Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African entrepreneur and space tourist[2][3][4] who became the first citizen of an independent African country to travel to space.[5] Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd. and as of 2013, provides leadership for the Ubuntu operating system.[6] He currently lives on the Isle of Man[7] and holds dual citizenship of South Africa and the United Kingdom... Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security, and then sold it to Verisign in December 1999, earning R 3.5 billion (about US$ 575 million at the time)... In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as one of the developers of the Debian operating system.[14] In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational, free, and open source software projects in South Africa, such as the Freedom Toaster. In 2004 he returned to the free software world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian, through his company Canonical Ltd. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

Mark McElroy: A Metaphysican Looks at Algorithms of Thought. I enjoyed Cortex Futura’s latest post on algorithms of thought ((2020-11-27) Cortex Future True Algorithms Of Thought Have Arrived). In reflecting on the role algorithms of thought have played in my own life and work, I’d agree that new technologies for sharing algorithms of thought have arrived (especially with the advent of Roam Research). But the algorithms of thought themselves — and ways to share them — have actually been around for quite some time. (more)

idea of a variation/subset of the World Wide Web which has fewer of the ugly bits (Small World) (more)

Pathologies is synonymous with diseases. The suffix "path" is used to indicate a disease, e.g. psychopath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological (more)

Jason Kottke: From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution... Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. (more)

someone with a narrow Specialization

Division Of Labor; across specialists? (more)

there are many rules of three, but my favorite is: any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life (cf planning, HPMOR) (more)

Alan Klement: Know the Two — Very — Different Interpretations of Jobs to be Done. The two versions of JTBD see consumers differently. One version sees them as reactive creatures who just do things. The other sees them as pro-active and aspirational. (more)

Film Industry "rebel"; author Rebel Without A Crew ISBN:0452271878 (more)

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Robert Rodriguez, The Wizard of Cinema Returns — The “Fear-Forward” Way of Life, How to Overcome Self-Doubt, Learning to Love Limitations, and Counter-Intuitive Parenting That Works (#804). While a student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, Rodriguez wrote the script to his first feature film El Mariachi, which won the coveted Audience Award at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival and became the lowest budget movie ever released by a major studio. (more)

Lifestyle Design for Nuclear Family trying to dodge some of the downsides (Alternatives To Traditional Family). (more)

SmallCo created/run by many members of a Lean Family

How you identify yourself to yourself. (Self Perception) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #28: March 2025. I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’ (more)

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