The Knowledge Navigator is a concept described by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley in his 1987 book, Odyssey. It describes a device that can access a large networked database of HyperText information, and use software agents to assist searching for information. Apple produced several concept Videos showcasing the idea. All of them featured a Tablet style computer with numerous advanced capabilities, including an excellent text-to-speech system with no hint of "computerese", a Gesture based interface resembling the MultiTouch interface later used on the IPhone and an equally powerful Speech Recognition system, allowing the user to converse with the system via an animated "butler" as the software agent (Intelligent Software Assistant). (more)

A great and funny writer. I recommend his Chrestomathy as a great intro. (more)

Open Source Relational Data Base engine. Known for simplicity and speed. http://www.mysql.com/ (more)

The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform, a network Operating System, for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications (Collaboration Ware). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project https://croquet.io/ (more)

Ubiquity, a legacy browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, was a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. It also allowed Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox) (more)

Command Line on steroids - (2008-03-12) Enso (more)

Archy is a software system that had a user interface that introduced a different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces (GUI). Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser. Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Apple Macintosh, Canon Cat, SwyftWare, and Ken Perlin's Pad ZUI system. It can be described as a combination of Canon Cat's text processing functions with a modern ZUI (zooming user interface). Archy is more radically different from established systems than are Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass and Microsoft Research's "Task Gallery" prototype. While these systems build upon the WIMP desktop paradigm, Archy has been compared as similar to the Emacs text editor, although its design begins from a clean slate. Archy used to be called The Humane Environment ("THE")... The plan includes making the interface as "modeless" as possible, to avoid mode errors and encourage habituation. In order to achieve this, modal features of current graphical user interfaces, like windows and separate software applications, are removed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)

Venkatesh Rao on how Good is the Enemy of the Great (Best Practices, Jim Collins) (and the danger of Business Book-s). First, there’s a success that attracts imitative greed. Then something very predictable happens. A “great” story is retold in ways that only capture the “good” part... The people behind the original success discount the amount of Luck, special conditions and randomness involved in the success, and tell stories (unconsciously or consciously) designed to minimize factors besides their own contribution... So rather than getting the unreconstructed messy story of how chaos turned into order, you get an apparently logical backward extrapolation of the final state. We get the speculative assertion that the end-state process, with its checks and protections could have emerged more efficiently with a given hypothetical storyline... By promising a less messy (“learn from our mistakes”) version of XYZ’s path, without the “inefficient” twists and turns, and by promising the beautiful and efficient end state that currently exists, a path-dependent history culminating in a desirable steady state gets retold as a path-independent story. Worse, you get the suggestion that it is the end-state that contains the value, rather than the truth: most of the value was banked along the way. The end-state merely milks already-won assets efficiently. That last point bears repeating: the end-state is not where the value is. The end-state is a hard-won and defensible value-adding position. The value was banked along the way... So if you follow the “great” formula faithfully you will accidentally build walls that prevent your own bits of Luck and Serendipity from getting through. It is only by creating your own bloody mess that you will be responding to your own unique local conditions and environments, and the lucky breaks your unique initial conditions and unique path offer... To a certain extent, I am advocating methodological anarchy. But this does not mean “be stupid and random.” The real secret to getting from “good” to “great” is selective rule breaking... “Good” imitators either try and achieve modest success, or fail, by applying formulas religiously. But the “greats” find “good” formulas to break... And if there’s no formula worth breaking in your neighborhood, welcome to pioneer country. All bets are off. (more)

Forester is a tool for creating densely interlinked networks (forests) of scientific writing in hypertext... Forester is a tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. It is your lab notebook, your journal, your blackboard, and the home of your lecture notes.... Many working scientists, students, and hobbyists have wished to create their own tag-based hypertext knowledge base, but the combination of tools historically required to make this happen are extremely daunting. Both the Stacks project and Kerodon use a cluster of software called Gerby, but bitrot has set in and it is no longer possible to build its dependencies on a modern environment without significant difficulty, raising questions of longevity. Moreover, Gerby’s deployment involves running a database on a server (in spite of the fact that almost the entire functionality is static HTML), an architecture that is incompatible with the constraints of the everyday working scientist or student who knows at most how to upload static files to their university-provided public storage. The recent experience of the nLab’s pandemic-era hiatus and near death experience has demonstrated with some urgency the precarity faced by any project relying heavily on volunteer system administrators. https://www.forester-notes.org/ (more)

OCaml (/oʊˈkæməl/ oh-KAM-əl, formerly Objective Caml) is a general-purpose, high-level, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the Caml dialect of ML with object-oriented features. OCaml was created in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon,[5] Damien Doligez, Didier Rémy,[6] Ascánder Suárez, and others. The OCaml toolchain includes an interactive top-level interpreter, a bytecode compiler, an optimizing native code compiler, a reversible debugger, and a package manager (OPAM) together with a composable build system for OCaml (Dune). OCaml was initially developed in the context of automated theorem proving, and is used in static analysis and formal methods software. Beyond these areas, it has found use in systems programming, web development, and specific financial utilities, among other application domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml (more)

Jon Barton has been a YouTube Red/Premium subscriber since basically day one... YouTube Premium is the mega subscription (content bundle) model you're describing, and it already works brilliantly - Google just can't market it to save their lives... YouTube splits Premium subscription revenue 55/45 with creators, just like ad revenue. But here's the kicker: it fundamentally changes the entire ecosystem. Instead of viewers being the product sold to advertisers, we become the customers. Creators get paid MORE per Premium view than ad views, without worrying about "advertiser-friendly" content guidelines. I never get that "feels bad" moment of deciding if a video is worth X cents - I just watch what interests me, guilt-free. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #118: Claude Ascendant. The big news of this week was of course the release of Claude 4 Opus. I offered two review posts: One on safety and alignment, and one on mundane utility, and a bonus fun post on Google’s Veo 3. (more)

Twitter-acquired newsletter tool/service, killed Dec'2022

maker of Digital Video Cameras (more)

from Randall Collins: if there is a period in history where new ideas are produced, there are always between 3 and 6 networks linking the creative figures of one generation to the next. There are always at least two or three major figures at the same time; if a single network dominates, it is not creative (because creativity is negating what exists, taking up an oppositional position in a field).

Georg Simmel (/ˈzɪməl/; German: [ˈzɪml̩]; 1 March 1858 – 26 September 1918) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. Simmel was influential in the field of sociology. Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking "what is society?"—directly alluding to Kant's "what is nature?"—presenting pioneering analyses of social individuality and fragmentation. Simmel discussed social and cultural phenomena in terms of "forms" and "contents" with a transient relationship, wherein form becomes content, and vice versa dependent on context. In this sense, Simmel was a forerunner to structuralist styles of reasoning in the social sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Simmel

Sprezzatura ([sprettsaˈtuːra]) is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".[2] Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura See Renaissance Man (more)

book by Randall Collins. (more)

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America is a 2001 book by Louis Menand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metaphysical_Club:_A_Story_of_Ideas_in_America (more)

This smells like a good deal: $300 for a Chromebook where the keyboard is removable, giving you a tablet. "Lenovo - IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook 2-in1 Laptop - 13.3" Full HD Touchscreen - Snapdragon 7cG2 - 8GB - 128GB eMMC - with Keyboard - Abyss Blue" (more)