Tantra (/ˈtæntrə/; Sanskrit: तन्त्र, lit. 'loom, weave, warp') are the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism that developed in India from the middle of the 1st millennium CE onwards.[1] The term tantra, in the Indian traditions, also means any systematic broadly applicable "text, theory, system, method, instrument, technique or practice".[2][3] A key feature of these traditions is the use of mantras, and thus they are commonly referred to as Mantramārga ("Path of Mantra") in Hinduism or Mantrayāna ("Mantra Vehicle") and Guhyamantra ("Secret Mantra") in Buddhism.[4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantra (more)

Threaded Discussion in Twitter. Sometimes also used for broadcast TweetStorm. (more)

My Pixel 2 XL has been increasingly flaky with voice and SMS/MMS, so it seemed like time to give up. (more)

SMS texting works ok, but MMS, either for a group text, or for a single-person text with a photo attachment, is often unreliable. I'm pretty sure this has always been true, but can't find a record of it before today. (On t-mobile with Pixel 2 XL.) (more)

ADD: A Different Perception ISBN:1887424148 by Thom Hartmann. Hartmann takes a positive view of ADD, stressing the successes that those with ADD can have using their talents and skills rather than dwelling on their difficulties. His work marks the first time an author characterized ADD as something other than a disease. (more)

see ADD: Different Perception and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_versus_farmer_hypothesis

Logseq raises $4.1M to Accelerate Growth of the New World Knowledge Graph. The financing was led by Patrick Collison, Stripe CEO, Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, Tobias Lütke, Founder of Shopify, Sriram Krishnan, GP at A16Z, along with Craft Ventures, Matrix Partners, Day One Ventures, Charlie Cheever, Founder of Expo/Quora, and Dave Winer. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/5/22: A Lack of Care. I haven’t written an additional China post because my sources have not turned up much additional information, and the situation does not seem to have dramatically changed (more)

aka software robot, e.g. chatbot

Chris Hayes 2012 book: if you have this vision of an institutional arrangement with huge rewards for performance, it's trickier than it looks to design a system that doesn't also have big rewards for cheating (more)

Robin Sloan: Bad hosts, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the overlay network. Concluding my notes on Web3, I wrote that Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of the internet, because it proves, powerfully, that new protocols are still possible. (see (2021-11-11) Sloan Notes On Web3) (more)

Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 5, imagination engine. I made a system to aid in the generation of locations beyond this first one. That will be the focus of this week’s edition (more)

Anne-Laure LeCunff: Control your time to free your mind with the founder of Akiflow. Nunzio Martinello is the Founder and CEO at Akiflow, a powerful tool that allows you to consolidate all the apps you use into one place so you can block time for your tasks and see everything you need to get done in your calendar. (more)

Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 4, ladder of abstraction. Perils of the Overworld aims to be an adventure game in which you set out on a grand, dangerous quest but then, as you aid others and are aided in return, find yourself enmeshed with them: and so, your quest ends not in the jaws of a dragon but in the grip of a community. In the vise of actually caring! Which is, of course, wonderful, and which sets up a tension, I hope, between “winning” the game and “losing” the game. Losing will be pleasant and interesting. You’ll do it over and over. (cf CoachBot, infinite game) (more)

Robin Sloan: Cloud study. The website you’re reading is mostly static HTML, just web pages on a CDN, but for newsletter subscribers, it does offer a few bits of interactivity, and those bits require code to run somewhere other than your browser. For my projects, that “somewhere” has lately and reliably become cloud functions (more)

Robin Sloan: Overworld Week 6, mechanic or bust. Regarding the actual mechanism of this so-called game I am making, my initial strategy was basically to ignore it. Seriously: this was a considered strategy! The main attraction of Perils of the Overworld, I figured, would be the writing, and the basic push-pull of making choices—the “what next?” of a Choose Your Own Adventure book—would be mechanism enough to keep the player tapping. I still think there’s a kernel of truth there—“what next?” is one of the most powerful forces in the universe—but the no-strategy strategy did not work. Here’s why (more)

Noah Smith Interview: Ramez Naam, futurist, author, and investor. In 2011 he wrote a guest post for Scientific American entitled “Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?” that alerted the world to the startling, consistent, and seemingly unstoppable cost declines for solar energy. (more)

Robin Sloan: OverWorld Week 3, oblique. Here’s one of my key references for the look of the map in Perils of the Overworld—and the game’s whole visual approach, really: (more)

Robin Sloan: The Truth About the East Wind. This a short story about curiosity, obsession, and one of the greatest cover-ups of all time. Also, Greek gods (more)

Amazon Removes Purchase Feature From Kindle for Android. Amazon has removed purchases from the Kindle app for Android devices in accordance with a new Google Play App Store policy that requires developers to implement Google's billing system.