Nathan Lewis thinks a Service Economy in an Urban Village (Traditional City) environment is better and more Sustainable living. He notes that while we currently have a hard time thinking-about/measuring/trusting a Service Economy, the same thing happened during the transition from Agricultural Economy to Industrial Economy (Industrial Age). (more)

Nathan Lewis slams the New Urbanists again. With all these photos from Old Europe, people sometimes get the impression that what I mean by "TraditionalCity" is old-fashioned. You could imitate Toledo (Spain) exactly and get a splendid result, but you can also have a contemporary version of the Traditional City. For example, these are photos from Seijo, a residental community (ie a "suburb") on the western side of Tokyo (Japan). Many people commute to central Tokyo. These were all farmlands sixty years ago. This is all recent construction, from a green field. (more)

Nathan Lewis on having an Abundance mentality of Minimalism. Choose aspirations and expectations that are more worthwhile on an absolute basis than the common alternatives. Like playing squash, at a serious competitive level, instead of big-car-fondling. Then, you are never "giving up" anything. You are, instead, avoiding time-wasting activities, or life-wasting activities, which also happen to be money-wasting activities. It is like eating healthy food instead of junk food. It's something you should do anyway. The fact that the healthy food also costs a lot less than the junk food is just another plus. Why would anyone eat junk food when it is not only bad for you, but also costs more? Duh. That would be stupid. In the same way, you should avoid junk activities and junk aspirations. Which are just as common, in American life today, as junk food. (more)

Like a Google you control. (more)

Search Engine feature I added to my WikiGraph site in Mar'2016. Has 2 bits: (more)

Google as Search Engine Platform. http://www.google.com/coop (more)

Chris Aldrich says Mastodon isn’t as Federated or as Decentralized as the IndieWeb. (more)

Jacob Falkovich: Winning is For Losers. Imagine if we were trying to design a Community of people devoted to cooperation, based on everything we learned about competitive and cooperative games. How should we approach this? We would build a community dedicated to creating something new, a freshly baked pie. It would have to be a long-term project. It would have an important and purely collective reward at stake, like protecting against a common tragedy (Grand Challenge, Plausible Promise). It would involve a bunch of weirdos. It would be something like transhumanism. (more)

AI-driven device created in Diamond Age that acts as coach-via-StoryTelling for some young women. (Educational Technology) (more)

Martin Seligman (in Authentic Happiness) says it's to further the process of Evolution (or the Singularity) (ok, that's my gloss on "serving something larger than yourself" (Transcendentals). Not a bad idea... (more)

A Manifesto for Less-BullShit-Living: Like many, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the “minimalism” meme, because it feels like we get “Less Everything” and who wants that? I want MOAR. (more)

serving the Transcendentals?

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer (P2P) method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system.[2] IPFS was initially designed by Juan Benet, and is now an open-source project developed with help from the community... In 2014, the IPFS protocol took advantage of the Bitcoin blockchain protocol and network infrastructure in order to store unalterable data, remove duplicated files across the network, and obtain address information for accessing storage nodes to search for files in the network... IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the World Wide Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high-throughput, content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks.[11] This forms a generalized Merkle directed acyclic graph (DAG). IPFS combines a distributed hash table, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other not to tamper with data in transit.[12] Distributed Content Delivery saves bandwidth and prevents DDoS attacks, which HTTP struggles with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System (more)

Support Group, Self-Improvement collaboration... (more)

Andy Matuschak: Bringing ideas into your Orbit. Central to what I’m imagining here is a daily practice habit somewhat akin to meditation: you open this thing up and engage with whatever microtasks it presents. You’ll work on your memory, maybe do some self-authorship with reflection questions, do some quick physics problems, some quick writing, etc. Then ten minutes later, the train arrives, you board, and that’s it for the day. The next day’s different. (more)

Chris Dent gives his philosophy of URI-for-ThinkingSpace. Some information systems exist to confirm what we think we already know or for which we can phrase a fairly concrete question (e.g. "Where is London?" or "What is the definition of "information"?"). In these cases, searching or similar interaction models are excellent tools: our inquiry is algorithmically transformed into a query against an index (note an index can take many forms). Think dictionary. Or google. Other information systems are storehouses (real or otherwise) which provide affordances for navigation, browsing and discovery. These allow for that extraordinary thing: learning new stuff. We're wandering along, soaking up new information or new ways of stating old information and BAM, we make a connection (associative), disparate paths are linked and now we know something. We have made a synthesis of A and B et voila new thesis C. Think narrative book. Or the web at large. Intertwingularity.

Andy Matuschak ponders meditation apps. (more)

Andy Matuschak various notes excerpts on the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. (more)

Term from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen for one tool they're building. (more)

Andy Matuschak concept - see (2020-02-20) Matuschak On Primer