Effective Altruism is a philosophy and social movement focused on answering one question: How can we best help others? Our resources are limited, so we have to use them wisely. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ (more)

Santa Fe Institute researcher on scaling of cities like biological organisms. (more)

Observable is a platform where you can collaboratively explore, analyze, visualize, and communicate with data on the web. In this demo, you'll see how to work with your own data and discover business insights in just five minutes. https://observablehq.com/ (more)

Engagement. contra DisEngagement (more)

Active listening is the practice of preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback for the sake of showing attentiveness to the message being presented.[1] This form of listening conveys a mutual understanding between speaker and listener. Speakers receive confirmation their point is coming across effectively, and listeners absorb more content and understanding by being engaged. Active listening was introduced by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening (more)

FastAPI is a Web framework for developing RESTful APIs in Python. FastAPI is based on Pydantic and type hints to validate, serialize, and deserialize data, and automatically auto-generate OpenAPI documents.[3] It fully supports asynchronous programming and can run with Uvicorn and Gunicorn.[4] To improve developer-friendliness, editor support was considered since the earliest days of the project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastAPI (more)

Scott Alexander: Welcome To The Terrible World Of Prescription-Only Apps. Trouble falling asleep? Guidelines recommend you try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Insomnia (CBT-i). The journals are full of articles begging doctors to use CBT-i instead of potentially-dangerous sleeping pills. Doctors rarely comply: getting patients CBT-i is hard. The usual sound bite is that “there are 60 million people with insomnia in the US but only 75 licensed CBT-i therapists.” What can you do? Not much. Late last year, Pear Therapeutics released a CBT-i app (formerly “SHUT-i”, now “Somryst”) which holds the patient’s hand through the complicated CBT-i process. Studies show it works as well as a real therapist, which is very well indeed. There’s only one catch: you need a doctor’s prescription. (more)

Product Positioning guru https://www.aprildunford.com/ (more)

Michael Mace on using quantitative Market Research techniques for Market Segmentation. It’s better to use quantitative research – at least then you’ll know you have a representative sample of customers. But there are still two major drawbacks to this sort of research, which I call the possibility gap and the blender... I think the way to get past the blender and the possibility gap is not to try to design the actual products through research. Instead, focus on understanding the needs and psychology of the customers, so you can anticipate the way they’d react to new features. (more)

creating a Model of Market Segments (more)

A note that is "about" a single concept. This improves its composability. (more)

Christoph Labacher: Gotz Bachmann's Ethnographic Research on Dynamicland. While it would be inaccurate to describe the Dynamic Medium Group as secretive.. it is obvious that the publicly available information is highly moderated. Little is available on the history, inner workings, and processes of the group (more)

James Somers: The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete. Here's What's Next. - The Atlantic (more)

Softspace is inventing a new kind of tool for thought for thinkers and makers using virtual reality and augmented reality. https://soft.space/ (tools for thought) (more)

Oculus Quest

virtual reality standard format for 3D virtual avatars (more)

Jess Martin on Real-Time Apps and Thinking about Thinking. Building real-time, multi-user apps..I’ve been working with the Croquet team for the past two months. Croquet is a library and platform for building multiplayer web applications with no server. (more)

Jess Martin: A Few Research Updates. I'm happy to share my new Research Notebook... It took me less than two hours to export my notes from Bear, set up the new Gatsby site, and publish to Netlify. The update workflow is also quite a bit easier, so I plan to integrate more of my 1000+ notes over the next few weeks. (more)

Jess Martin: The Work I'm Looking For. I believe that computation represents a fundamental shift in human capacity, similar in scope to the creation of spoken language or writing. And yet we're only 50 years into a 500-year revolution. (more)

Jess Martin: Fission and the Future of Computing. In the last update, I announced that I was joining the team at Fission as a research engineer (more)