see Gartner Hype Cycle

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism is a 2019 book by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, published by Verso Books. In the book, Phillips and Rozworski argue that large multinational corporations, such as Walmart, are not expressions of free-market capitalism but instead examples of central planning on a large scale. They also argue that the question is not if large-scale planning can work, but if it can be made democratic to serve everyone's needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Walmart

MacroEconomics prof https://braddelong.substack.com/ James Bradford "Brad" DeLong (born June 24, 1960) is an American economic historian who has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bradford_DeLong (more)

see UbiComp

aka "The Guide", from Adrian Hon's A History Of The 21st Century In 100 Objects (see excerpts there) (more)

Diamond Age junkie; product manager

Gemini is an application-layer internet communication protocol for accessing remote documents, similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Gopher. It comes with a special document format, commonly referred to as "gemtext", which allows linking to other documents. Started by a pseudonymous person known as Solderpunk, the protocol is being finalized collaboratively and as of October 2022, has not been submitted to the IETF organization for standardization... The design is inspired by Gopher, but with modernisation such as mandatory use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) for connections and a hypertext format as native content type.[4] The design is deliberately not easily extensible, in order to meet a project goal of simplicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/ (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #42: The Wrong Answer. With the year ending and my first Vox post coming out, this week was a natural time to take stock. I wrote my first best-of post in a long time and laid out my plans for my 501c(3). (more)

Michael "Mike" Masnick (born December 8,[1] 1974) is an American editor and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of Techdirt, a weblog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Masnick

amazon weekly metrics review process/meeting (WBR); documented a bit in Working Backwards

3 different contexts (here) (more)

Tim Harford: Who’s responsible for our accountability problem? I was recently scheduled to present my Cautionary Tales podcast live on stage as a curtainraiser for a podcast conference (more)

Adrian Hon: A Thousand Primers, Not Just One. Andy Matuschak’s essay, Exorcising us of the Primer, highlights the limitations of Neal Stephenson’s influential The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. (2024-07-10-Matuschak ExorcisingUsOfThePrimer) (more)

Dan Hon: s17e04: You don’t want an intelligent assistant; Protocols, Not Platforms (more)

Bushra Farooqui: The Ghost of "The Old Curiosity Shop" in "The Diamond Age". While re-reading Stephenson, it’s helpful to consider Diamond Age from the lens of its traditional predecessor, the allusion that lingers between the pages, unspoken, but felt—Charles Dickens’ dark 1840 tale, The Old Curiosity Shop. (more)

Frank Miroslav Review: The People’s Republic of Walmart. Let me begin by saying that I’m glad this book exists. Phillips and Rozworski are upfront about their book not containing any radical new insights into questions of economic planning, but instead they compile arguments made by others in a highly readable format, something that those on the left who argue for economic planning have needed for some time. (more)

Dan Hon: s17e09: What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide (more)

Kevin Munger: The Tragedy of Stafford Beer. There has been growing interest in cybernetic socialism over the past decade, starting with Eden Medina’s history Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Evgeny Morozov’s article on Cybersyn in the New Yorker, and a chapter on the enterprise in Leigh Phillips’ and Michal Rozworski’s book The People’s Republic of Walmart. (more)

Bruce Sterling: Futures of Cybernetics (bad auto-transcript of video). Cybernetics might have a Revival (more)

Ash Maurya: The Right Way vs. The Battle-Tested Way for Driving Breakthrough Innovation. I often get initial pushback from other coaches when I first present my step-by-step continuous innovation roadmap: The biggest objection typically centers around ordering business modeling before customer/problem discovery. (more)