'I have no money': Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis. When she and her husband sold the house last year, they stowed away the proceeds, $282,153.87, in what they thought of as a safe place — an account at the savings startup Yotta held at a real bank (more)

Nov'2004 essay arguing that the political market structure is not Red Vs Blue states, but rather cities vs exurbs. (more)

One of the Alexander Patterns (more)

novel by Andy Kessler ISBN:098271632X (more)

The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought by William Everdell ISBN:0226224813 (more)

Steven Johnson book, ISBN:978-1-59448-771-2. This 2010 book adduces seven conditions (patterns) that enable discoveries and inventions (Huge Invention, Breakthrough, Generative), each of which gets its own chapter. (more)

Erik Hoel: I'm a complexitarian: only eat things below a certain neural complexity... octopus (is above the bar)... But of course being a complexitarian is just a stand-in. Ideally, we'd all be unconscioustarians... but without a theory of consciousness we can't even decide what to ethically eat. (more)

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)

Kurt Lewin (/lɛˈviːn/ lə-VEEN; 9 September 1890 – 12 February 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States.[1] During his professional career, Lewin's academic research and writings focuses on applied research, action research, and group communication. Lewin is often recognized as the "founder of social psychology" and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Lewin

Brian Marick: Imre Lakatos on what persuades scientists to risk their careers. He’d develop a theory of what makes it rational for a scientist to either devote their career to a new quote “research programme” or to abandon an old one. Now, it seems to be the consensus that Lakatos failed. (more)

Brian Marick: The offloaded brain, part 1: behavior. The theme of this series is that we think too much. We’d be better off if we more often arranged for our environment to push us around. Be thoughtful a few times so you can be thoughtless the rest of the time. (more)

Brian Marick on Governing the Commons, part 3: Man, 63, seeks software teams, any age. Object: matchmaking. In the previous two episodes, I’ve encouraged you to think of a software codebase as enough like a commons that Elinor Ostrom’s writings about successful commons can apply. There’s been a fair amount of skepticism (more)

aka HSA; system of paying advance into account with pre-IncomeTax dollars to later spend on medical expenses - typically used to cover gaps in High Deductible Health Insurance

Samo Burja (Bismarck Analysis): Plastic Recycling Does Not Work. For many materials like metals or paper, recycling drives down costs, saves energy, and substitutes for resource extraction. Plastics, however, are not conducive to large-scale recycling. (more)

Brian Marick on Coding, New Hampshire Style. In late 2023, I did a series of podcast episodes on ecological and embodied cognition. (more)

frenchie deconstructionism (more)

An umwelt (plural: umwelten; from the German Umwelt meaning "environment" or "surroundings") is the specific way organisms of a particular species experience the world, which is dependant on what their sensory organs and perceptual systems can detect and interpret.[1] In the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexkull and Thomas Sebeok, it is considered to be the "biological foundations that lie at the very center of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal". The term is usually translated as "self-centered world".[3] Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. The term umwelt, together with companion terms Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer) and Innenwelt (the mapping of the self to the world of objects),[4] have special relevance for cognitive philosophers, roboticists and cyberneticians because they offer a potential solution to the conundrum of the infinite regress of the Cartesian Theater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

Donald Alan Schön (September 19, 1930 – September 13, 1997) was an American philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed the concept of reflective practice and contributed to the theory of organizational learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Sch%C3%B6n

Marc Hedlund (ex-co-founder of Wesabe) on why Wesabe lost to Mint.com. First, we chose not to work with Yodlee, but failed to find or make a replacement for them (until too late)... Second, Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that. (To be defensive for just a moment, their data accuracy -- how well they automatically edited -- was really low, and anyone who looked deeply into their data at Mint, especially in the beginning, was shocked at how inaccurate it was. The point, though, is hardly anyone seems to have looked.) (more)

Past and present reads. Bolded-titles were faves. See esp. Greatest Books (more)