Family of views in the philosophy of mind. Not to be confused with Theory of computation or Pancomputationalism. In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. It is closely related to functionalism, a broader theory that defines mental states by what they do rather than what they are made of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind (more)

Peter Putnam (1927-1987) was not widely known in his lifetime, but he laid the groundwork for a revolution in cognitive science. His influence is likely to spread in decades to come as the world catches up with his pioneering studies on the operation of the nervous system. With this insight of how the nervous system works, Putnam worked out its implications for virtually every branch of human knowledge, from the foundations of mathematics and physics, to psychology, the arts, social science, and the diversity of human cultures, history, religion, and philosophy. The Peter Putnam Papers (more)

Simon Willison: AI assisted search-based research actually works now. For the past two and a half years the feature I’ve most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023, with Perplexity (first launched December 2022, first prompt leak in January 2023) and then the GPT-4 powered Microsoft Bing (which launched/cratered spectacularly in February 2023). Since then a whole bunch of people have taken a swing at this problem, most notably Google Gemini and ChatGPT Search. (more)

Amanda Gefter: Finding Peter Putnam. The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: o3 Turns Pro. You can now have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem. That’s o3-pro. Should you have o3 throw vastly more compute at a given problem, if you are paying the $200/month subscription price for ChatGPT Pro? Should you pay the $200, or the order of magnitude markup over o3 to use o3-pro in the API? (more)

Microdramas are Minting New Six-Figure Careers: 'Faster You Can Get in, the Better'. I teamed up with my Ankler Media colleague Elaine Low of Series Business — where she covers the TV industry from L.A. — to dig into the booming world of microdramas, which has opened doors to fame and fortune for many creatives even as they bypass the traditional Hollywood career path. (more)

Operations Research/Systems Thinking guru (more)

the people in a group with the real Power. In-Group, Inner Circle (more)

a requirement for a company is to be sustainable (more)

John Ohno: Bot capitalism will fail. There’s been a lot of hype surrounding chat bots lately. I love bots, and usually I’m all for getting excited about the things I love, but I think the recent hype is very misguided. The reason is that the people contributing to the current hype bubble surrounding bots are not natural persons but corporate persons: they are excited about bots as products. (more)

No Netflix Deal. No Trust Fund. How the F*ck Do I Fund a YouTube Show? Today’s entry is for every legacy producer, writer, or director who wants to make their first real YouTube show — and needs an honest roadmap for how to actually pay for it. (more)

It's easier to grok ideas that are adjacent to ideas you already grok. This means that ideas also have their own adjacent possible, emanating from the ideas that form your existing foundation of understanding. (more)

Karl Schroeder: Noon in the antilibrary. ...today I’m talking to Marius Rivas, the founder and CEO of Augmented Manners.” She turned to him with a smile. “Marius, you’ve called it ‘the first true political app.’ It’s just a phone app, but it has this magic ability to get people working together. How does it do this?” (more)

An EMACS PIM app https://orgmode.org/ (more)

Refined-standard MarkDown. http://commonmark.org/ (more)

Ian Piumarta and Kimberly Rose assembled a book Points Of View: A Tribute To Alan Kay for Alan Kay's 70th birthday. Available as free EBook for all of us. (more)

Michael Strong: The Missing Institution. What if many of the ills of our society are due to the fact that we are missing a key institution for the improvement of the human condition? What if young people need to be raised in healthy moral ecologies that are becoming increasingly rare? (more)

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of Gold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard (more)

another SmartAscii format (more)

Annalee Newitz: Social media is dead – here’s what comes next. One of the not-funny ironies of the 21st century has been that everything we thought was social media is actually just mass media, except it’s terrible and broken. (more)