one thing, despite JavaScript's inevitable quirks and flaws and warts and hairy boogers and severe body odor, it possesses that magical property that you can get stuff done really fast with it. JavaScript is definitely the tortoise to Java's hare... It turns out if you dig deep into Mozilla (aka Netscape, aka FireFox, aka Sea Monkey, aka Swamp Monster, I mean the thing really has way too many farging names already), you'll find that it actually is a relatively full-featured Platform. It's not quite as general-purpose as an OS (or Java), but it's certainly big and hairy enough to be making threats in that general direction. But my God, it's sooooooo ugly. It's got well over a decade of ugly packed in there. "HelloWorld" in Mozilla is six or seven files in as many different languages... OK, but what about FireFox? Why don't they, you know, innovate? Well, they're trying, I think, but for what I'm guessing are probably tangled historical reasons - which manifest as the developers often being gridlocked politically - Mozilla lacks what Fred Brooks Jr. calls "ConceptualIntegrity" in his classic "The Mythical Man Month". (Which, incidentally, remains today the most vitally relevant book on software engineering, over 30 years after it was written.) The Mozilla folks would have to do a lot of serious re-thinking in order to reduce XUL's "HelloWorld" down to a few lines of code in a single language. And I'm not convinced that kind of thinking is happening in the FireFox camp right now. It's not that they're not thinking at all; don't get me wrong. They're just not thinking about radical, revolutionary user-level simplifications to the basic framework. (more)

Google Web Toolkit, from Google. Google Web Toolkit (GWT /ˈɡwɪt/), or GWT Web Toolkit,[1] is an open-source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain JavaScript front-end applications in Java. It is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit (more)

Doing some pondering about where the Web Browser may be headed. (more)

the NewEconomy RustBelt. cf Rao 3rd-gen management (2020-09-25) Rao Fifth Generation Management. The Paper Belt consists of four metropolitan areas where several important industries and political infrastructures converged during the post-war era: Boston (education), New York City (publishing, finance), Los Angeles (media, Hollywood) and Washington, D.C. (politics, law)... It came into attention[dubious – discuss] after Balaji Srinivasan's 2013 talk titled Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit.[3][4][5] In the context of the talk, the term was used as a contrast with the emerging influence-structure of Silicon Valley. https://en.everybodywiki.com/Paper_Belt ((2013-11-22) Balaji Srinivasan Cloud Exit) (more)

The Rust Belt is a potentially pejorative[1] term for a region of the United States that experienced industrial decline starting around 1980 (industrial age). The U.S. manufacturing sector as a percentage of the U.S. GDP peaked in 1953 and has been in decline since, impacting certain regions and cities primarily in the Northeast and Midwest regions of the U.S., including Allentown, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Jersey City, Newark, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Toledo, Trenton, Youngstown, and other areas of New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Upstate New York. These regions experienced and, in some cases, are continuing to experience the elimination or outsourcing of manufacturing jobs beginning in the late 20th century... The term gained popularity in the U.S. beginning in the 1980s[2] when it was commonly contrasted with the Sun Belt, which was surging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

Balaji Srinivasan anticipates a tech-culture Exit from mainstream BigGov to the Cloud. (Exit Voice And Loyalty, Free State Project) (more)

UnCollege was founded by Dale J. Stephens in 2011.[2][3][4][5][6] Stephens is a self-described "elementary school dropout", as he was homeschooled with emphasis on real-world experience for the majority of his childhood.[7] He briefly attended Hendrix College. While there, Stephens had a night-long discussion with a friend regarding the disconnect between the theoretical subject matter taught in college and its real world applications.[7] This discussion would become the basis for UnCollege, which Stephens founded in 2011.[7] In 2010, Stephens also applied for the Thiel Fellowship, a program founded by Peter Thiel which grants fellows US$100,000 to forgo college for two years and focus on their passions.[8][9][10][11] After his initial proposal was rejected, Stephens was encouraged to reapply in pursuit of his work as an educational futurist through UnCollege. His second application succeeded and he was in the first batch of Thiel Fellows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_On#Background

co-founder, EBay (more)

lots of meanings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer (more)

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built is an illustrated book on the evolution of buildings and how buildings adapt to changing requirements over long periods. It was written by Stewart Brand and published by Viking Press in 1994. In 1997 it was turned into a 6-part TV series on the BBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn ISBN:0140139966

In musical terminology, tempo (Italian for "time"; plural tempos, or tempi from the Italian plural) is the speed or pace of a given piece. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece (often using conventional Italian terms) and is usually measured in beats per minute (or bpm). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo (more)

Consultant, author (more)