AppLog defines a background idea of providing WebLog-like views (native and via RSS) of any WebApp (or other app?) where chronology has any relevance. AppWiki's a slightly weirder idea, going further into Application Integration. (more)

System that caches everything you read on the web (maybe you have to hit a Save button, or maybe it defaults to saving, and you hit an Ignore button; or maybe it only saves what you blog about). (more)

DALL-E (stylized DALL·E) is an artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions. It uses a 12-billion parameter[1] version of the GPT-3] Transformer model to interpret natural language inputs (such as "a green leather purse shaped like a pentagon" or "an isometric view of a sad capybara") and generate corresponding images.[2] It can create images of realistic objects ("a stained glass window with an image of a blue strawberry") as well as objects that do not exist in reality ("a cube with the texture of a porcupine").[3][4][5] Its name is a portmanteau of WALL-E and Salvador Dalí.[2][1] Many neural nets from the 2000s onward have been able to generate realistic images.[2] DALL-E, however, is able to generate them from natural language prompts, which it "understands [...] and rarely fails in any serious way".[2] OpenAI has not released source code for either model, although a "controlled demo" of DALL-E is available on OpenAI's website, where output from a limited selection of sample prompts can be viewed.[1] Open-source alternatives, trained on smaller amounts of data, like DALL-E Mini, have been released by others.[6] According to MIT Technology Review, one of OpenAI's objectives was to "give language models a better grasp of the everyday concepts that humans use to make sense of things".[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DALL-E (more)

A coalition is an alliance among entities (Stakeholders), during which they cooperate in joint action (semi-collective action), each in their own self-interest. This alliance may be temporary or a matter of convenience. A coalition thus differs from a more formal covenant. (more)

Nora Jones on Incident Analysis: Your Organization’s Secret Weapon. the research that myself and my team have done in this space, has shown the following responses to the question of why are incident reviews important: “I’m honestly not sure.”... “Management wants us to.” ... “It gives the engineer space to vent.” (more)

Linsey Chen Marr is an American scientist who is the Charles P. Lunsford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. Her research considers the interaction of nanomaterials and viruses with the atmosphere.[1] During the COVID-19 pandemic Marr studied how SARS-CoV-2 and other airborne pathogens could be transported in air. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linsey_Marr

Zeynep Tufekci - Opinion | Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid-19? A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update. (more)

Software Forge - GitHub competitor. t follows an open-core development model where the core functionality is released under an open-source (MIT) (most of it is RubyOnRails) license while the additional functionality such as code owners,[13] multiple issue assignees,[14] dependency scanning[15] and insights[16] are under a proprietary license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitLab (more)

Alan Kay: When “What Will It Take?” Seems Beyond Possible, We Need To Study How Immense Challenges (Grand Challenges) Have Been Successfully Dealt With In The Past. Just as one person can’t make an automobile from ore, but 1000 can, a well organized community of top people can be qualitatively and exponentially more powerful than simple top-down hierarchical tactics/strategies and general voting. (more)

columnist for Bloomberg View. He was previously an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. He also blogs at Noahpinion. https://noahpinion.substack.com

Scott Alexander: Still Alive. As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to fix it. But as Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insufferable about it.

change, invention (more)

cf Customer Discovery, Product Development (Solution Discovery, Solution Interview)

term for Business Model where website (esp Newspaper) has some amount of content available for free, but makes you pay for more. (more)

one variety of learning to Say No (more)

Derek Thompson: A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. During the holiday week, I spent a frigid afternoon standing in a long line outside the local library to pick up a COVID-19 rapid test. Lines for essential goods are a pretty good sign of failed public policy. (more)

Noah Smith: A New Industrialist roundup. Six years ago, I wrote a pair of Bloomberg columns predicting the rise of an intellectual movement that I called New Industrialism — though I was sure that people would name it something else. Basically, the idea was that America wasn’t investing enough (i.e., not building enough productive capital), and that we needed a new economic outlook that emphasized building more stuff. Now that movement is springing to life before my eyes, so I think it’s time to take stock of where we are. (more)

Martin Cagan: Two in a Box PM. In this article I’d like to talk about the tendency to want to split the product management job in two, referred to as the “two in a box” PM model. (more)

Martin Cagan: Scaling with Process vs. People. In my last article I provided an overview of the six major models of Product Ops that I have encountered (thus far), and I shared my views on each. But while I highlighted the models that I consider dangerous or harmful, I didn’t elaborate on the root cause of the harmful models (more)

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Steven Johnson on Innovation. The thesis of Steven Johnson’s new book Wonderland is right there in its title: “How Play Made the Modern World.” Through a series of historical case studies, Johnson explores how certain ostensibly recreational activities led to a host of social, political, or technological breakthroughs–for instance, how the English fondness for pubs led to an abundance of them in their colonies in North America, which in turn proved to be a hotbed for the movement for independence. (play ethic, (2010-01-03) Dixon The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy)