James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009)[2] was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media.[3] Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), but later courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard

This is the publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden (20k pages, starting from 2002) of Bill Seitz (a Product Manager and CTO). (You can get your own pair of garden/note-taking spaces from FluxGarden.) (more)

Mary Lou Jepsen (born 1965)[1][2] is a technical executive and inventor in the fields of display, imaging, and computer hardware. Her contributions have had worldwide adoption in head-mounted display, HDTV and projector products. She was the co-founder and first chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) a non-profit that generated more than $1B in revenue and helped create $30B in revenue for its for-profit partners. Subsequently, she founded Pixel Qi in Taipei, Taiwan, focused on innovative opto-electronic (LCD) architectures and the manufacturer thereof. She was a project leader at Google X, and after that an executive at Facebook / Oculus VR (Oculus Rift).[3] Among her objectives at Facebook was leading a concerted effort to bring Virtual Reality to the next level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen

Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website.[2] Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams,[3] the company has its headquarters in Farmington, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog.[4][5][6] Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralsight (more)

Elliott Investment Management L.P. is an American investment management firm. It is also one of the largest activist funds in the world.[4] It is the management affiliate of American hedge funds Elliott Associates L.P. and Elliott International Limited. The Elliott Corporation was founded by Paul Singer, who is CEO of the management company, based in New York City. As of the first quarter of 2015, Elliott's portfolio is worth over $8 billion.[5][6] By 2009 "more than one-third of Elliott's portfolio was concentrated in distressed securities, typically in the debt of bankrupt or near-bankrupt (bankruptcy) companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Investment_Management

Ed Zitron: Disruption Killed Innovation. The reason that none of these products seem to ever have a firm connection to any real use case or product is that these announcements are not for customers. Mark Benioff’s 2019 announcement of “full blockchain” (for Salesforce.com) coincided with a brief bull run in cryptocurrency. (more)

Vista Equity Partners is an American private equity firm that invests in software, data, and technology-enabled businesses.[4][failed verification] With over $100 billion in AUM, it is one of the largest private equity firms in the world.[5] Vista Equity Partners has invested in hundreds of technology companies, including Citrix, SentinelOne, and Marketo, and has achieved many accolades in the space, most recently being named as 2023's Global Technology Private Equity Firm of the Year by Private Equity International.[6] In September 2019, Vista Equity Partners raised $16 billion for their flagship fund, which was the largest technology-focused fund ever raised by an independent private equity firm at the time. In June 2023, Vista Equity Partners was ranked 16th in Private Equity International's PEI 300 ranking of the largest private equity firms in the world.[7] The company has offices in several cities, including Austin, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Equity_Partners

TIBCO Software Inc. is a business unit of Cloud Software Group that provides enterprise software. It has headquarters in Palo Alto and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America... TIBCO (The Information Bus Company) was founded in 1997 by Vivek Ranadivé as a subsidiary of Reuters Holdings.[2] Ranadivé originally developed the information bus software at his previous company, Teknekron Software Systems, which he sold to Reuters for $125 million in 1994... TIBCO was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $4.2 billion in December 2014. Murray Rode replaced Ranadivé as chief executive officer (CEO) following the acquisition.[15] In 2019, Rode became vice chairman of the company and Dan Streetman succeeded him as CEO.[16][17] TIBCO acquired data and analytics company Information Builders for an undisclosed sum in January 2021.[18] In September 2022, Vista and Elliott Management acquired Florida-based Citrix Systems for $16.5 billion and merged the company with TIBCO, forming Cloud Software Group]]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIBCO_Software

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump was a criminal case against Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States. Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records with the intent to commit or conceal another crime, relating to payments made to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence about an alleged sexual encounter between them.[a] The Manhattan District Attorney (DA) accused Trump of falsifying these business records with the intent to violate federal campaign finance limits, unlawfully influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and commit tax fraud... Rather than paying Stormy Daniels, the National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard negotiated a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement between Daniels and Michael Cohen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Donald_Trump_in_New_York (more)

book by Neal Stephenson, ISBN:0553380966 (more)

Moral Relativism

Zebra Insurance Services: 10 best U.S. cities for withstanding climate change. (Picking a Future Home Recognizing Climate Change) (more)

Notre Dame releases climate change vulnerability assessment of more than 270 US cities. Picking a Future Home Recognizing Climate Change (more)

At some point we'll want to move, and I want to think through a climate change future. (more)

BeOS is a discontinued operating system for personal computers that was developed by Be Inc.[2] It was conceived for the company's BeBox personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for multitasking, multithreading, and a graphical user interface. The OS was later sold to OEMs, retail, and directly to users; its last version was released as freeware. Early BeOS releases are for PowerPC. It was ported to Macintosh and then x86. Be was ultimately unable to achieve a significant market share and ended development with dwindling finances, so Palm Inc acquired the BeOS assets in 2001. Enthusiasts have since created derivate operating systems including Haiku, which retains BeOS 5 compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS (more)

Matt Jones on the City (Urban) as machine-for-surviving-the-future. (more)

Jason Benn: Neighborhood Update #11: the Village Retreat, Treehouse, and Cohousing. ...a one-square mile community of communities in SF that aims to recapture the vibes of a university campus, but for all generations. We’re part of a movement composed of coliving (one big rented house), cohousing (multiple adjacent owned houses), third spaces (community centers), and good vibes (I bump into friends once every 40 minutes around Alamo Square and Hayes Valley) (more)

One Question to Rule Them All. What Would You Say You Do Here? (more)

JSON-LinkedData format. The encoding is used by Schema.org,[8] Google Knowledge Graph,[9][10] and used mostly for search engine optimization activities. It has also been used for applications such as biomedical informatics,[11] and representing provenance information.[12] It is also the basis of Activity Streams, a format for "the exchange of information about potential and completed activities",[13] and is used in ActivityPub, the federated social networking protocol.[14] Additionally, it is used in the context of Internet of Things (IoT), where a Thing Description,[15] which is a JSON-LD document, describes the network facing interfaces of IoT devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON-LD (more)

MicroContent Open Format (more)