Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American computer game developer and publisher based in Irvine, California. A subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the company was founded in February 1991 as Silicon & Synapse, Inc. by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles:[2] Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce and Allen Adham. The company originally concentrated on the creation of game ports for other studios' games before beginning development of their own software in 1993, with games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1993, the company became Chaos Studios, Inc., and then Blizzard Entertainment soon after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates early in the following year. Shortly after, Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. (World of Warcraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment
Mat Duggan is Reading "Play Nice", the story of Blizzard ComputerGames. Really good book, but also a fascinating look at a company following a very similar trajectory to a lot of tech companies. (more)
The Software Business. The big guys, and the ISV. Originally shrink-wrap, now more SaaS (more)
Book preaching: I want Computer Game creation to be decentralized. I want open access to the creative act for everyone. I want games as zines. (Network Economy, indie) (more)
Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #85: AI Wins the Nobel Prize. Both Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis were given the Nobel Prize this week, in Physics and Chemistry respectively. Congratulations to both of them along with all the other winners. AI will be central to more and more of scientific progress over time. This felt early, but not as early as you would think. (more)
Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #5. Bullying: Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. (more)
Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #84: Better Than a Podcast. Introduction: Andrej Karpathy continues to be a big fan of NotebookLM, especially its podcast creation feature. There is something deeply alien to me about this proposed way of consuming information, but I probably shouldn’t knock it (too much) until I try it? So I figured: What could be a better test than generating a podcast out of this post (more)
Nadia Asparouhova: Mapping out the tribes of climate. Climate is a gravity well for talent, but why don’t other, equally impactful topics attract talent in the same way? Why isn’t everyone dropping everything to work on homelessness, or global poverty, or curing cancer?... What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate change as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?” (more)
Machine learning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence, concerns the construction and study of systems that can learn from data (Big Data). For example, a machine learning system could be trained on email messages to learn to distinguish between spam and non-spam messages (SpamWars). After learning, it can then be used to classify new email messages into spam and non-spam folders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning (more)
Simon Wardley: Why open source AI matters? Why the fuss about conversational programming — Part III. ((2023-01-30) Wardley Why The Fuss About Conversational Programming) (more)
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a class of artificial neural networks for sequential data processing. Unlike feedforward neural networks, which process data in a single pass, RNNs process data across multiple time steps, making them well-adapted for modelling and processing text, speech, and time series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.[4][5] TensorFlow was developed by the Google Brain team for internal Google use in research and production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow
In machine learning, a neural network (also artificial neural network or neural net, abbreviated ANN or NN) is a model inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks in animal brains.[1][2] An ANN consists of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in the brain. These are connected by edges, which model the synapses in the brain. Each artificial neuron receives signals from connected neurons, then processes them and sends a signal to other connected neurons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning) (more)
Simon Wardley: Maps as Code. Why the fuss about conversational programming? Part II. (2023-01-30) Wardley Why The Fuss About Conversational Programming (more)
what seems like Elite Overproduction is really Midwit Overproduction
Gary Marcus on AI (GenAI). ...a new article on LLMs from six AI researchers at Apple: "we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models .... Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching--so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!" (more)
This is the publicly-readable WikiLog Digital Garden (20k pages, starting from 2002) of Bill Seitz (a Product Manager and CTO). (You can get your own pair of garden/note-taking spaces from FluxGarden.)
My Calling: Reality Hacking to accelerate Evolution by increasing Freedom, Agency, and Leverage of Free Agents and smaller groups (SmallWorld) via D And D of Thinking Tools (software and Games To Play).
See Intro Page for space-related goals, status, etc.; or Wiki Node for more terse summary info.
Beware the War On The Net!
Current:
- head of product for an early-stage boot-strapped company
- founder FluxGarden for Digital Garden hosting
- wrote Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems ASIN:B00HHJA5JS
My Coding for fun.
Past:
- Director Product Managment, NCSA Sports
- CTO/Product Manager at a series of startups: MedScape, then Axiom Legal, then Living Independently, then DailyLit, then AEP...
- founded Family Financial Future, personal-financial-planning nagware for parents
- consulting
- founded Teamflux.com, a hosting service for wiki-based collaboration spaces.
- founded Wikilogs.com, a hosting service for WikiLog-s (wiki-based weblogs).
Agile Product Development, Product Management from MVP to Product-Market Fit, Adding Product To Your Startup Team, Agility, Context, and Team Agency, (2022-10-12) Accidental Learnings of a Journeyman Product Manager
Big Levers, Theory of Change, Change the World, (2020-06-27) Ways To Nudge Future; Network Enlightenment, Optimistic Near Future Vision; Huge Invention; Alternatives To A College Degree; Credit Crisis 2008; Economic Transition; Network Economy; Making A Living; Varieties Of Info Technology Jobs; Generative Schooling; Product Oriented Unschooling; Reality Hacker; A 20th Century Economic Theory
FluxGarden; Network Enlightenment Ecosystem; ThinkingTools Interaction as Medium; Hypermedia Pattern Language; Everyone Needs Their Own ThinkingSpace; Digital Garden; Virtual ThinkingSpace; Thinking Tools Companies; Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts; My CollaborationWare History; Wiki Proliferation; Portal Collaboration Roadmap; Wiki For GroupWare, Overlapping Scopes Of Collaboration, Email Discussion Beside Wiki, Wiki For CollaborationWare, Collaboration Roadmap; Sister Sites; Wiki Hack
Personal Cloud; 2018-11-29-NextOpenInfrastructure, 2018-11-15-BooksVsTweets; Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock
Social Warrens; Culture War; 2017-02-15-MindmapCultureWarSocialMediaEconomy; Cultural Pluralism
Fractally Generative Pattern Language, Small Tribe, SimplestThing, Becoming A Reality Hacker, Less-Bullshit Living, The Craft; Games To Play; Evolution, Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems
Digital Therapeutics, (2021-05-26) Pondering a Mental Health space, CoachBot; Inside-Out Markov Chain