Cybernetic Organism (Cybernetics); A cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. The term was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline.[1] The term cyborg is not the same thing as bionic, biorobot or android; it applies to an organism that has restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on some sort of Feedback. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg (more)

a board game

chess grandmaster

mathematics/logic author (more)

see GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, ChatGPT

Matt Brown: The iron triangle of embedded fintech. In the 2010s the biggest fintechs were product innovators... Chime’s branchless bank, Robinhood’s fun fee-free trading, innovative consumer credit products like Earnin’s earned-wage-access or Afterpay’s buy-now-pay-later. (more)

flow of physical goods through a supply chain; attention economy of finding cost-effective marketing/sales channel - GTM, traction, CAC

term from John Hagel (more)

Mark Lipsky on Gigantic Digital's attempt to mix theatrical and digital distribution (Film Industry). The two biggest challenges we faced were 1) how to protect the integrity (read exclusivity) of the bricks and mortar engagements and 2) how to convince local media in the top 100 markets that a new film opening exclusively online in their market was virtually the same as a new film opening at the local art house - and that they should cover it as such... In the first case the answer was geo-targeting. With Gigantic Digital we have the ability to turn on or turn off access to our content in real time and at very fine granularity. In other words, if a film is or will be opening theatrically in, say, San Francisco, we can limit access in the greater San Francisco area - or in the entire state of California - until after the theatrical engagement(s) there has complete. (Artificial Scarcity)... As for convincing local media that Gigantic Digital represented the future of independent film distribution, that would be a matter of literally thousands of phone calls and emails and thousands more follow-ups. We were relentless yet patient; our outreach was personal, One To One and genuine; we were willing to hand-hold and cajole; and we were right.

Abhishek Madhavan: Why Distribution Still Matters in the Internet Age. The most valuable public consumer internet companies in the world are all Aggregators. (more)

Visakan Veerasamy: "solve for distribution" is a phrase I came up with to talk about marketing without using the word marketing (more)

What Is Markdown, And Why Should You Use It Instead Of MS-Word? Writing has become an important, ubiquitous part of our modern-day life, and having essential skills in not only putting words down but also in formatting the written word quickly and efficiently is a vital component of just about every job or venture imaginable. (more)

Peter Kaminski on Git Branching and Pull Requests for Collaborative Writing (group email). I can sense that there will be growing need for collaborative work on agreements, most of which will live on the Lionsberg Wiki and therefore be in markdown. We have been using HackMD for collaboration - is there a way to track and comment on changes? (more)

Alex Schroeder on Writing alone, together. In a way, this page is a follow-up to Wiki culture and The potential of interaction. (2023-10-11-SchroederWikiCulture, collaboration) (more)

Will Manidis and John Kennedy: Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups. When we started our companies in the late 2010s, we heard the same advice about how to raise money from venture capitalists in the pursuit of fast growth: Founders would need to raise significant sums of venture capital to incur fixed costs like software developers and sales reps that would pay back over time. This paradigm is now saturated. (more)

Vaclav Smil has Bill Gates’ ear, which is part of the problem with Gates’ climate change actions. Smil is one of Gates’ favorite analysts, but unfortunately Smil gets a few things wrong about energy. (more)

Serverless Stack raises $1M for open-source application framework. Open-source framework startup Serverless Stack announced Friday that it raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Greylock Partners, SV Angel and Y Combinator. The company was founded in 2017 by Jay V and Frank Wang in San Francisco, and they were part of Y Combinator’s 2021 winter batch. (more)

Andrew Chen: Startups need dual theories on distribution and product/market fit. One is not enough. A common startup situation. A team busts their ass for months building the first version of their product. It’s almost done. Now a big question emerges — how do you get the first people to use your product? Hmm… If you find yourself at this moment, then you are already in a bad place. (more)

Boris Mann: Networked Orgs and tooling. I am hugely inspired by Protocol Labs and their “versioning” approach to company and organizational evolution. This current version sees the birth of the Protocol Labs Network, or #pln, to which Fission is lucky enough to have been invited to become a member of. (more)

Kevin Lipe: Guest Post: Markdown is the new MS-Word 5.1. There were contemporaries to AppleWorks, though. Around the end of the Classic era, Microsoft came out with Office 98, which was an awful abortion, but it was also a direct result of a terrible moment in Macintosh history: the replacement of Word 5 by Word 6. It was at this point that “standard word processors” stopped being minimal and work-oriented and started pandering to mothers making sixth-grade-class newsletters. This is the first point at which word processors started mirroring the increasing complexity and distraction of computing environments in general, and the point at which I started having trouble using them for writing. (more)