Paul Ford: AI is ushering in a miraculous age. We shouldn’t waste it. There’s a lot swirling right now (more)

Chris Butler: Decision-Forcing Cases: Gaining experience without the hurt. Product people play an amorphous, uncertain, and constantly renegotiated role on product teams. To do well in that role requires experience. (more)

Paul Ford: Stop trying to make computers human—and get back to making them awesome. That day, people online had been discussing how good ChatGPT was at guessing where a picture was taken, so I fed it this image and asked it not just to figure out what building, but which floor. It identified the exact building (17 State Street), and then suggested it was the 34th floor (it was the 30th). This was, I thought, surprisingly accurate. (more)

Library Startup ‘Briet’ Wants to Revolutionize E-Book Sales, Not Licensing. With publishers and libraries at odds over e-book licensing’s long-term expense, hold times, and ethical concerns, a new platform called Briet is pursuing an open-access approach. Briet invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access. Several independent publishers including PM Press, Punctum, Sideshow, and Silver Sprocket are on board. (more)

Paul Ford: AI explains Palantir. I spent a lot of time using AI tools to generate text, and most of it was predictably forgettable, but I did get ChatGPT to help me finally understand what Palantir does. Basically, they strap a graph database on a CRM and some dashboards, solve deploy for police departments, throw consultants in front of that, and use a government-friendly version of agile to actually ship product in months instead of years (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Eigenyou Theory. software eats you...in a medium-is-the-message way, the digital environment changes you and makes you a different and, as I will argue, more characteristic version of yourself. And less of an interchangeable part. (more)

Paul Ford: Claude Code for web ruined my brain. Anthropic recently launched a browser-based version of its Claude Code product. I’ve been using their desktop- (or rather, terminal-) based coding tool for nearly a year. Now it’s on the web, and in their mobile app (more)

Paul Ford: My Practical “Pre-Meeting“ AI Prompt That Helps Me Be a Better Listener. At Aboard, we’re building a tool that helps you build business software very, very quickly. And lately we’re starting to have more meetings to pitch our approach—and I've been using AI to prep myself for those meetings. (more)

FourGW term? Foreign Policy? wider? or is it really a generic phrase? (more)

Fabius Maximus on the Myth of Grand Strategy. We can describe these as "grand strategies", but to do so has an element of falsity. Such intellectual analysis, based on theory, had no place in the hearts of these peoples. History also suggests than leaders cannot manufacture a "Primal Strategy." You either have it, or you don't (Emergence?)... We can only envy these "primal strategies." The people of a developed western state seldom have a widely agreed goal and the willingness to sacrifice for its achievement. History shows that a mature state often tries to imitate a "primal strategy," a vain attempt to recapture a lost element from its past. Developed states have wealth, income, and security. They have complex societies, whose elements have a wide range of goals and viewpoints (Coalition). Their leaders and people have a large degree of cynicism. All of these make a "primal strategy" difficult to achieve. Europe"s last attempt was burnt out of its culture in the fires of World War I... General Semantics also sees the world in terms of maps. It is a science of applied epistemology invented in 1933 by Alfred Korzybski. The "ABC-s" of General Semantics explain why grand strategies tend to fail, and greater ambition increases the odds of failure. (This is 1st in his 4-part Grand Strategy series.)

Daniel Nettle: It probably is that bad. The discipline of [psychology] is wringing its hands about its failure to make enough substantial and dependable scientific progress (failure of science) over the last fifty years of effort. First, we blamed our methods: hypothesizing after the results were known, researcher degrees of freedom, p-hacking and the rest. Then, we went after the theories: theories in psychology were so arbitrary. (more)

A. Jesse Jiryu Davis reviews Naur Programming as Theory Building. In his 1985 article “Programming as Theory Building”, Peter Naur (of Backus-Naur form) says a programmer’s main activity isn’t coding, it’s creating a theory of the problem at hand and its solution. This theory is implicit (tacit) knowledge, which can’t be written down. (more)

The Food That Helps Battle Depression. Now recent studies show that a healthy diet may not only prevent depression, but could effectively treat it once it’s started. (more)

A user journey is the experiences a person has when interacting with something, typically software. This idea is generally used by those involved with user experience design, web design, user-centered design, or anyone else focusing on how users interact with software experiences. It is often used as a shorthand for the overall user experience and set of actions that one can take in software or other virtual experiences. User journeys describe at a high level of detail exactly what steps different users take to complete a specific task within a system, application, or website. This technique shows the current (as-is) user workflow, and reveals areas of improvement for the to-be workflow. When documented, this is often referred to as a User Journey Map. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_journey

Jeni Miles: Apps to the Future. (more)

In 2012, aspiring to develop a time management app that helps people "use time better" and avoid procrastination, Dan Ariely co-founded Timeful with Yoav Shoham and Jacob Bank.[52][2] The app was acquired by Google in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Professional_ventures_and_affiliations

David Kadavy: I Took a Week Off. Three Years Later, I Sold to Google. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time — that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want. (more)

Scott Alexander: Chronic Psychitis. Some people have asked my opinion on a recent spate of articles like Is Depression Partly Caused By An Allergic Reaction? and Depression May Be Caused By Inflammation. (more)

GRM vs PITIA (more)

Real Estate Investing for Dummies by Eric Tyson (Author), Robert S. Griswold (Author) (more)