Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about serverless? It’s how back in Canonical in 2008, we knew we had to focus on the emerging DevOps world and to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) that were building in that space were working on Ubuntu. We exploited this change for our own benefits. As one CIO recently told me, one day everyone was talking about RedHat and the next it was all Cloud plus Ubuntu. That didn’t happen by accident. (more)

Apple Computer Lap Top (more)

Leonard Richardson: "Writing Aliens", or, "Duchamp, Markov, Queneau: A Mostly Delightful Quilt". In computer science, artificial intelligence is the stereotypical failed project. We have been working on this for sixty years and we don't have anything that approaches the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. (AGI) As a science fiction writer, I think it's presumptuous to use a human being as the standard of intelligence. We don't expect space aliens to have the general-purpose cognitive ability of a human being. We expect them to be different from us. (more)

see surrealism

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.[1] Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.[2][3][4] It produced works of painting, writing, theatre, filmmaking, photography, and other media as well. Works of Surrealism feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. However, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Zvi Mowshowitz: Danger, AI Scientist, Danger. the company that made the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries. Its name is Sakana AI. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Housing Roundup #8: Your Local Area. In honor of San Francisco failing its housing target and becoming subject to SB 423, this special edition of housing deals with various state and local developments (more)

Ethan McCue: Just use Postgres. Advice: When you are making a new application that requires persistent storage of data, like is the case for most web applications, your default choice should be PostgreSql. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Do Not Mess With Scarlett Johansson. Andrej Karpathy (co-founder OpenAI, departed earlier), May 14: The killer app of LLMs is Scarlett Johansson. You all thought it was math or something (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #6: College Edition. Childhood roundup #5 excluded all developments around college. So this time around is all about issues related to college or graduate school, including college admissions. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Economics Roundup #3. As always, remember that there are plenty of really stupid proposals always coming from all sides. I’m not spending as much time talking about why it’s awful to for example impose gigantic tariffs on everything, because if you are reading this I presume you already know. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #80: Never Have I Ever. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #65: I Spy With My AI. (more)

Residential real-estate, incl Senior Housing, Co-Housing, Low-income Housing, Public Housing....

market structure where the biggest organization makes almost all the profits, and everyone else struggles. (even worse than zero-sum game) (more)

Matthew Yglesias: What was neoliberalism? I think the closest thing to its current usage dates to the late 1940s and is captured by a 1951 Milton Friedman essay titled “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects.” (more)

SideGig http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hustle (more)

The Film Industry, Publishing Industry, Music Industry, TV, theatre, etc. - not just Big Media (more)

There are a variety of different producers on a television (TV) show, including showrunners, executive producers, supervising producers, coordinating producers, field producers, line producers, among other roles on a television crew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_producer (more)

A showrunner is the top-level executive producer of a television (TV) series.[1][2][3][4] The position outranks other creative and management personnel, including episode directors, in contrast to feature films, in which the director has creative control over the production, and the executive producer's role is limited to investing.[5] In scripted comedy and drama TV shows, the showrunner also usually serves as the head writer (or its most prolific writer). The role of a showrunner is not present on all television series, especially outside the US; this article describes the nature of the role where it is present... The term showrunner was created to identify the executive producer who holds ultimate management and creative authority for the program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showrunner