Bill Seitz is a Product Manager/CTO with a track-record of bringing a business perspective to building agile product-development teams for start-ups, and is seeking senior role in entrepreneurial organization building disruptive Internet-driven products. (more)

Michael Bolton: Jerry Weinberg Interview (from 2008). Michael: Recently you launched a new Web site, and your banner is “Helping smart people be happy.” Why did you choose that? Jerry: Most of the people in the computing professions are pretty smart, at least as measured by tests and the kind of technical work they accomplish. But so many of them haven’t learned how to use their smarts on themselves. They can create wonderful systems, but when they use their brains to think about themselves, they often think themselves into depression. (more)

Jerry Weinberg mission

Dan Ariely (Hebrew: דן אריאלי‎; born April 29, 1967) is an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the founder of the research institution The Center for Advanced Hindsight,[1] co-founder of the companies Kayma,[2] BEworks,[3] Timeful,[4] Genie[5] and Shapa.,[6] the Chief Behavioral Economist of Qapital and the Chief Behavioral Officer of Lemonade.[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely (more)

Brandon Hendrickson: How to really SEE an eclipse. Seven years ago, right before the last total solar eclipse to pass through North America, the web comic xkcd got something terribly, terribly wrong about solar eclipses — and about science, too (more)

Robin Berjon: The Web Is For User Agency. As Joseph Weizenbaum noted in 1976: “I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force. It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed. (more)

Lalit Bhamare: Over A Cup Of Tea With Jerry Weinberg. I’ve always been interested in helping smart people be happy and productive. To that end, I’ve published books on human behaviour, on leadership, and stories about smart people—how they produce quality work and learn to be happy. As I live in this world and look about me, I see unhappy people everywhere, and I think, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” I perceive that much of this unhappiness arises from ignorance, so when I think I can clear up some of this ignorance, I write. (more)

Samuel Arbesman: The Spreadsheet is a Simulation Machine. In 1984, a few years into the spreadsheet revolution, the tech journalist Steven Levy, wrote a long and fascinating article about this genre of software. Not only is this article a time capsule of computing history, it also gives one a sense for how people were thinking about spreadsheets even then (more)

Simon Willison: Reviving PyMiniRacer. PyMiniRacer is “a V8 bridge in Python”—it’s a library that lets Python code execute JavaScript code in a V8 isolate and pass values back and forth (provided they serialize to JSON) between the two environments (more)

I just realized my AtomStandards (near-RSS) feed is broken. Set up back in 2014 at Flask For Wiki Engine. Was working at (2019-04-15) Fixing RSS/Atom Feed. Maybe whacked by (2021-03-01) Massive Server Upgrade? Probably - web.archive has good snapshot from Jan19'2021, then bad on Jul21'2021. (more)

getting "above the bar" of good enough "quality" of web design by leaning on Bootstrap. (Designers call me "Bootstrap Bill"... then spit.)

Erik Hoel: The banality of ChatGPT. Despite being the culmination of a century-long dream, no better word describes the much-discussed output of OpenAI’s ChatGPT than the colloquial “mid.” (middle mind) (more)

Fission: IPFS, Mainnet and the Everywhere Computer. Content addressing is a fundamentally useful innovation that opens new use cases and approaches that are difficult or impossible without. (more)

Amy Chua did great job of link-baiting with her excerpt from her new Tiger Mother book. (Parent-Hood) (more)

Requiring Schooling of every person up to a certain age. School is Prison (more)

sub-case of Mental Health; see worst-case Teen Suicide; also, School is Prison

Peter Gray questions the amount of ADD diagnosis happening. In one study involving 16 different schools and more than three thousand children, teachers filled out the standard ADHD diagnostic checklist of behaviors for the students in their classrooms.[2] In that study, where teachers' ratings were not averaged in with the ratings made by parents, 23% of elementary school boys and 20% of secondary school boys were diagnosed as having ADHD... What does it mean to have ADHD? Basically, it means failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling. Most diagnoses of ADHD originate with teachers' observations... How convenient that we have this official way of diagnosing kids who don't sit still in their seats, often fail to pay attention to the teacher, don't regularly do the assignments given to them, often speak out of turn, and blurt out answers before the questions are finished. (Teen Mental Health) (more)

Peter Gray on the rise in childhood anxiety and depression (Teen Mental Health). Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant... In a research study published a few years ago, Twenge and her colleagues analyzed the results of many previous studies that had used Rotter's Scale with young people over the years from 1960 on through 2002.[3] They found that over this period average scores shifted dramatically--for children aged 9 to 14 as well as for college students--away from the Internal toward the External end of the scale. In fact, the shift was so great that the average young person in 2002 was more External than were 80% of young people in the 1960s. The rise in Externality on Rotter's scale over the 42-year period showed the same linear trend as did the rise in depression and anxiety... Twenge's own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depression are related to a shift from "IntrinsIc" to "ExtrinsIc" goals... My guess is that Twenge is at least partly correct on this, but I am going to suggest here a further cause, which I think is even more significant and basic. My hypothesis is that the generational increases in Externality, extrinsic goals, anxiety, and depression are all caused largely by the decline, over that same period, in opportunities for free play and the increased time and weight given to Schooling... By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives... Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Outside of school children spend more time than ever before in settings where they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children... School is also a place where children have little choice about with whom they can associate.

Factory Schooling is Prison

Peter Gray: “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Well, Duhhhh… (more)