The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid-19 Kill. The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff. (more)

John Cutler: TBM 330: (Un)common Sense Playbook. I remember listening to a podcast a few years ago featuring a Netflix engineering manager who described how he turned around a struggling team... The approach worked. The team (and the manager) turned things around... None of this sounds revolutionary (more)

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (German: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus) is a 1933 psychology book written by the Austrian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in which the author attempts to explain how fascists and authoritarians come into power through their political and ideologically-oriented sexual repression on the popular masses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism (more)

Representational State Transfer. A model for resource interaction that scales like the World Wide Web - is Generative - so even if designing an Enterprise architecture you get more scalability and flexibility. (more)

python guru

Python learning book. (more)

The expression military–industrial complex (MIC) describes the relationship between a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy.[1][2][3][4] A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense-minded corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them.[5] The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and politicians.[6][7] The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship's detrimental effects, in the farewell address of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. Conceptually, it is closely related to the ideas of the iron triangle in the U.S. (the three-sided relationship between Congress, the executive branch bureaucracy, and interest groups) and the defense industrial base (the network of organizations, facilities, and resources that supplies governments with defense-related goods and services). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex

projects designed to piss tax dollars into the home districts of powerful US Congress-men as a form of bribery (more)

"this part of twitter"; there may be multiple parts now, but first one was heavily post-rat: (2022-04-24) Rival Voices Tpot Is Littered With Postrats (more)

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a tabletop and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield.[1] Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first trading card game and had approximately fifty million players as of February 2023.[2][3][4][5] Over twenty billion Magic cards were produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity.[6][7] As of the 2022 fiscal year, Magic generates over $1 billion in revenue annually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering (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)

improve the system (not focused on human behavior/motivation) of a process. A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes.[1] These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once.[2] Delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process

mobile app LLM chatbot: An ally that actually gets you. Auren is an emotionally intelligent guide built for people who care deeply about their growth, relationships, goals, and emotional well-being. Auren offers grounded insight, warm encouragement, and gentle accountability on your terms.... Seren offers pushback, strategy, hard truths, and tough love to help you grow and keep your promises to yourself. https://auren.app/

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are a type of globally unique identifier (GUID, UUID) that enables an entity to be identified in a manner that is verifiable, persistent (as long as the DID controller desires), and does not require the use of a centralized registry.[1] DIDs enable a new model of decentralized digital identity that is often referred to as self-sovereign identity or decentralized identity.[2] They are an important component of decentralized web applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier (more)

Portable Identity for ActivityPub. I want to focus on: portable digital identity. The idea that I should be able to take all of my data, everything that my identity consists of, and move wholesale to a new instance/server/PDS/whatever you call it. Bluesky permits this. Mastodon and most (all?) other ActivityPub implementations do not. But that doesn’t have to be the case, nothing about ActivityPub—architecturally speaking—is incompatible with this vision. (more)

a SmallWeb variant that focuses on passing just Markdown. See (2023-11-14) The Markdown Web. (more)

atjson is a living content format for annotating (annotation) content https://github.com/CondeNast/atjson

Rival Voices Tweet: LessWrong is structurallly analytic, you see? It suffers from the same problems which is why it leads to meaninglessness. Now, TPOT is littered with post-rats, ex-rationalists from LessWrong, that reached stage 4.5 (more)

Divination (from Latin divinare 'to foresee, foretell, predict, prophesy')[2] is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic ritual or practice.[3] Using various methods throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact or interaction with supernatural agencies[4] such as spirits, gods, god-like-beings or the "will of the universe" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divination (more)

Anna Gat: I’m now fully sold on new ChatGPT 4o + memory becoming everybody’s therapist in like the next 2 minutes. Just based on 4 days of interaction, it is astounding: 1) It can give you as good a Big 5 analysis after a few conversations as an official test.* (mental health) (more)