Someone making a living on their own. I think of it as a one-person "company": being a freelancer or consultant doesn't smell the same (where as they do fall under the Free Agent umbrella). Is that implying a requirement on having a "product"? Not sure... (more)

Cyc (pronounced /ˈsaɪk/ SYKE) is a long-term artificial intelligence (AI) project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge. The project began in July 1984 at MCC and was developed later by the Cycorp company... By 2002, Cyc was described as having "consumed $60 million and 600 person-years of effort from programmers, philosophers and others—collectively known as Cyclists—who have been codifying what Lenat calls 'consensus reality' and entering it into a massive database... The knowledge base is divided into microtheories. Unlike the knowledge base as a whole, each microtheory must be free from monotonic contradictions. Each microtheory is a first-class object in the Cyc ontology; it has a name that is a regular constant. The concept names in Cyc are CycL terms or constants... An inference engine is a computer program that tries to derive answers from a knowledge base. The Cyc inference engine performs general logical deduction.[9] It also performs inductive reasoning, statistical machine learning and symbolic machine learning, and abductive reasoning... A Semantic Web version of OpenCyc was available starting in 2008, but ending sometime after 2016... The Cyc project has been described as "one of the most controversial endeavors of the artificial intelligence history".[26] Catherine Havasi, CEO of Luminoso, says that Cyc is the predecessor project to IBM Watson.[27] Machine-learning scientist Pedro Domingos refers to the project as a "catastrophic failure" for the unending amount of data required to produce any viable results and the inability for Cyc to evolve on its own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc (more)

I've been programming and designing software for over 25 years. My chief interest is in systems that allow end-users to visualize and manipulate complex systems. I've designed and built many systems that involve both complex user interfaces and an AI/KR component (such as a visual knowledge entry for medical expert systems, and a spatial visualizer for the Cyc knowledge base). I've also built many systems that involve end-user programming, for many different types of users including both children and scientists. My approach: the goal is to make software that lets people be smarter (Augmenting Human Intellect). http://hyperphor.com/ammdi https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdtravers/ (more)

Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show. The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks. By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do. (more)

DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing. The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. (more)

Naomi Klein: China's All-Seeing Eye. With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. (more)

Kevin Carson book (more)

Kevin Carson book. (more)

Mutualism guru http://mutualist.blogspot.com https://kevinacarson.org/ (more)

Kevin Carson book (more)

Kevin Carson's Homebrew Industrial Revolution is available now as Printed Book ISBN:1439266999 and free EBook. Resilient Community, Desktop Fab, etc. (more)

Teresa Torres tool for Agile Product Development framing: connecting big desired-outcomes to specific pains/opportunities, to solutions/hypotheses, to experiments.... aka OST (more)

Traditional "management", even most software product management, is Industrial-Age Command-and-Control thinking that is net-negative for managing creatives. We need a re-framing of Agile Software Development with a business-building software Product Development mindset. Rapidly Iterative based on FeedBack. A bit post-Lean-Startup. Product-Led, Customer-Driven. (more)

structure of peer-managed organization to share/reduce costs of an activity (more)

Marketing of Internet-based services? Marketing via the Internet? (more)

Supreme Court decision supporting Abortion (more)

aka ObamaCare

Steven Levy: Brian Chesky Lost His Mind One Night—and Now He's Relaunching Airbnb as an Everything App. As Brian Chesky tells it, the reinvention of Airbnb started with the coup at OpenAI. On November 17, 2023, the board of OpenAI fired company CEO Sam Altman. His friend Chesky leapt into action—publicly defending his pal on X, getting on the phone with Microsoft’s CEO.... “I was so jacked up,” he says—turned his buzzing mind to his own company, Airbnb.... He wanted to bust the company he’d cofounded out of its pigeonhole of short-term home rentals. I guess this was made possible by (2023-09-09) Itamar Gilad On Linkedin Why Did Airbnb Kill Product Management. (more)

Patrick McKenzie: *A Dangerous Professional trick: I see many people, including people in the professional class, interact with automated tooling as if it were The Company and interpreting that tooling’s inability to help as The Company’s refusal to help. (more)

a Patrick McKenzie frame for someone who gets things done.... cf reality hacking, high agency. (not quite accurate, have to find reference..) (more)