Weather and Wildfires of 2023 - climate change? (more)

cable channel (more)

GenAI chatbot built for Lenny Rachitsky and his fans, built early 2023, by Dan Shipper https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/i-built-a-lenny-chatbot-using-gpt

Federated OpenMicroBlogging/OStatus app/network. (more)

like incubator

accelerator? "Home of The Post Web... Beyond Web3.. the future is agentic" https://outlierventures.io/ (more)

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction (scifi) novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune and the game itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One (then a 2018 movie)

Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink https://indivisible.org/resource/guide (more)

Robert Sullivan wrote an op-ed claiming that NYC is getting worse in letting pedestrians get frozen-out by increasing AutoMobile Street Traffic. Streets Blog copied his piece and added lots of links. (more)

NYC has been doing down-Zoning to limit residential Real Estate development. (Good way to restrict supply and maintain a justification for Rent Control, I suppose...) Most of that has been outside Manhattan, but: Even in Manhattan, where the city has recently rezoned former manufacturing areas to make high-rise residential development possible, it has at the same time downzoned parts of the West Village. Part of the problem is the responsiveness of BigGov Infrastructure - People started to realize: "This is a problem in my Neighborhood. You know what? This is leading to overcrowding in my school (Public School). This is why we have a Street Traffic problem. We're getting Sew Er backups because the Infrastructure can't handle these developments." People started to realize, "Wow, this really does affect our Quality Of Life." (more)

AutoMobile, Taxis, buses (Cheap Oil) (more)

the hell you face after getting your AutoMobile through Street Traffic (more)

Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation, creator of Chandler, the WorkGraph PIM for Free Agents. http://www.osafoundation.org/ (more)

book by Scott Rosenberg about OSAF in particular, and the general frustration of all parties in building software. Software Engineering, Big Project, etc. http://www.dreamingincode.com/ ISBN:1400082463 (more)

Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass media.[1] The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, the sciences, and the private-life morality of the citizens.[2] In the exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian regime of government and an authoritarian régime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview, authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power, and is supported, either jointly or individually, by a military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

The Power of the Powerless (Czech: Moc bezmocných) is an expansive political essay written in October 1978 by the Czech dramatist, political dissident, and later statesman, Vaclav Havel. The essay dissects the nature of communist regimes of the time, life within such a regime, and how by their very nature, such regimes can create dissidents of ordinary citizens. The essay goes on to discuss ideas and possible actions by loose communities of individuals linked by a common cause, such as human-rights petition Charter 77... The topic of how best to resist a totalitarian system occupied Havel's mind after the launch of Charter 77. This became the crux of his essay, which was one of the most "original and compelling pieces of political writing" to come out of the Eastern Bloc, according to Havel biographer, John Keane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless (more)

Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry.[1] The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American theoretical biologist, in 1986.[2] In 1987 Langton organized the first conference on the field, in Los Alamos, New Mexico.[3] There are three main kinds of alife,[4] named for their approaches: soft,[5] from software; hard,[6] from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life researchers study traditional biology by trying to recreate aspects of biological phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life

A new study confirms the benefits of Urbanization. What they found were some general correlations of size and resource consumption that more or less fit the biological organism metaphor, meaning as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it (Energy Accounting) in a proportion called Sub Linear scaling (Economies Of Scale). What was surprising to the team was when they measured Creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew (City Size), the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but Super Linear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster... Oftentimes, cities are referred to as its own EcoSystem and many use the metaphor of it acting like a biological organism, Lobo said. But the team found that this was a false Metaphor. "The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down," Lobo said. "They use less energy, they don't move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling." "In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite," he added. "As cities get larger they create more wealth and they are more innovative at a faster rate. There is no counterpart to that in biology." Authors: Jose Lobo; Luis Bettencourt of Los Alamos National Laboratory, LosAlamos, New Mex.; Dirk Helbing and Christian Kuhnert of Dresden University of Technology, Germany; and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mex. (more)

Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.[1] He coined the term in the late 1980s[2] when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.[3] Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langton

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $27 billion in 2023),[1] over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project