Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was a Florentine[4][5] diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince (Il Principe), written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death.[6] He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli

Florence (/ˈflɒrəns/ FLORR-ənss; Italian: Firenze [fiˈrɛntse] ⓘ)[a] is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in its metropolitan province as of 2025.[2] Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of that era.[4] It is considered by many academics[5] to have been the birthplace of the Renaissance, becoming a major artistic, cultural, commercial, political, economic and financial center. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence (more)

NotebookLM generating notes. Yes, collaborative groups of thinkers have frequently instigated significant technological and political changes throughout history, operating through various mechanisms such as shared vision, informal roles, rebellion against established norms, and instrumental intimacy. (more)

A monastery is a building or complex of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone (hermits). A monastery generally includes a place reserved for prayer which may be a chapel, church, or temple, and may also serve as an oratory, or in the case of communities anything from a single building housing only one senior and two or three junior monks or nuns, to vast complexes and estates housing tens or hundreds. A monastery complex typically comprises a number of buildings which include a church, dormitory, cloister, refectory, library, balneary and infirmary and outlying granges. Depending on the location, the monastic order and the occupation of its inhabitants, the complex may also include a wide range of buildings that facilitate self-sufficiency and service to the community. These may include a hospice, a school, and a range of agricultural and manufacturing buildings such as a barn, a forge, or a brewery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastery

Genius for Scenes (Subcultures)? Brian Eno term. (more)

an old-Europe city/ (more)

"What looks like a Crisis is often simply the end of an Illusion." (theater) -Jerry Weinberg (Rhonda’s First Revelation: It May Look Like a Crisis, But It’s Only the End of An Illusion.) - link (more)

term often used for leader/creator of an open-source project

Alfred Elton van Vogt (/væn voʊkt/ ⓘ VAN VOHKT;[1] April 26, 1912 – January 26, 2000) was a Canadian-born American science fiction writer. His fragmented, bizarre narrative style influenced later science fiction writers, including Philip K. Dick. He was one of the most popular and influential practitioners of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the genre's so-called Golden Age, and one of the most complex.[2] The Science Fiction Writers of America named him their 14th Grand Master in 1995 (presented 1996). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._van_Vogt (more)

Philosophy created by Alfred Korzybski. His key book was Science And Sanity, which I have but will probably never read in full. (Here's the archive of an online reading group from 1996.) (more)

the system at the meta level? aka meta-systems, systems thinking at the meta-level, or for the infinite game

John Taylor Gatto, a rebel against institutionalized education (Factory Schooling). (more)

Apache Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project[1] designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powered their Inbox Search feature until late 2010.[2][3] Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon DynamoDB-like infrastructure.[4] Cassandra provides a structured Key-Value store with tunable consistency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra

Amazon DynamoDB is a managed NoSQL database service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It supports key-value and document data structures and is designed to handle a wide range of applications requiring scalability and performance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_DynamoDB (more)

Werner Vogels on Amazon's internal DynamoDB system, internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable (Scaling Out), highly-available Key-Value storage system... We submitted the technology for publication in SOSP because many of the techniques used in Dynamo originate in the operating systems and distributed systems research of the past years; DHTs (Distributed Hashtable), consistent hashing, versioning, vector clocks, quorum, anti-entropy based recovery, etc. As far as I know Dynamo is the first production system to use the synthesis of all these techniques, and there are quite a few lessons learned from doing so. The paper is mainly about these lessons... There are many services on Amazon's platform that only need Primary Key access to a Data Store. For many services, such as those that provide best seller lists, shopping carts, customer preferences, session management, sales rank, and product catalog, the common pattern of using a Relational Data Base would lead to inefficiencies and limit scale and availability. (more)

Technology that can be key Infrastructure either pre-Civilization (Africa) or post-Collapse. (more)

Term coined by Ray Oldenburg to refer to public spaces (not those necessarily owned by the government, but where the public can gather for interaction). (Third because it's not home or work.) (more)

A neobank is a type of direct bank that operates exclusively using online banking without traditional physical branches. In contrast to direct banks, in many cases, neobanks do not have their own banking licenses, and instead rely on partner banks.[1][2][3] They typically have lower operational costs, which can sometimes result in lower fees and more competitive interest rates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobank (more)

I just discovered Tim Carmody's New Liberal Arts (free) EBook which he put out a couple years ago. (Written with lots of other people.) Attention Economics, Brevity, Coding and Decoding, Creativity, Finding, Food, Genderfuck, Home Economics, Inaccuracy, Iteration, Journalism, Mapping, Marketing, Micropolitics, Myth and Magic, Negotiation, Photography, Play, Reality Engineering, Translation, Video Literacy (more)

Dmitry Orlov book Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, published in 2008 ISBN:0865716064 (Thin Book: 176 pages) - Survivalism bit? (more)