Summary: Treat human interactions like Improv, co-creation, dancing. (more)

The Thiel Fellowship (originally named 20 under 20) is a fellowship created by billionaire Peter Thiel through the Thiel Foundation. The fellowship is intended for students aged 22 or younger and offers them a total of $100,000 over two years, as well as guidance and other resources, to drop out of school and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement. Selection for the fellowship is through a competitive annual process, with about 20–25 fellows selected annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship (more)

see Ludic, Play Ethic (more)

Clay Shirky on "Situated Software", designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues. This sounds a lot like the old days of HyperCard, MsAccess, spreadsheet macros, though these WebApp-s have the advantage of being easier to roll out to multiple users. (Update: and the code is separated from the data, which offers the potential of future apps built by different people in different languages having some leverage of history...) (more)

Homophily (i.e., "love of the same") is the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. The presence of homophily has been discovered in a vast array of network studies. More than 100 studies that have observed homophily in some form or another and they establish that similarity breeds connection.[1] These include age, gender, class, and organizational role. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily (more)

see Tribe

Robin Sloan defines: “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around... “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms. (algorithmic feed)

Writer, Media Inventor https://www.robinsloan.com (more)

Robin Sloan: Serialized mystery: The Strange Case of the New Golden Gate, Chapter 1. On a sunny Tuesday in June, Stella Pajunas missed her burrito. This wouldn’t have been a problem except that multiple pedestrian onlookers watched her step onto the sidewalk, reach upward and vanish. Burrito, splat. (more)

Josh Kramer interviews Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online. What's interesting to you about books as technology? (more)

Robin Sloan: Notes on a genre. The thing to know about the AI language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters (more)

Getting FeedBack from others is a good thing for your sense-making: Digital Garden (more)

Perils of the Overworld (more)

typically defined as books sold in electronic format - typically in a closed binary form (more)

Julian Shapiro: Starting Principles: How to turn great advice into action. If I have a superpower, it’s that I now act on great advice. (See my application at bottom.) (more)

positive self-talk (more)

mood/mindset, esp of a scene

Martin Cagan: Product Vision vs. Mission. The product vision is one of the most important and highest-leverage tools for tech-powered product companies. (more)

see Balsamiq Mockups

Martin Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group) on Start Up Product Development via Prototype. there are two keys: 1) the idea is to create a high-fidelity prototype that mimics the eventual user experience – it’s just fine if the back-end processing and data is all fake; and 2) you need to validate this product design with real target users. In this model, it is normal to create literally dozens of versions of the prototype – it will evolve daily, sometimes with minor refinements and sometimes with very significant changes. I think that for something really "new" it's hard to make a prototype rich enough to really give people a strong intuitive sense of what you're about. On the other hand, maybe that's a sign that you need to craft a narrow/tangible/compelling message, even if it only covers one corner of what you do. Kinda like a Product Fragmentation approach - 2005-07-15-JotspotProduct Fragmentation.