It’s been a surprisingly busy August, usually the doldrums for us consultant types. Good haul of activity to round up this week: 5 selections from friends-of-ribbonfarm, 12 from elsewhere on the internet, 7 short takes. Happy Labor Day, and here’s the fruit of some human and robot labor for your hopper.
There is now a “robot” at San Jose airport. It is not a very good robot.
This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.
New Posts
I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler by putanumonit. Link
Exploratory conversation by @msweet. Link
How Do You Value a Human Being? by @vgr. Link
How to spot good “futurism” by @jcamachor@mastodon.social. Link
Introducing key terms by @meaningness. Link
Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle.
Stuff We Read
Wired guide to quantum computing . Link. ht @vgr
Thinking about willpower, or lack thereof . Link. ht @bkam
Bret Victor’s Quotes Page. Link . ht @a
This helped me a lot to navigate the political waters these days—not that I understand it all. Link. ht @steve
The ‘Other’ category in Singapore. Link. ht @visakanv
Excellent post on how you can get infrastructure rot in important sectors of the economy. Link. ht @jdp
Interesting (and potentially FUD-inducing) example of future warfare… Link ht @msweet
Fascinating how even with the Internet you still have these separations between groups of humans in terms of available memetics [Sewage Analysis]. Link. ht @jdp
“Perhaps intuitive but an interesting study nonetheless on walking eight minutes to acutely raise creativity. Link. ht @bkam
Review of Edward Said ‘On Late Style’. Link. ht @bueno
Failures in audience respect when communicating about climate change. “Risky time.” Link. ht @necopinus
Emoji, part 1: in the beginning. Link. ht @ipfactor
If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.
Short Takes
“the left likes to pretend production is a solved problem, the right likes to pretend distribution is a solved problem” — @Harry_Pottash
New theory of ideological polarization/culture wars. When one ideology is taken seriously enough by those in power to exercise influence, ALL ideologues believe the pendulum might swing their way in the future and they’ll get their turn to try out their policy ideas. So all ideologues tend towards pragmatic centrism to increase their odds of gaining influence. But when ideology-apathetic opportunistic grifters are in power, all ideologues feel powerless and get more extremist. — @vgr
The only certainty in life is that the fragile will break. — @msweet
Mistaking the illegible for the non-existent and the legible for reality is one of the underpinnings of human nature.We’ve survived anyway because our explicit rationality doesn’t matter very much, in the long run. — @saamdaamdandbhed
A lack of information problem can hide like a master of disguise. Sometimes it presents as feeling directionless or uninspired. — @strangeattractor
Internet survival skill: when you read an accusation against someone, you must hold a kind of quantum superposition of “guilty” and “innocent” in your mind, to avoid being swept up and used as part of an online mob.The human brain really, REALLY doesn’t like holding that superposition for any length of time. Maybe this is why it “innocent until proven guilty” didn’t catch on until so recently in human history. — @nindokag
When people can shoot further than they can shout, it becomes wise to be very quiet. — @machado
If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.
