EBook distributor (more)

80,000 Hours: What are the most pressing world problems? (updated Jun'2025) (more)

Reasons to Change The World: (more)

Christopher Alexander book: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction ISBN:0195019199. I'll probably abuse Fair Use rules here shortly (at Alexander Patterns). Because it's not just about architecture, but about Design Thinking for kids, families, education systems, work, etc. (more)

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (German: [ˈɪɡnaːts ˈzɛml̩vaɪs]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp [ˈsɛmmɛlvɛjs ˈiɡnaːts ˈfyløp]; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures and was described as the "saviour of mothers".[2] Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861. Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Callum James Henderson-Begg (born 17 January 1981), known as Cal Henderson, is a British computer programmer and author based in San Francisco... Henderson is best known as the co-founder and chief technology officer at Slack.com, as well as co-owning and developing the online creative community B3ta[3] with Denise Wilton and Rob Manuel; being the chief software architect for the photo-sharing application Flickr[4] (originally working for Ludicorp[5][6] and then Yahoo); and writing the book Building Scalable Web Sites [7] for O'Reilly Media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Henderson

(cf reacji, slackmoji) An emoji (/ɪˈmoʊdʒi/ im-OH-jee; plural emoji or emojis;[1] Japanese: 絵文字, pronounced [emoꜜʑi]) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system.[2]... Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵; 'picture') + moji (文字; 'character');[4] the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.[5] The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s.[6] Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard... The first emoji are a matter of contention due to differing definitions and poor early documentation.[22][6] It was previously widely considered that DoCoMo had the first emoji set in 1999, but an Emojipedia blog article in 2019 brought SoftBank's earlier 1997 set to light.[22] More recently, in 2024, earlier emoji sets were uncovered on portable devices by Sharp Corporation and NEC[23] in the early 1990s, with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 (PDA) harboring what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji (more)

book (Design Fiction?) by Adrian Hon ASIN:B00EX8QRPM http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/ (more)

Altruism is the concern for the well-being of others, independently of personal benefit or reciprocity. Altruism is an important moral value in many cultures and religions. It can expand beyond care for humans to include other sentient beings and future generations.[3] Altruism, as observed in populations of organisms, is when an individual performs an action at a cost to itself (in terms of e.g. pleasure and quality of life, time, probability of survival or reproduction) that benefits, directly or indirectly, another individual, without the expectation of reciprocity or compensation for that action.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism

Thomas Nagel (/ˈneɪɡəl/; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University,[3] where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016.[4] His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of mind.[5] Nagel is known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. He continued the critique of reductionism in Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself.[2][3] In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness (more)

Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. It is not to be confused with Consciousness. While consciousness is being aware of one’s environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness

Erik Hoel: I'm a complexitarian: only eat things below a certain neural complexity... octopus (is above the bar)... But of course being a complexitarian is just a stand-in. Ideally, we'd all be unconscioustarians... but without a theory of consciousness we can't even decide what to ethically eat. (more)

A cephalopod /ˈsɛfələpɒd/ is any member of the molluscan class Cephalopoda /sɛfəˈlɒpədə/ (Greek plural κεφαλόποδες, kephalópodes; "head-feet")[3] such as a squid, octopus, cuttlefish, or nautilus. These exclusively marine animals are characterized by bilateral body symmetry, a prominent head, and a set of arms or tentacles (muscular hydrostats) modified from the primitive molluscan foot. Fishers sometimes call cephalopods "inkfish", referring to their common ability to squirt ink. The study of cephalopods is a branch of malacology known as teuthology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod (more)

John Ohno: The end-game of the voice UI (like that of the chat UI (Conversational Interface)) is the command line interface. So, it’s useful to take cues from currently-existing good CLI UX. (For instance, look at the differences between zsh & command.com, and the trends in the evolution of borne-compatible command shells since 1970.) (more)

Matt Web On Conversational Interfaces: the 2015 twist is that everything old is new again, and we're dealing not just with actionable notifications, but robot-generated text that we can have an actual conversation with. (more)

When the UI is a chatbot

Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell: A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus. ELIZA... Loebner prize competition (more)

biggest part of Big Media (more)

Like a retrospective, but triggered more by a specific "event", most often a production outage or important bug... which means there's a certain urgency to "fixing" it (Time to Restore Service as one of the Four Key Metrics), but you need to generate enough info during the fixing process to be able to agree afterwards (a) what was actually/fundamentally broken, (b) what correction actually fixed it, and (c) what that implies for preventing a recurrence. (more)