Barack Obama's stab at Healthcare Reform. (more)

The Panama Papers (Spanish: Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities.[1][2][3] The documents, some dating back to the 1970s,[4] were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca,[5] and were leaked in April 2016.[6] The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private.[7] While offshore business entities are legal (see Offshore Magic Circle), reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.[8]... On May 27, 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted a number of companies and individuals for conspiracy, corruption and racketeering in connection with bribes and kickbacks paid to obtain media and marketing rights for FIFA tournaments. Some immediately entered guilty pleas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers (more)

Adrian Hon: What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon. ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding. (more)

Zettelkasten guru

Amazon is known for starting meetings (since 2004) with silent reading ("Study Hall") of a 4-6pg memo, instead of using PowerPoint. (more)

Tim Bray: an A-Cloud PR/FAQ. (more)

Digital Therapeutics maker

The FDA just approved the first prescription video game — it’s for kids with ADHD (ADD). Akili Interactive’s EndeavorRX, formerly Project EVO, may go down in history: it’s the first video game that can legally be marketed and prescribed as medicine in the US. (more)

Generative Pretrained Transformer 2, commonly known by its abbreviated form GPT-2, is an unsupervised transformer language model and the successor to GPT. GPT-2 was first announced in February 2019, with only limited demonstrative versions initially released to the public. The full version of GPT-2 was not immediately released out of concern over potential misuse, including applications for writing fake news.[51] Some experts expressed skepticism that GPT-2 posed a significant threat. The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence responded to GPT-2 with a tool to detect "neural fake news".[52] Other researchers, such as Jeremy Howard, warned of "the technology to totally fill Twitter, email, and the web up with reasonable-sounding, context-appropriate prose, which would drown out all other speech and be impossible to filter".[53] In November 2019, OpenAI released the complete version of the GPT-2 language model.[54] Several websites host interactive demonstrations of different instances of GPT-2 and other transformer models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#GPT-2

stripe.com etsy twitter scala scalding rainier ppl dabbledb smalltalk seaside islands remote gradient retreat (more)

Payment Processing company

Allen Cheng: Starting a Business Around GPT-3 is a Bad Idea. A good technology doesn’t necessarily make for a good business. The fact that GPT-3 works so well out of the box should be terrifying to founders (more)

The FDA announces COVID-19 Digital Health Devices for Psychiatric Disorders Policy. FDA is issuing this guidance to provide a policy to help expand the availability of digital health therapeutic devices for psychiatric disorders to facilitate consumer and patient use while reducing user and healthcare provider contact and potential exposure to COVID-19 during this pandemic. (Digital Therapeutics) (more)

Adam Keesling: GPT-3 Will Accelerate The Privatization of Internet Communities (Social Warrens). In this article, I’ll be attempting to inform and persuade you that GPT-3 is the beginning of the end of the digital public commons. (more)

Azeem Azhar on OpenAI and GPT2. (more)

Robin Sloan: Notes from the quest factory. Recently, I used an AI trained on fantasy novels to generate custom stories for about a thousand readers. The stories were appealingly strange, they came with maps (MAPS!) (more)

Sarah Constantin: Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences. Recently, OpenAI came out with a new language model that automatically synthesizes text, called GPT-2. (more)

See status game

Cory Doctorow on QAnon. Which raises a different question: why is it so easy to find people who want to believe in conspiracies. My answer: because so many of the things that have traumatized so many people ARE conspiracies. (Conspiracy Theory, CultureWar) (more)

Real World systems are Open System-s, which makes them messily non-linear. (more)