Democrats Lost the Propaganda War. The intra-Democratic argument over what should be done following their loss in 2024 goes on. Bernie Sanders is arguing for working-class populism. Matt Yglesias has been flogging a “Common Sense Manifesto” arguing for Bill Clinton–style triangulation. (more)

writer

book by Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement. From 2011. (more)

In The Stack (pub 2016), Benjamin H Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/stack (more)

Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive – meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.[1][2] Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte.[3][4] His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to scientific laws.[5] After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism, although still popular, has declined under criticism within the social sciences by antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

David Émile Durkheim (/ˈdɜːrkhaɪm/;[1] French: [emil dyʁkɛm] or [dyʁkajm]; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.[2][3] Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with no how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being. Durkheim's conception of the scientific study of society laid the groundwork for modern sociology, and he used such scientific tools as statistics, surveys, and historical observation in his analysis of suicides in Roman Catholic and Protestant groups... Durkheim was preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. Refining the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, he promoted what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, understanding the term in its broader meaning as the "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity,"[5] with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic[i] in the sense that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the study of specific actions of individuals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim

same as social capital?

Sex, smoking, and social stratification are three very different social phenomena. And yet, argues sociologist Randall Collins, they and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. Interaction Ritual Chains is a major work of sociological theory that attempts to develop a “radical microsociology.” It proposes that successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy. Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in. The first half of Interaction Ritual Chains is based on the classic analyses of Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead, and Erving Goffman and draws on micro-sociological research on conversation, bodily rhythms, emotions, and intellectual creativity. The second half discusses how such activities as sex, smoking, and social stratification are shaped by interaction ritual chains. ISBN:9780691123899 https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691123899/interaction-ritual-chains?srsltid=AfmBOooxAswj6t9GagsF2cIX7CrFivXBsSr9La8JIgqXY5NQZsGmuD_P

Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing... He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Collins (more)

Matt Yglesias: A Common Sense Democrat manifesto. This is a column I am writing because Kamala Harris lost the election, but it’s not a column about “why Harris lost.” An honest assessment of why Democrats lost has to acknowledge that 90 percent of the explanation is the inflation-driven anti-incumbent trend that has hit essentially every rich country around the world. (more)

Jon Stewart Tears Apart Dems’ ‘Idiotic’ Project 2029 Plan. Jon Stewart is not impressed with the Democratic Party’s plan to craft a Project 2029, which he said will just be a “a rehash of all the consultant driven, careful nonsense” that caused them to lose the presidency to Donald Trump. (more)

The Knowledge Navigator is a concept described by former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley in his 1987 book, Odyssey. It describes a device that can access a large networked database of HyperText information, and use software agents to assist searching for information. Apple produced several concept Videos showcasing the idea. All of them featured a Tablet style computer with numerous advanced capabilities, including an excellent text-to-speech system with no hint of "computerese", a Gesture based interface resembling the MultiTouch interface later used on the IPhone and an equally powerful Speech Recognition system, allowing the user to converse with the system via an animated "butler" as the software agent (Intelligent Software Assistant). (more)

A great and funny writer. I recommend his Chrestomathy as a great intro. (more)

Open Source Relational Data Base engine. Known for simplicity and speed. http://www.mysql.com/ (more)

The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform, a network Operating System, for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications (Collaboration Ware). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project https://croquet.io/ (more)

Ubiquity, a legacy browser extension for Mozilla Firefox, was a collection of quick and easy natural-language-derived commands that act as mashups of web services, thus allowing users to get information and relate it to current and other webpages. It also allowed Web users to create new commands without requiring much technical background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox) (more)

Command Line on steroids - (2008-03-12) Enso (more)

Archy is a software system that had a user interface that introduced a different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces (GUI). Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser. Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Apple Macintosh, Canon Cat, SwyftWare, and Ken Perlin's Pad ZUI system. It can be described as a combination of Canon Cat's text processing functions with a modern ZUI (zooming user interface). Archy is more radically different from established systems than are Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass and Microsoft Research's "Task Gallery" prototype. While these systems build upon the WIMP desktop paradigm, Archy has been compared as similar to the Emacs text editor, although its design begins from a clean slate. Archy used to be called The Humane Environment ("THE")... The plan includes making the interface as "modeless" as possible, to avoid mode errors and encourage habituation. In order to achieve this, modal features of current graphical user interfaces, like windows and separate software applications, are removed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)

Venkatesh Rao on how Good is the Enemy of the Great (Best Practices, Jim Collins) (and the danger of Business Book-s). First, there’s a success that attracts imitative greed. Then something very predictable happens. A “great” story is retold in ways that only capture the “good” part... The people behind the original success discount the amount of Luck, special conditions and randomness involved in the success, and tell stories (unconsciously or consciously) designed to minimize factors besides their own contribution... So rather than getting the unreconstructed messy story of how chaos turned into order, you get an apparently logical backward extrapolation of the final state. We get the speculative assertion that the end-state process, with its checks and protections could have emerged more efficiently with a given hypothetical storyline... By promising a less messy (“learn from our mistakes”) version of XYZ’s path, without the “inefficient” twists and turns, and by promising the beautiful and efficient end state that currently exists, a path-dependent history culminating in a desirable steady state gets retold as a path-independent story. Worse, you get the suggestion that it is the end-state that contains the value, rather than the truth: most of the value was banked along the way. The end-state merely milks already-won assets efficiently. That last point bears repeating: the end-state is not where the value is. The end-state is a hard-won and defensible value-adding position. The value was banked along the way... So if you follow the “great” formula faithfully you will accidentally build walls that prevent your own bits of Luck and Serendipity from getting through. It is only by creating your own bloody mess that you will be responding to your own unique local conditions and environments, and the lucky breaks your unique initial conditions and unique path offer... To a certain extent, I am advocating methodological anarchy. But this does not mean “be stupid and random.” The real secret to getting from “good” to “great” is selective rule breaking... “Good” imitators either try and achieve modest success, or fail, by applying formulas religiously. But the “greats” find “good” formulas to break... And if there’s no formula worth breaking in your neighborhood, welcome to pioneer country. All bets are off. (more)

Forester is a tool for creating densely interlinked networks (forests) of scientific writing in hypertext... Forester is a tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. It is your lab notebook, your journal, your blackboard, and the home of your lecture notes.... Many working scientists, students, and hobbyists have wished to create their own tag-based hypertext knowledge base, but the combination of tools historically required to make this happen are extremely daunting. Both the Stacks project and Kerodon use a cluster of software called Gerby, but bitrot has set in and it is no longer possible to build its dependencies on a modern environment without significant difficulty, raising questions of longevity. Moreover, Gerby’s deployment involves running a database on a server (in spite of the fact that almost the entire functionality is static HTML), an architecture that is incompatible with the constraints of the everyday working scientist or student who knows at most how to upload static files to their university-provided public storage. The recent experience of the nLab’s pandemic-era hiatus and near death experience has demonstrated with some urgency the precarity faced by any project relying heavily on volunteer system administrators. https://www.forester-notes.org/ (more)