Joel Garreau book from 1981 suggesting that there are 9 different regional cultures covering the US, Canada, and Mexico, and that maybe it would make sense to draw national boundaries that way... (more)

Matt Webb: Designing multiplayer apps with patterns from architecture. I’ve found myself looking at architecture to pick up hints on designing multiplayer apps. Or rather: the coming ecosystem of multiplayer apps. (more)

Rich Ziade and Paul Ford: Why We're Building Aboard. We’re building a product that deep inside we think, for those who use it and commit to it, will make a better internet. (more)

"feature" where Google search results display an answer, more than just an excerpt, often with the source de-emphasized (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: OpenAI: Fallout. Previously: OpenAI: Exodus (contains links at top to earlier episodes), Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson... We have learned more since last week. It’s worse than we knew. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: OpenAI Exodus. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman’s temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, the day after the release of GPT-4o, and soon after a number of other recent safety-related OpenAI departures. Many others working on safety have also left recently. This is part of a longstanding pattern at OpenAI. (more)

Introducing Simpleology 5.14 with… So what is the simple and elegant technique anyone can use to brainwash themselves? (more)

Asking Questions is one of the key Thinking Tools - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question (more)

Sending jobs Off-Shore to save on labor (and regulatory) costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshoring#History (more)

A blue zone is a region in the world where people are claimed to have exceptionally long lives beyond the age of 80 due to a lifestyle combining physical activity, low stress, rich social interactions, a local whole-foods diet, and low disease incidence.[1] Examples of blue zones include Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Icaria, Greece.[1] The name "blue zones" derived simply during the original survey by scientists, who "used a blue pen on a map to mark the villages with long-lived population."[2] The term, Blue Zones, is also used in marketing to promote a healthy lifestyle during aging. The concept of blue zones with longevity, however, has been challenged by the absence of scientific proof,[3] and by the substantial decline of life expectancy during the 21st century in one of the first proposed blue zones, Okinawa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone (more)

Self Determination, Agency? (more)

David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/;[1] born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block).[2][3] In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.[4] In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[5] Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness. He and David Bourget cofounded PhilPapers, a database of journal articles for philosophers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers

Giulio Tononi (Italian: [ˈdʒuːljo toˈnoːni]) is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin. He is best known for his Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a mathematical theory of consciousness, which he has proposed since 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Tononi

Antonio Damasio (Portuguese: António Damásio) is a Portuguese neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute.[1] He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years.[2] Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness.[3] Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio

In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience.[1][2] It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking (including generating an utterance that appears to refer to personal behaviour or belief), and so forth.[1] The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained (at least in principle) purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness (more)

Entering a New Phase of the Web, with Citation Needed’s Molly White. Welcome to Dotsocial, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement, someone who sees the Fediverse's tremendous potential and understands that this could be the internet's next wave. Today, Mike is talking to Molly White, a researcher, writer, and software engineer who cares deeply about free and open access to high-quality information. (more)

Google smart-watch for Android https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Watch (more)

Simon Willison: llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer. On my M2 Mac it runs at around 55 tokens a second, which is really fast (more)

british TV series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who (more)

Martin Cagan: Good Product People. Recently Shreyas Doshi published a reminder that the vast majority of the best product people are not likely to be spending their time on social media. His point is that the best product people are busy practicing the craft of product, and not trying to attract followers. (product manager) (more)