Desire... (more)

Marketing term from Crossing The Chasm (more)

Dan Davies: incompetence is a form of bias. People will sometimes attribute unfair outcomes, particularly of state processes, to incompetence rather than bias. But, as my slogan suggests, incompetence is itself a bias, because it’s a bias in favour of people who can get mistakes corrected. (more)

Competence porn is a term invented by Leverage writer John Rogers and used by a lot of critics since. It's the thrill of watching talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems (problem solving). It's not just "characters being good at a thing," particularly if that thing is fighting—otherwise the term would apply to virtually all fiction—but specifically about using cleverness and hard work. Though the term mostly applies to realistic dramas, there's an element of Wish-Fulfillment to it, as characters in a competence porn series rarely have to deal with serious infighting, dead end ideas, and all the other difficulties that affect real life groups. Common genres include Capers, Medical Dramas, the more idealistic Government and Law Procedurals, and harder sci-fi. Guile Hero and The Trickster characters from mythology and legend are antecedents. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetencePorn (TV trope) (more)

In politics (and particularly in international politics), soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power). It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change. In 2012, Joseph Nye of Harvard University explained that with soft power, "the best propaganda is not propaganda", further explaining that during the Information Age, "credibility is the scarcest resource".[1] Nye popularised the term in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Konrad Hinsen: Deconstructing the Mastodon client. Ever since I joined Twitter in 2011, and then moved to Mastodon in 2022, I have been unhappy with the timeline view proposed by both of these communication platforms as their main interface. Now I have finally done something about it: I wrote my own Mastodon client. Or perhaps rather a non-client, because the concept of "the client" is a big part of what I disliked. (more)

Open Standards for the MicroBlog (more)

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe". It is a common, informal name for a somewhat broad federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages. By running social network software that supports a standard set of protocols called ActivityPub, independently run servers can connect to the Fediverse,[1] allowing its users to follow and receive short messages from each other, regardless of which particular ActivityPub server implementation they are running. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse See esp Mastodon, (2022-11-02) Axbom The Many Branches Of The Fediverse. See related IndieWeb. (more)

read-it-later app like InstaPaper, but based on IndieWeb standards. https://www.indiepaper.io/ https://github.com/cleverdevil/indiepaper

Transforming Social Networks into Sensemaking Networks: Social media is a vital information source for researchers, but knowledge is buried in noisy feeds and fragmented across platforms. Cosmik builds tools to unlock and amplify this knowledge, powered by semantics, AI, and human collective intelligence. https://www.cosmik.network/

Ronen Tamari: Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies. Herbert Simon, in the oft-quoted passage from the 1971 piece “Designing Organizations For An Information-Rich World”, foresaw how information overload would transform attention into one of the most valuable resources: (more)

arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩)[1] is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer reviewed. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance, and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008,[2][3] had hit a million by the end of 2014[4][5] and two million by the end of 2021.[6][7] As of November 2024, the submission rate is about 24,000 articles per month... arXiv was made possible by the compact TeX file format, which allowed scientific papers to be easily transmitted over the Internet and rendered client-side.[11] Around 1990, Joanne Cohn began emailing physics preprints to colleagues as TeX files, but the number of papers being sent soon filled mailboxes to capacity.[12] Paul Ginsparg recognized the need for central storage, and in August 1991 he created a central repository mailbox stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that could be accessed from any computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv https://arxiv.org/

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #19: June 2024. Yes, the non-AI world still exists. (more)

A circular economy (also referred to as circularity or CE)[1] is a model of resource production and consumption in any economy that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products for as long as possible.[2][3][4] The concept aims to tackle global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution by emphasizing the design-based implementation of the three base principles of the model. The main three principles required for the transformation to a circular economy are: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems.[5] CE is defined in contradistinction to the traditional linear economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

Scott Alexander: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does. (POSIWID) Consider the following claims: The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients. (more)

Rival Voices: The Purpose of POSIWID Is What It Does. The phrase POSIWID—“The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does”—has been making the rounds on Twitter. In response, Scott Alexander just published a Substack post arguing the opposite: that the purpose of a system is “obviously not” what it does. 2025-04-11-AlexanderComeOnObviouslyThePurposeOfASystemIsNotWhatItDoes (more)

Hanlon's razor is an adage, or rule of thumb, that states:[1] (more)

A field of study – also called a discipline – is a general area of knowledge, learning, or research. In schools they are often called "subjects". Some examples include biology, mathematics, and classical studies. Disciplines require training and qualification. Qualified people are able to use the methods of a discipline, and have knowledge of that discipline. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_study (more)

a classic webcomic

or Public Field Technologies (more)