Let Christopher Alexander design your life. I received my copy of 'A Pattern Language' as a high school graduation gift. I had already declared my intention to be an architect, so my aunt and uncle bought me the design equivalent of the Bible (more)

researcher, author (Skill Code) https://www.mattbeane.com/

Collaborative Hypermedia - Basically, people collaborating in some form or another using the internet. Chat rooms, message boards and WikiWikiWeb are examples.

see esp MeatballWiki:WebOfTrust - In Collaborative Hypermedia, users are ideally given a large degree of freedom to add, edit, and remove content. Overly strict security mechanisms not only discourage free cooperation, but can fail to protect communities from malicious users. Systems like the Wiki Wiki Web "replace technical security with social and political limits" (Clifford Adams). The Web Of Trust concept attempts to create technical security that is based on the social strength of the community. An important part of the WebOfTrust (and what makes it different from a TrustMetric but the distinction is not always clear) is that it measures trust for each user based on his or her choices. (more)

Benoit Mandelbrot at EdgeOrg. A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something that I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee. I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in undertaking a theory of roughness (Texture). Think of color, pitch, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of Physics. Chemistry is filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols; all are concepts derived from sensory perceptions. Roughness is just as important as all those other raw sensations, but was not studied for its own sake... Do I claim that everything that is not smooth is Fractal? That fractals suffice to solve every problem of science? Not in the least. What I'm asserting very strongly is that, when some real thing is found to be un smooth, the next mathematical model to try is fractal or multi fractal. A complicated phenomenon need not be fractal, but finding that a phenomenon is "not even fractal" is bad news, because so far nobody has invested anywhere near my effort in identifying and creating new techniques valid beyond fractals. Since roughness is everywhere, fractals - although they do not apply to everything - are present everywhere. And very often the same techniques apply in areas that, by every other account except geometric structure, are separate.

Steve Yegge: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns. *The Wasteland has been the inevitable next step for Gas Town since the day I launched it. Every new AI tooling form-factor breakthrough has involved 100x increase in token spend. How do you 100x a Gas Town? You federate a hundred Gas Town users together to build stuff. (more)

Structured data stored at the beginning of a plaintext (like markdown). Often YAML.

Andrej Karpathy on LLM Knowledge Bases. (more)

hmm, is this expert product management pattern-matching? intuition? judgment? Fingertip Feeling? (more)

Amid Drought, Billionaires Control A Critical California Water Bank. Water prices are soaring in California’s Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s food is grown. As the West Coast’s megadrought worsens, one farming company has long been scrutinized for its outsize role in the arid region’s water supply. (more)

See fragile

Easy-to-break (more)

Scott Adams on Simplifiers and Optimizers (part of How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big). Some people are what I call simplifiers and some are optimizers. A simplifier will prefer the easy way to accomplish a task (SimplestThing, Satisficing), while knowing that some amount of extra effort might have produced a better outcome. An optimizer looks for the very best solution even if the extra complexity increases the odds of unexpected problems. I have a bias for simplification, but surely there are situations in which optimizing is the better play. So how do you know which approach works best in a given situation? (more)

see also Slack.com - app by Stewart Butterfield (more)

Bitcoin (₿) is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.[7] Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto.[8] The currency began use in 2009[9] when its implementation was released as open-source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (more)

Chris Dixon: The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle. People who’ve been in crypto for a long time view the space as evolving in cycles, alternating between periods of high activity and “crypto winters.” There have been three cycles so far. The first peaked in 2011, the second in 2013, and the third in 2017 (more)

HighLight, Annotation, Note Taking (more)

Aakash Gupta: How to Turn Claude Code into an Operating System with Carl Vellotti. (for product management) (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)

aka Beer Garden (more)