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repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer reviewed.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)

Blockchain Technology: Layer-1 and Layer-2 Networks | Gemini. There are currently two primary methodologies for achieving essential blockchain scalability: Layer-1 and Layer-2 solutions. (more)

Venkatesh Rao: The Splintering of the Second World. I just returned from a week-long business trip in Europe, my first since 2015. This time, I got a keen sense of the US having lost an essential spiritual quality necessary for mass flourishing. (more)

Daniel Drezner: American Soft Power, R.I.P. Ever since Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” more than thirty years ago, foreign policy mavens and international relations scholars have debated whether it’s really a thing or not. (more)

Context: You're creating many notes in your Digital Garden, and you want each note-page to have a "good" Name. (more)

TeamWiki vendor; also has a nice Draft browser extension

book by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Zvi Mowshowitz on More Dakka. Eliezer Yudkowsky's book Inadequate Equilibria is excellent. I recommend reading it, if you haven't done so... My hope here is to offer both another concrete path to finding such opportunities, and additional justification of the central role of social control (as opposed to object-level concerns) in many modest actions and modesty arguments. (more)

A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google instant messaging apps. Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. (more)

Vivek Paul "Vic" Gundotra (born 14 June 1969) is an Indian-born American businessman who served as the Senior Vice President, Social for Google until 24 April 2014.[1][2][3] Prior to joining Google, he was a general manager at Microsoft.... On 11 November 2015, Vic Gundotra announced on his Google+ profile[12] that he was joining AliveCor as its CEO.[13] On 17 January, 2019 it was reported that he was stepping down from AliveCor for personal reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra (more)

Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor... As our perceptual system adapts to the natural world, we become better at discriminating between different stimuli when they belong to different categories than when they belong to the same category. We also tend to become less sensitive to the differences between two instances of the same category.[17] These effects are described as the result of categorical perception. Categorical perception effects do not transfer across domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_learning cf Tacit Knowledge

Kathy Sierra product goal: Oct'2012 talk: Now some of you may know I used to say words like “user AweSome ” or “user Kicking Ass” (Kick-Ass) or “user Passionate ” I don’t really tend to use those words anymore because it’s really easy to misinterpret that as yet another “we made the customer feel good” or ‘he likes us.” It’s too easy to focus back on the company again. This isn’t about focusing on what the user thinks of you. It’s about what the user is able to do, and to be able to become Bad-Ass. (more)