Joe Procopio: The End of SaaS Is Closer Than You Think. As more and more companies hop on the A.I. train in what seems like a panicked game of musical chairs... it just might be actual panic driving the decisions in those executive boardrooms right now. (more)

Joe Procopio: OpenAI Is Building 'Her' and Big Tech Is Still Defending SaaS Canned Reports. I don’t have any great love for this current version of genAI. (more)

The Hawthorne effect is a type of reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.[1][2] The effect was discovered in the context of research conducted at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant; however, some scholars feel the descriptions are apocryphal.[3] The original research involved workers who made electrical relays at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric plant in Cicero, Illinois. Between 1924 and 1927, the lighting study was conducted. Workers experienced a series of lighting changes in which productivity was said to increase with almost any change in the lighting. This turned out not to be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect (more)

Robin Sloan's latest print-zine is titled: This is How E-books Should Work. (And/or "Information technology should aspire to the speed & privacy of the printed page.") “Twenty-five years into a digital century, and the e-books are dismal.” Also refers to (2025-05-01) Sloan Zine Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail. (more)

The shadow docket (or non-merits docket)[1][a] refers to motions and orders in the Supreme Court of the United States in cases which have not yet reached final judgment,[b] decision on appeal, and oral argument. This especially refers to stays and injunctions (preliminary relief), but also includes summary decisions and grant, vacate, remand (GVR) orders. The phrase "shadow docket" was first used in this context in 2015 by University of Chicago law professor William Baude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_docket (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #134: If Anyone Reads It. It is book week. As in the new book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Sores, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The rest of the AI world cooperated by not overshadowing the book, while still doing plenty, such as releasing a GPT-5 variant specialized for Codex, acing another top programming competition, attempting to expropriate the OpenAI nonprofit in one of the largest thefts in human history and getting sued again for wrongful death. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI-Companion Piece. AI companions, other forms of personalized AI content and persuasion and related issues continue to be a hot topic. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Letting Kids Be Kids. Letting kids be kids seems more and more important to me over time. Our safetyism and paranoia about children is catastrophic on way more levels than most people realize. I believe all these effects are very large: (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #133: America Could Use More Energy. I have to remind everyone that once again that AI continues to make rapid progress. Meanwhile, we must also notice that OpenAI’s actions in the public sphere have once again because appreciably worse, as they descend into paranoia and bad faith lobbying, including baseless legal attacks on nonprofits. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #126: Go Fund Yourself. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Give Me a Reason(ing Model). Are we doing this again? It looks like we are doing this again. This time it involves giving LLMs several ‘new’ tasks including effectively a Tower of Hanoi problem, asking them to specify the answer via individual steps rather than an algorithm then calling a failure to properly execute all the steps this way (whether or not they even had enough tokens to do it!) an inability to reason. (more)

Ian Bicking: THE vs. Emacs. About two years ago I gave THE (The Humane Editor) a try. Since Raskin is back in the news and presumably going to continue work on THE, I thought I'd repost my thoughts (originally left in the forum -- they didn't have a mailing list back then). I actually want to write more about THE and some of the ideas, but I'll start here. Mostly I was just comparing it to Emacs (my primary editor) (more)

Cameron Kaiser: Jef Raskin's v and the quest for the humane computer. It's sometimes forgotten that Raskin was the originator of the Macintosh project in 1979 (more)

Meet the Canon Cat, the forgotten 1987 alternate-reality Mac. The Mac will always be identified with the year 1984. But 40 years ago, the Macintosh project started as an under-the-radar effort within Apple by Jef Raskin (more)

Walter Mossberg: For Those Nostalgic For Typed Commands, Enso Does a Nice Job. *For some people, especially fast touch typists, removing a hand from the keyboard to use the mouse is annoying, and picking through menus is slow. They prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, but these shortcuts must be memorized and can vary program to program. (more)

John Warner: (more)

SKMurphy helps startup entrepreneurs get their first few clients by offering customer development services. https://www.skmurphy.com/ https://x.com/skmurphy

tag for experiments with GenAI, like (more)

Jef Raskin: Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer. This is an outline for a computer designed for the Person In The Street (or, to abbreviate: the PITS); one that will be truly pleasant to use (more)

Entrepreneur. Brian Clark is the founder of Copyblogger, the midlife personal growth newsletter Further, Unemployable, an educational community that provides smart strategies for freelancers and solopreneurs, and Creative Affiliate, affiliate marketing advice for creators. (more)