The original SimCity has been donated to the OLPC project. This was initiated by Don Hopkins, the original coder (correction: he ported the original Maxis code to UNIX). He is integrating it into the Sugar UI system and will make it mod-able by Python. (more)

book on Raising Kids ISBN:0470471948 by Lenore Skenazy http://www.freerangekids.com/ (more)

Dilbert notes There's a fine line between Marketing and Hating.

Since when is Marketing a crime?

Today during the Tools for Thought Rocks call, Boris Mann noted that there's really very little mention/adoption of Tools for Thought, per Google Trends. Especially when you compare to Evernote. (more)

Does anyone have a model of activity alive-ness? (more)

"the" "current" model/framing of a problem - cf Problem Discovery

getting to the "real problem" (hah), leading later to Solution Discovery (more)

shared mental model, shared language

see IssueTracker

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

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid-19 Kill. The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff. (more)

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)