Martin Hardee quotes Edward Tufte on Structured Writing: Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated "product" imaginable - and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated.

Sven Schnieders: We Used To Eat A Lot More Without Becoming Obese. The mainstream theory regarding the obesity crisis is that people consume excessive calories and move insufficiently - “calories in, calories out.” Alternative nutritional perspectives, such as Keto and Veganism, challenge this narrative only to some extent (more)

Chris F on Complex Adaptive Media Systems (CAMS). “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan would be disappointed by how we are thinking about AI-enabled media. Our focus is on forging the tools and not wielding them. When we have the tools, we are engaged in acts of mimicry. (ugh this piece seems mostly magical thinking around LLM, blockchain, and metaverse) (more)

Darkhorse Analytics: Clear Off the Table. We received a lot of attention for our Data Looks Better Naked post. (2013-08-20 DarkhorseDataLooksBetterNaked) (more)

50 Completely True Things (specifically about Israel-Palestine) (more)

Darkhorse Analytics: Data looks better naked. Edward Tufte introduced the concept of data-ink in his 1983 classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In it he states "Data-ink is the non-erasable core of the graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented" (more)

The Dada Era of Internet Memes. Last December, a factory in the Chinese province of Hebei called Donghua Jinlong posted a marketing video to TikTok showing aerial clips of its campus set to a jaunty tune. A caption proudly declared, in English, “Since 1979, Glycine comes from here.” (more)

From doomscrolling to sex: being a boy in 2024. It was two separate conversations that made me think properly about what life might be like as a boy these days. (more)

Robin Sloan novel, due mid-2024

Typically pop-up window, modal, dialog-box. (more)

aka Iain M. Banks, author of the Culture Series

Fractal guru (more)

The Uncertainty Project is a constantly evolving, community-driven collection of research-backed models and tools that helps companies architect processes for effective decision making. Built by practitioners, for practitioners, this is meant to be a collection of building blocks; not a heavy, prescriptive framework. It enables individual managers, teams, as well as whole organizations to implement systematic decision making practices at varying levels of complexity. https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/ (more)

Chris Butler is a chaotic good product manager, writer, and speaker. He has over 20 years of product management leadership at Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, Facebook Reality Labs, and Cognizant. He is now the Lead Product Manager at Google's Core Machine Learning team where he PM's the PM experience and strategy. Co-founder of the Uncertainty Project. https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/contributor/chris-butler (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Lands of Lorecraft. In the last couple of years, I’ve become aware of some genuinely fresh management thinking from an emerging cohort of thinkers on the margins of the landscape of traditional institutions. (more)

Aaron Swartz describes Judea Pearl's attempts to use AI techniques to evaluate causality, not just correlation, with Social Science Statistics. One of the reasons I find these areas to be fertile grounds to try out new ideas is that, unlike AI, tangible rewards can be reaped from solving relative small problems. Problems involving barely 4 to 5 variables, which we in AI regard as toy-problems, carry tremendous payoffs in public health and social science.

Uncertainty Project on Causal Decision Diagrams (CDD). (more)

Robin Sloan: The Conspiracy Museum. REMARKS AS PREPARED BY WILLIAM K. SING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CONSPIRACY, FOR DELIVERY ON TUESDAY APRIL 16, 2041 (more)

Robin Sloan: Are AI language models in hell? The concluding item in this mini manifesto from Taylor Troesh, about “finishing projects together”, is lovely and enticing. It strikes me that the “never finished” nature of modern software is something Zygmunt Bauman might have observed and discussed, if he’d lived long enough to write a sequel to Liquid Modernity in, say, 2020. The feeling of maintaining a “live” “service” forever (we definitely need those scare quotes)rather than completing a coherent product … oof. (more)

Robin Sloan: Hit the lights. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s been a multimodal week. I’ve traveled aboard multiple ferries, several trains — including the new SMART line in Sonoma County, terrific — and, notably, my first robo-car, one of the whirring Waymos (more)