Motivation Manifesto, 2014 book by Brendan Burchard. (more)

Lazy Man's Way To Riches by Joe Karbo, 1973 (more)

How To Save the Colorado River. Snowpack in the mountains provides tap water for millions downstream. That water is also the key ingredient for salads and steak dinners around the country. Melting snow feeds creeks and tributaries that eventually connect with the Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles through seven states, supporting nearly 40 million people, over 4 million acres of farmland, and an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic activity. The river fills sprinklers and faucets from Denver to San Diego and every other major southwest city, town, farm field, and feed lot in between (more)

Colorado River Water Plan Postpones Reckoning With a Drier Future. The US government released a plan on Friday that for now staves off catastrophic cuts to the water supply in Arizona, California and Nevada as the Colorado River climate crisis leaves reservoirs at record lows, threatening a resource supporting 40 million people and more than $1 trillion in gross domestic product (more)

When politics dams feedback. Dan Davies’ account of how complex institutions drive decisions and actions while shielding themselves from accountability is a major contribution to public policy analyses. I applaud him for bringing cybernetics back in and for developing a model that surpasses the standard economics approach to information. (more)

The Colorado River in Crisis. As the population in the Colorado River Basin continues to grow, the demand for water will increase. The water in the Colorado River needs to serve municipal, agricultural, Tribal and recreation needs, and enough water needs to stay in the river for fish and wildlife, including more than 150 species that are at risk. It’s a dire situation with no easy answers. (more)

Why the western US is running out of water, in one chart. More than one in 10 Americans rely on the Colorado River to take showers and drink clean water. But with no end in sight to the decades-long drought in the western US and rapidly decreasing river levels, this essential resource is fueling bitter disputes over who, exactly, should be cutting back on water. (more)

These Four States Are in Denial Over a Looming Water Crisis. Not for the first time, the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River are fighting over how to keep these reservoirs from crashing — an event that could spur water shortages from Denver to Las Vegas to Los Angeles. (more)

William David Marx, known professionally as W. David Marx, is an American fashion and culture writer who works and lives in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (2015)[3][4][5] and Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (2022).[6] Marx also publishes a newsletter titled Culture: An Owner's Manual. He previously worked at Google as part of the Asia-Pacific Team in Corporate and Product Communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._David_Marx | https://culture.ghost.io/

Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. (more)

MTS and Gabriel: OpenAI's Lab Leak (Lab Leak). Park Bench False Flag: While working on an internal cybersecurity benchmarking exercise, a team of OpenAI models with cyber safeguards removed—including an unreleased internal model—broke out of the testing sandbox and hacked an open-source AI platform. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I’ve heard this one before. Was the researcher eating a sandwich on a park bench, perchance? (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Medical Roundup #7. It’s time to check in on some other things that have been going on, including various developments at the FDA. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On the FLI AI-Risk Open Letter. The Future of Life Institute (FLI) recently put out an open letter, calling on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. (2023 Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Types and Degrees of Alignment. What would it mean to solve the AI alignment problem sufficiently to avoid catastrophe? What do people even mean when they talk about alignment? (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: On Eliezer Yudkowsky's Letter in Time Magazine. FLI put out an open letter, calling for a 6 month pause in training models more powerful than GPT-4, followed by additional precautionary steps. (2023-03-30-ZvimOnTheFliAiriskOpenLetter) (more)

programmer, general partner @blueyard, author of upcoming book Regenerative Software. prev @wunderlist, @microsoft, @rubycentral, @rubyconf, @railsconf https://x.com/chadfowler | https://chadfowler.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/ (more)

2023 letter calling for a pause on AI system training. Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter is the title of a letter published by the Future of Life Institute in March 2023. The letter calls "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4", citing risks such as AI-generated propaganda, extreme automation of jobs, human obsolescence, and a society-wide loss of control. It received more than 30,000 signatures, including academic AI researchers and industry CEOs such as Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Noah Harari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter (more)

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person's or group's intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives. A misaligned AI system pursues unintended objectives.[1] It is often difficult for AI designers to specify the full range of desired and undesired behaviors. Therefore, the designers often use simpler proxy goals, such as gaining human approval. But proxy goals can overlook necessary constraints or reward the AI system for merely appearing aligned.[1][2] AI systems may also find loopholes that allow them to accomplish their proxy goals efficiently but in unintended, sometimes harmful, ways (reward hacking). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment (more)

Wunderlist is a discontinued cloud-based (SaaS) task management application. It allowed users to create lists to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet, computer and smartwatch. Wunderlist was free; additional collaboration features were available in a paid version known as Wunderlist Pro, released April 2013. Wunderlist was created in 2011 by Berlin-based startup 6Wunderkinder (Engl.: 6Prodigies). The company was acquired by Microsoft in June 2015, at which time the app had over 13 million users.[1] In April 2017, Microsoft announced that Wunderlist would eventually be discontinued in favor of Microsoft To Do, a new multi-platform app developed by the Wunderlist team that has direct integration with the company's Office 365 service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist

Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation.[1][2] Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition (abductive reasoning?); and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning.[3][4] Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate or heuristic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition cf Taste