Week 2, barnyard This is an edition of Robin Sloan’s video game development diary . Welcome: to returning readers as well as everyone newly subscribed. If you missed it, week 1 sets up the motivat
“I am the Lord your God.” — 1st Commandment Human culture began with a murder. That culture was fueled by rage and rivalry, which led to violence. Managing that violence is the secret reason for all r
The Future of Text Book : A 2020 Vision Growing out of the annual Symposium , we have put together a book published by Future Text Publishing on the possible futures of text which has turned out to
The subterranean dungeon of Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island mansion is painted a folksy, endearing robin’s-egg blue, a delicate contrast to the exposed copper piping which runs the length of the cavernous
Image Credit: DeepMind In a paper published in the journal Nature Physics , DeepMind researchers describe an AI system that can predict the movement of glass molecules as they transition between liqui
H ere we are, in the middle of a pandemic, staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The question on everybody’s minds: How bad will this really get? Followed quickly by: Seriously, how
Updated at 4:04 p.m. ET on March 11, 2020. C OVID-19 is not the flu. We have a vaccine for the flu. We have anti-viral medications designed to treat the flu. We have a sense of what to expect when we
Missing: Nothing When I first landed in New York in 2013, I arrived ready to optimize. I submitted myself to the cult of personal development and joined the masses, trying to reverse engineer the proc
“Command line interfaces. Once that was all we had. Then they disappeared, replaced by what we thought was a great advance: GUIs. GUIs were - and still are - valuable, but they fail to scale to the de
A book by Arvid Kahl Zero to Sold How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business From your first idea to successfully selling your business for life-changing amounts of money, this book will help
Even today, 20 years after my childhood diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), I am still keenly aware of how my attention wavers, lapses or holds differently from that of most
Last Wednesday, I sat down in my office in midtown Atlanta to conduct a lunchtime writing seminar in Durham, North Carolina. I had considered flying in for the event, but my schedule was in flux, and
Please log in to bookmark this story. Log In Create Free Account Sarah Kendzior is the co-host of the podcast Gaslit Nation and the author of the coming book Hiding in Plain Sight. Since the election
Published in Intuition Machine · 10 min read · Nov 3, 2019 -- Photo by x ) on Unsplash Arthur C. Clarke was Wrong. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology (and not magic
Graph Market Leader Delivers the Definitive Foundation for Connected Data, Built for Unlimited Scale and Developer Flexibility. SAN MATEO, CA: Neo4j , a graph technology company, announced today the general availability of Neo4j 4.0, the most significant product release in the graph technology…
On November 23, 2000, John Underkoffler packed a bag, set off for the airport, and left Boston for good. Underkoffler was an MIT PhD research student obsessed by data representation and user interface
What do you do when the bond market is basically uninvestable and the stock market keeps hitting all-time highs and you know in your gut that none of this will end well? What do investors—big and smal
What is design’s role in business? For years, designers have advocated for more decision-making power at companies , with the goal of building humanistic products that serve users instead of corporate interests or technological advancement alone. Recent studies have shown that design does have a…
Over the years, I have encountered many process experiments. Sometimes I have been the one doing the experimenting, but most of the time I (and my team) have been the test subject. Someone (often more
From: Robin Sloan To: the lab Sent: February 2020 An app can be a home-cooked meal Have you heard about this new app called BoopSnoop? It launched in the first week of January 2020, and almost immedia
I’ve been deeply interested in personal knowledge management for almost 10 years now. V1 of my interest was a private wiki I created in college to help organize the notes I started taking from non-fic
More than a decade ago, Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “ 1,000 True Fans ,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he…
The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. The document is an expression of trauma , and its intellectual descendants continue to carry this baggage. While
How to Take Smart Notes is a book by Sonke Ahrens explaining the "Zettlekasten" methodology developed by Niklas Luhmann , a 20th century Sociologist who published a prodigious amount of work: 70 books
A purely aspirational litany. 11 min read · Feb 11, 2020 -- Imagine a medium… Whose essence is pure thought. That is constructed purely from the arrangement of logic and intention. That is completely
I long ago stopped reading books on note-taking. They were always too vague and boring, full of platitudes that had little to do with the world outside academia. I especially avoided “how-to” style bo
July 18, 2023 China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various
Table of Contents Introduction Let’s travel back to a simpler time when all everyone talked about in machine learning were SVMs and boosted trees,while Andrew Ng introduced neural networks as a neat p
This is a blog version of the talk I gave at GopherCon Europe 2019 (Canary Islands Edition) , where I shared my thoughts on why Visual Programming Languages have failed and revealed for the first time
Lucidity is a new way of understanding what programs are doing as they execute. I've been working on it off and on since 2014, but it's looking like I won't be able to continue. So, I'm sharing what I have and telling the story of the project's origins. At Lucidity's core is a flexible way of…
Was thinking of starting a small series with the hashtag #WorstAcademicDiagrams but worried that they'd all end up being from Bruno Latour articles. Prompted by this diagram, which has really got to m
XGBoost Gradient Boosting. In the first part of this discussion on XGBoost, I set the foundation for understanding the basic components of boosting. In brief, boosting uses sequences of decision trees
6,600 words Sign up for the Blank Horizons mailing list here . Definitions As in previous essays, I use “perceive,” “observe,” and “experience” synonymously. A “quale” (plural: “qualia”) is defined as
The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe, which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe in the Opinion collection of
I n its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. By 2020, experimental devices connected to the internet would deduce our search queries by d
Computer users are forever being misled, successfully lied to, sold "old wine in new bottles," bamboozled in a myriad ways large and small. Why? Simply because we are, to use the technical term, sucke
Every few weeks, I invite an interesting thinker to curate Exponential View . It allows them to share their ideas with us in an intimate setting. This week, Zavain Dar, a young, bright investor in dee
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. –Albert Einstein I had the pleasure recently of serving as a faculty member for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s newly launched national fellowship, the Community Leadership Network . The Foundation had selected me as a national fellow…
Julie Zhuo, the vice president of product design at Facebook, writes about the complexities of ‘doing it all’ Published in Forge · 8 min read · Nov 8, 2019 -- Julie Zhuo, vice president of product des
A Visual Vocabulary to Relate Systems, Products & Brands Published in EightShapes · 7 min read · Feb 13, 2019 -- So many enterprises present ecosystems far more complex than “one design system, all ou
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