Reading

A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.

Ending his decade of silence, the voice of Marc Andreessen rises from the dust, trumpeting forth a rousing cri de coeur: “It is time to build.” Andreessen’s essay has got a lot of…

Much has been written about the usual evolution of general-interest online communities. Less attention has been paid to the dynamics of more specialized, expert-led forums — and the unique if ultimately destructive role of expertise. Over the past 25 years, I participated in dozens of such groups. The forums ranged from 200 to 200,000 members, have been hosted on a variety of platforms, and have dealt with topics ranging from electronic circuit design, to emergency preparedness, to collectible antiques. In almost every instance, they followed the same trajectory — so today, I’d like to put forward a general lifecycle model for expert-led communities.

A generous salary, a hybrid work schedule, robust PTO, and the ability to put that anthropology degree to use at long last. The commute: minimal. T...

Ars chats with host James Burke about his "connective" approach to science history.

Thanks to Garrett Baker, David Udell, Alex Gray, Paul Colognese, Akash Wasil, Jacques Thibodeau, Michael Ivanitskiy, Zach Stein-Perlman, and Anish Up…

Years after the publication of this book — which turned its author into a global phenomenon — there is still pending doubt about the intellectual rigor of the work by Yuval Noah Harari

Author: Markus Strasser

Ivan Illich’s radical critique of our modern certitudes resonates loudly amid today’s crises.

1. The obsession with short-term profits severely undermines long-term positive impact. 2. The lack of diversity among founders and investors propagates harmful exclusion. 3. The prevalence of poor work-life balance and burnout culture is inhumane and unsustainable. 4. Too many products optimize

A metameme is a collection of interconnected, mutual dependent, non-arbitrary memes. “Metameme” is thus an overarching term for groups of other memes that helps us understanding the relation of one meme to another. (With “meme”, I’m not referring to the illustrated jokes kids pass around on social media these days, but rather the original idea […]

The struggle for distinction

Richard Hanania's handbook to fight back

Each year, millions of people, including half a million Americans, experience cardiac arrest. With no discernible heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, they have experienced the medical definition of death, notes Sam Parnia, the NYU Medical Center’s director of cardiopulmonary resuscitation resea...

Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness, which he actively cultivated in the service of his writing.

Thoughtful, results-focused hypnosis in a spacious downtown facility. Request a treatment plan for private care, or join an affordable group class.

In his new book ‘The Internet Con,' the writer and activist Cory Doctorow makes a forceful case for cutting Big Tech down to size.

Why do some people from the distant past become memes?

For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]

Latest technology advancements have made data processing accessible, cheap and fast for everyone. We believe combining engineering practices with the scientific method will extract the most utility from these advancements. So this manifesto proposes a principled methodology for unifying science and technology by valuing: - **Minimal Viable Products** over prototypes...

I’ve spent 26 days reading 26 years of messages from the Self mail conference archive. Here is what I’ve learned. Please note, that everything is highly subjective and may be even wrong…

The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself, and it's mostly not Biden's doing.

So… I’ve had the most unreal week of coding. Zero exaggeration, I’ve halved the RAM requirements of the search engine, removed the need to take the system offline during an upgrade, removed hard limits on how many documents can be indexed, and quadrupled soft limits on how many keywords can be in the corpus. It’s been a long term goal to keep it possible to run and operate the system on low-powered hardware, and so far improvements have been made, to the point where my 32 Gb RAM developer machine feels spacey rather than cramped, but this set of changes takes it several notches further.

Recently a short article of mine was recently published on the excellent Genealogies of Modernity blog. I repost it here, merely with the aim of including some of the footnotes and references that …

First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. The reality, discovers James Ball, is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix

How to keep an external brain using ideas from 1945 and technology from 2023.