Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about serverless? It’s how back in Canonical in 2008, we knew we had to focus on the emerging DevOps world and to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) that were building in that space were working on Ubuntu. We exploited this change for our own benefits. As one CIO recently told me, one day everyone was talking about RedHat and the next it was all Cloud plus Ubuntu. That didn’t happen by accident. (more)

Apple Computer Lap Top (more)

Cedric Chin has a free email course on using XmR charts, esp with his Xmrit tool. https://xmrit.com/ (more)

Leonard Richardson: "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt". In computer science, artificial intelligence is the stereotypical failed project. We have been working on this for sixty years and we don't have anything that approaches the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. (AGI) As a science fiction writer, I think it's presumptuous to use a human being as the standard of intelligence. We don't expect space aliens to have the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. We expect them to be different from us. (more)

see surrealism

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.[1] Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.[2][3][4] It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Exquisite corpse (from the original French term cadavre exquis, literally exquisite cadaver) is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g., "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.")[citation needed] or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed... This technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least as early as 1918... Later the game was adapted to drawing and collage, in a version called picture consequences, with portions of a person replacing the written sentence fragments of the original.[9] The person is traditionally drawn in four steps: The head, the torso, the legs and the feet with the paper folded after each portion so that later participants cannot see earlier portions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

Zvi Mowshowitz: Danger, AI Scientist, Danger. the company that made the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries. Its name is Sakana AI. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Housing Roundup #8: Your Local Area. In honor of San Francisco failing its housing target and becoming subject to SB 423, this special edition of housing deals with various state and local developments (more)

Ethan McCue: Just use Postgres. Advice: When you are making a new application that requires persistent storage of data, like is the case for most web applications, your default choice should be PostgreSql. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson. Andrej Karpathy (co-founder OpenAI, departed earlier), May 14: The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson. You all thought it was math or something (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #19: June 2024. Yes, the non-AI world still exists. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #6: College Edition. Childhood roundup #5 excluded all developments around college. So this time around is all about issues related to college or graduate school, including college admissions. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Economics Roundup #3. As always, remember that there are plenty of really stupid proposals always coming from all sides. I’m not spending as much time talking about why it’s awful to for example impose gigantic tariffs on everything, because if you are reading this I presume you already know. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #80: Never Have I Ever. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #65: I Spy With My AI. (more)

Residential real-estate, incl Senior Housing, Co-Housing, Low-income Housing, Public Housing....

market structure where the biggest organization makes almost all the profits, and everyone else struggles. (even worse than zero-sum game) (more)

Matthew Yglesias: What was neoliberalism? I think the closest thing to its current usage dates to the late 1940s and is captured by a 1951 Milton Friedman essay titled “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects.” (more)