Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016. Since its founding, it has accumulated more than a million English facts from over 15,000 contributors in addition to knowledge bases in other languages. Much of OMCS's software is built on three interconnected representations: the natural language corpus that people interact with directly, a semantic network built from this corpus called ConceptNet, and a matrix-based representation of ConceptNet called AnalogySpace that can infer new knowledge using dimensionality reduction.[1] The knowledge collected by Open Mind Common Sense has enabled research projects at MIT and elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mind_Common_Sense

creator/operator of the HomeTown flavor of Mastodon. (more)

Text from a talk by John Gall at Tom Gilb's Gilbfest, London, UK, June 25'2012 (more)

Factorio is a construction and management simulation game developed and published by Czech studio Wube Software. The game was announced via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2013 and released for Windows, macOS, and Linux on 14 August 2020 following a four-year-long early access phase to positive reviews. The game was released on Nintendo Switch on 28 October 2022.[1] The game follows an engineer who crash-lands on an alien planet and must harvest resources and create automated industry to build a rocket; however, as it is a sandbox game, players can continue the game past the end of the storyline. There are both single-player and multiplayer modes as well as eight additional game scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorio (more)

Alvin Roth uses the mathematical tools of Game Theory to find fixes for big, broken systems. Over the last 20 years he has pioneered a branch of economics known as Market Design (marketplace). Among Roth's accomplishments: designing networks for kidney donations and creating elegant systems that enable huge urban school districts to optimally place multitudes of students among hundreds of schools. (more)

The Fire Phone is a discontinued 3D-enabled smartphone developed by Amazon[5] and manufactured by Foxconn. It was announced on June 18, 2014, and marked Amazon's first foray into the smartphone market, following the success of the Kindle Fire (Amazon Fire). It was available for pre-order on the day it was announced. In the United States, it launched as an AT&T exclusive on July 25. The phone received mixed reviews. Critics praised the Dynamic Perspective, Firefly and, to a lesser extent, the packaged headphones, but derided the build, design, Fire OS version of Android, specifications, and exclusivity to AT&T. Amazon does not release sales figures for any of its devices, but based in part on its quickly declining prices and an announced US$170 million write-down, analysts have judged it a commercial failure.[9][10] Amazon ceased production of the Fire Phone in August 2015 and discontinued sales soon after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Phone

Amazon Fire Tablet - 2019-07-14-BoughtAmazonFireHd8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Fire (more)

The Macy conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various academic disciplines held in New York under the direction of Frank Fremont-Smith at the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation starting in 1941 and ending in 1960. The explicit aim of the conferences was to promote meaningful communication across scientific disciplines,[1] and restore unity to science.[2] (consilience) There were different sets of conferences designed to cover specific topics, for a total of 160 conferences over the 19 years this program was active;[3] the phrase "Macy conference" does not apply only to those on cybernetics, although it is sometimes used that way informally by those familiar only with that set of events. Disciplinary isolation within medicine was viewed as particularly problematic by the Macy Foundation, and given that their mandate was to aid medical research, they decided to do something about it.[4] Thus other topics covered in different sets of conferences included: aging, adrenal cortex, biological antioxidants, blood clotting, blood pressure, connective tissues, infancy and childhood, liver injury, metabolic interrelations, nerve impulse, problems of consciousness, and renal function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences (more)

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational view was recovered during the high Middle Ages, separated from theology during the Renaissance and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment. Then, with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries... The word consilience was apparently coined by William Whewell, in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience (more)

Suzanne Treister's Hexen Tarot deck from 2009-2011. HEXEN 2.0 looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society. HEXEN 2.0 specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. So I guess she's not a fan. (more)

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the [Macy conferences]] in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson (more)

An information hazard, or infohazard,[1] is "a risk that arises from the dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm," as defined by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2011, or as defined in the concept of information sensitivity. It is an idea that contradicts the idea of freedom of information as it states that some types of information are too dangerous for every single person to have access to, as they could either be harmed by it or harm others.[2] This is sometimes why information is classified based on its sensitivity. One example would be instructions for creating a thermonuclear weapon.[3] Following these instructions could cause massive amounts of harm to others, therefore limiting who has access to this information is important in preventing harm to others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard

Cass Robert Sunstein[1] (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar known for his work in constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and behavioral economics. He is also The New York Times best-selling author of The World According to Star Wars (2016) and Nudge (2008) (nudging). He was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein

A norm entrepreneur or moral entrepreneur is an individual, group, or formal organization that seeks to influence a group to adopt or maintain a social norm; altering the boundaries of altruism, deviance, duty, or compassion.[1] Moral entrepreneurs take the lead in labeling a particular behaviour and spreading or popularizing this label throughout society. This can include attributing negative labels to behaviour, the removal of negative labels, positive labeling, and the removal of positive labels. The moral entrepreneur may press for the creation or enforcement of a norm for any number of reasons, altruistic or selfish. Such individuals or groups also hold the power to generate moral panic; similarly, multiple moral entrepreneurs may have conflicting goals and work to counteract each other. Some examples of moral entrepreneurs include: MADD (mothers against drunk driving), the anti-tobacco lobby, the gun-control lobby, anti-pornography groups, Black Lives Matter and LGBT social movements [citation needed]. Pro-life and pro-choice movements are an example of two moral entrepreneurs working against each other on a single issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_entrepreneur (more)

A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue",[4] usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic (more)

Trying LLM for my Local Notes and Ebooks (more)

see also Slack.com - app by Stewart Butterfield (more)

Gergely Orosz: Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote). *Today I'm happy to have the Bending Spoons team here with me. We have Luca, Francesco and Federico. When I first tweeted about Bending Spoons and how I discovered the interesting things that you're doing, I had Italian developers ping me and telling me, oh, I actually applied to Bending Spoons. They're the hottest place to be in Italy. And I asked them, when did you apply? (more)

book series about a security cyborg who has hacked the chip that makes him controlled by his "owners" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries (more)

Premature optimization is the root of all evil -- Donald Knuth (more)