The Central Artery/Tunnel Project (CA/T Project), commonly known as the Big Dig, was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the Central Artery of Interstate 93 (I-93), the chief highway through the heart of the city, into the 1.5-mile (2.4 km) tunnel named the Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. Tunnel. The project also included the construction of the Ted Williams Tunnel (extending I-90 to Logan International Airport), the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge over the Charles River, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the space vacated by the previous I-93 elevated roadway. Initially, the plan was also to include a rail connection between Boston's two major train terminals. Planning began in 1982; the construction work was carried out between 1991 and 2006; and the project concluded on December 31, 2007, when the partnership between the program manager and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority ended.[1] The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the United States, and was plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests,[2][3] and the death of one motorist.[4] The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998[5] at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$7.4 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2020).[6] However, the project was completed in December 2007 at a cost of over $8.08 billion (in 1982 dollars, $21.5 billion adjusted for inflation, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig (more)

I'm enjoying Cory Doctorow's ThemePunks serialization on SalonCom. New Economy, Free Agent, Open Source Hardware, etc. Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That's not to say that there's no money out there to be had, but the money won't come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities (Network Economy) that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people... In her discussions with Kettlewell, he'd confided that it had turned out to be harder to find suits than it was finding wildly inventive nerds. Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction... "They (Capital Market) can't figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there's not enough of them. We've only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so 90 percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects - the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we've got are little Projects." (more)

AntiPattern of Agile Software Development being turned into developer-hostile mess. aka Fake Agile, Agile Washing; see esp Dark Scrum (more)

Vox (from Latin vōx 'voice') is an American news and opinion website owned by Vox Media. The website was founded in April 2014 by Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Melissa Bell, and is noted for its concept of explanatory journalism.[1] Vox's media presence also includes a YouTube channel, several podcasts, and a show presented on Netflix. Vox has been described as left-of-center[2] and progressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_(website)

Vox Media Inc. (previously known as SportsBlogs, Inc and publicly known as Vox) is an American digital media company that currently has eight editorial brands: SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Curbed, Eater, Racked, Vox.com and recently ReCode. All Vox Media sites are built on Chorus, its proprietary digital publishing platform (CMS)... Tyler Bleszinski, a freelance writer, established Athletics Nation in 2003 as a sports blog that sought to cover the baseball team Oakland Athletics from a fan's perspective. The blog quickly became popular, becoming the second-most popular site on the Blogads network, after Daily Kos. Bleszinski, together with Daily Kos creator Markos Moulitsas and political strategist Jerome Armstrong, then established the sports blog network SB Nation around Athletics Nation in 2005. The popularity of the site led to other sports blogs being incorporated.[7][9] SB Nation hired former AOL executive Jim Bankoff as an advisor in 2008 to assist in its growth. He was promoted to chief executive officer (CEO) in January 2009.[9][10] He showed interest in SB Nation's goal of building a network of niche-oriented sports websites.[9][11] By February 2009, the SB Nation network contained 185 blogs, and in November 2010, Comscore estimated that the site had attracted 5.8 million unique visitors.[12] The 208% increase in unique visitors over November 2009 made SB Nation the fastest-growing sports website the company tracked at the time.[12].. In 2011, Bankoff hired a number of former writers from AOL's technology blog Engadget, including former editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, to build a new technology-oriented website in the same network as SB Nation.[9] These writers had originally left AOL following a series of conflicts between Topolsky and Michael Arrington, the author of TechCrunch (which AOL had previously acquired), and the leak of an internal training document that outlined a content strategy for AOL's blogs that prioritized profitability.[13] Bankoff felt that a technology-oriented website would complement SB Nation due to their overlapping demographics.[11] The Verge was launched on November 1, 2011, with Topolsky as editor-in-chief.[11][13] Alongside this launch, Bankoff and Trei Brundrett created Vox Media as the parent company for both SB Nation and The Verge.[14][15] The previous parent shell to SB Nation, SportsBlogs, Inc., was converted into Vox Media, Inc. for this purpose. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Media

Dave Winer pitch for fixing some document standards (cf digital garden standards). One platform requires titles, another doesn't allow titles. One has styling, bold, italic, and links, but can't handle updates. Another has no styling or links, but does allow updates. (more)

Sean Johnson: Nailing Product-Market Fit: The Definitive Guide. Some people believe the answer is “when you can sustainably acquire customers for less than the value you extract from them.” (more)

Mike Solana: Based and Horse-Pilled. I do find it genuinely difficult to tell if the world is ending or if the smallness of social media makes it feel like the world is ending, but even by the “everything is burning” standards I’ve come to expect from Twitter it’s been a wild week. (more)

The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose.Twitter is not what it seems. The social media platform poses as a neutral marketplace for the exchange of ideas and information...But it is actually a tool of progressive power. That’s the story that conservatives want to tell about what Twitter used to be, in the bad old days before Elon Musk begrudgingly bought it. (more)

Mike Solana: Jump. Back in elementary school a ‘scientific theory’ hit the playground that blew my mind: if every person in China jumped at the same time, their impact would knock our planet off its axis and the world would end....this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time (more)

Mike Solana: Hereticon, Notes from the IRL. Last week, Founders Fund launched Hereticon, a conference for thoughtcrime. (more)

John Cutler: TBM 54/52: "That Framework Is Just Common Sense!" I recently chatted with an experienced product manager friend, and he asked me about a popular framework. "I can't believe it's an actual thing," he mentioned. "The concept is so core to good product management that I don't understand why people need a specific framework to describe that one concept." (more)

Mike Solana: Masters in Poverty. Colleges around the country, and especially graduate schools, are destroying the lives of young people. Product both of a pyramid-scheming academic class and bi-partisan commitment from the United States government, the problem is genuinely systemic. My suggestion is we burn this system to the ground. (more)

Mike Solana: Making Space for Monkeys. In 1984, Apple released one of the most famous commercials in American history, declared itself the mother ship for “thinking different,”... last week the house that Jobs built set a new creative standard when, just days after Business Insider reported he’d been hired to Apple’s ads team, the company fired Antonio García Martinez for the crime of having produced, five years ago, the critically-acclaimed, bestselling book Chaos Monkeys. (more)

Brad DeLong: The Forlorn Hope That Was Vox.com, & BRIEFLY NOTED. Matt Yglesias: What I learned co-founding Vox: ‘The current Vox management team or editorial staff… are doing a good job executing a reasonable strategy—it’s just not the strategy we set off with (more)

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent organization, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company, considered a competitor to DeepMind, conducts research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) with the stated goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. The organization was founded in San Francisco in late 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, who collectively pledged US$1 billion. Musk resigned from the board in February 2018[3] but remained a donor. In 2019, OpenAI LP received a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI (more)

ChatBot (Conversational Interface) SaaS. https://api.ai/ (more)

Had it in my calendar for yesterday. Today site was broken. Gotta schedule a couple days in advance. (more)

Google, Microsoft, And Startups Are Going To War On Chatbot Technology. Earlier this week Google planted a major flag in the war as it pushes further into the enterprise business dominated by Salesforce, SAP and Zendesk announcing bot technology for call centers alongside a raft of other machine-learning tools for its cloud customers. (more)

Peter Kaminski: What I Tell Friends About COVID-19 in December 2022. Version 2022-12-10-001. (more)