aka Oprah Winfrey (more)

ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol.[1] It provides a client/server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content... The social networking software, Mastodon, implemented ActivityPub in version 1.6, released on 10 September 2017. It is intended that ActivityPub will offer more security for private messages than the current OStatus protocol does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub (more)

creator/operator of the HomeTown flavor of Mastodon. (more)

Bret Steven Taylor (born 1980) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for leading the team that co-created Google Maps and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook (now Meta Platforms), as the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of Salesforce.com (alongside co-founder Marc Benioff). Taylor was additionally one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Quip. Since 2023, he is the founder of Sierra (an AI startup), chairman of OpenAI, and a board member of Shopify. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Taylor

Things that make it hard/impossible for a business to enter a market already served by someone else (more)

co-founder Instagram

Make explanations ADEPT: Use an Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain-English description, and then a Technical description. (more)

History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some theorists categorize history as a social science, while others see it as part of the humanities or consider it a hybrid discipline. Similar debates surround the purpose of history—for example, whether its main aim is theoretical, to uncover the truth, or practical, to learn lessons from the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

There are multiple "models" of the stages in the customer buying decision-making process. (more)

New Math Untangles the Mysterious Nature of Causality. IN HIS 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet... Erik Hoel, a 29-year-old theoretical neuroscientist and writer, quoted the passage in a recent essay in which he laid out his new mathematical explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. (more)

author: Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Climate Change) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Greenfield (more)

BigCo, Big Media, Big Government, Big Agriculture, Big Medicine, Big Education, Big Retail, Big Religion, etc. (more)

"That the available Control variety must be equal to or greater than the disturbance variety for control to be possible" - William Ross Ashby (more)

Ambition is the decision to take yourself seriously. I’ve always been ambitious. But I’ve also always been suspicious of that ambition, wondering if it’s a genuine hunger or just a prettier name for insecurity. Maybe I’m just desperate to avoid feeling ordinary. (more)

Anton Troynikov: Telescoping Ambition. San Francisco is delusional, and has been for a long time. This is occasionally a good thing; San Francisco is one of the few places capable of taking big ideas seriously when they’d be laughed out of the room anywhere else, and in tech SF provides the funding and social infrastructure to let people run with them. For this reason SF tends to attract people with big ideas, and people drawn to big ideas. (more)

A. C. Grayling: Family Feuds. Review of THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES, A Global Theory of Intellectual Change(. By Randall Collins. Isaiah Berlin once remarked that what philosophers do in the privacy of their studies can change the course of history, and he cited John Locke and Karl Marx as examples. (more)

book: Joseph Henrich's theory of human success, emphasizing that our remarkable achievements stem not from individual intelligence but from our collective brain—our capacity for cumulative cultural evolution. (more)

Anton Troynikov: Elite Underproduction. Elite Overproduction is a meme started by Peter Turchin. It's also essentially unworkable on its own as an explanatory social theory, which Turchin himself goes on to clarify; [Turchin] says “stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state” are two other critical factors. (more)

what seems like Elite Overproduction is really Midwit Overproduction.

OpenAI o3 is a reflective generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model developed by OpenAI as a successor to OpenAI o1 for ChatGPT.