🔗 WWW
There are a lot of links out to different parts of the web on this site. I try to mark them all so they get listed here.
🔗 Received from my friend Graham, article from The New Yorker .. as I commented tomorrow him;
Personally speaking - my life is too short
Another discovery from the archives … although only March, so not so bad.
Many of us seek status and belonging without even seeing it; we find it hard not to react to what others are doing, especially those we have been programmed to want to impress. We’re reactive without realizing it. We put limits on ourselves because we buy into other people’s rules. It’s the fundamental limit I’ve observed in most people, including myself and most founders: they define success by succeeding according to the rules that others have defined.
💬 Mike Maples
🔗 Source (Medium) - so heaven only knows how I stumbled on this one - other than Mike is actually very good at what he does - so maybe I was looking out from him?
😂 🔗 Letting ‘Marketing’ have a ‘seat at the table’
Truth in humor from Tom.
We Don't Care What The World Thinks - We Know Best.
🔗Over on Substack this morning, somebody had taken it upon themselves to ‘correct’ a writer’s English.
Tip: realized not “realised”. I’ll surprised that you got that passed spell check! 😊
The irony of her own typos in her post correcting someone that didn’t need correcting aside …
The click through takes you to the thread where Tom replied, but to save you that - this is what he wrote …
Thank you so much for your feedback in jumping in to correct me on what you believe is my poor spelling but you might want to check your facts: it’s lovely that America has its own spelling for words, and I am all for diversity of language, but I think I’m going to stick with the British spelling what with the fact that I was born in and live in the United Kingdom and (though I often wish it was more) have only visited the USA once in my life, for a total of five days.
Which then spawned a steady stream of comments.
Again - to save the click through, I wrote …
Pretty much whatever the UK does .. the response of the US is to do it different, if not completely opposite … spelling, driving on the wrong side of the road, eschewing roundabouts in favor of the four way stop, inventing its own version of perfectly acceptable games, defining the world as being the country .. ‘world series’, ‘
capital of the world’, taking a perfectly lovely uk show and rewriting it as an American show .. oh and then deliver an order of magnitude more episodes (Key Point: no series set up is that good) .. shall I go on?
And I wouldn’t normally bother writing this - except I was reminded of another Americn trait … we are the first … we are best .. we are exceptional …
Over in another group, someone posted this image.
Which reminded me of Philo Farnsworth (‘Father’ of TV), who has a staute in the Presidio in San Francisco
I quote …
Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) is the American engineer credited with inventing the first television. He had his potato row/scan line epiphany while growing up in Idaho, but it was later that he fully developed his image dissector and electronics system. His first successful broadcast happened on September 7, 1927, between two rooms in his lab in San Francisco.
In my world 1927 follows 1926 .. but let’s not let facts get in the way in America.
I am sure there is some bright person out there that will give me some technical overview of why one or the other - but really, to the average bear … this is the ‘Telly’ for goodness sake.
All this to ask … why are ‘they’ like that?
(I do know ‘they’ aren’t all like that - I’ve lived in the US long enough to know that - which I will use as my excuse why I freely interningle UK and US spelling in a single paragraph.)
Just a BIG shout out to @vladcampos for 🔗 📼 this video which talks you through how to rearrange the categories on the archive page of your MicroBlog.
GREAT JOB SIR - most excellent. Really really clear - and it worked first time.
AND of course - big shout out to @otaviocc for the new page.
I did it and it did exactly what it said on the tin.
Sadly it still isn’t quite right - i think mainly because Vlad is using Tiny Theme and I am using Hitchens and I am guessing some kind of styling conflict kicked in and it threw out the rest of my page (like Vlad I am not a developer), but no big deal, we just rolled back and maybe not at 11:32 pm I will look at the coe and se if I can parse what should be changed.
Vlad - one additional thing - rather than saving the name of a page and creating a new one - you can in fact click on the original page and when you save it - it automatically creates the edited page in the block at the top - that will save a few nano seconds.
Anyway - over and out - GREAT job. Thank you.
There Has To Be A Link Here For You ...
In case you hadn’t realized - I have been doing some backlog clearing over the weekend, this is one of those catchups. Links from the wild - collected and - not quite curated.
Still there might be something here for you?
🔗 Validating Factual Personal Information | February 2024 | Communications of the ACM - it’s as if Vint isn’t plugged in to the possibilities? What am I missing?
🔗 A Fascinating dive into the history of Poland
🔗 Why Is California the Way It Is? - by Tomas Pueyo - love this kind of visual analysis of the ‘history of geography’.
🔗 Haitz’s law - Wikipedia - the Moore’s law of light?
🔗 Rethinking the Concept of Philanthropy .. something near and dear to my heart as we ready to unleash our new organization onto the world.
🔗 The Seismic Shift That’s About to Change the American Workplace .. it’s Apple News, But TL;DR - old people is the fastest growing
🔗 A quick and easy guide to measurement. - Simon Wardley writing about ‘his thing’. It’s quotes like this that make me smile.
Deciding on what you will measure matters because it will change the type of system that you will build. A measure for getting people quickly from high to low altitude will encourage the development of one system - for example, personal solid fuel rockets. However, a measure for doing this safely will promote the development of another - for example, a parachute.
Three Links To My Readwise Library
🔗 Rishad Tobaccowala - Four Strategic Mistakes.
🔗 Roger Martin - Why Planning Over Strategy
🔗 Scott Galloway on (amongst many things) ESG - and is it failing to live up to its promise - he thinks so.
🔗 📼 This an 11 year old Ted Talk featuring Pablo Holman - demonstrating hacks on the stage. ELEVEN years ago .. so what 2013?
It includes a shout out to Kim Cameron who Pablo called The Chief Privacy Architect at Microsoft, which indeed at one time he was - though Kim retired from Microsoft May, 2011, the shout being an announcement that his hacks allowed him to track KIm as he moved through a conference - and … well, I will let you watch the video.
Imagine what is possible today. And you wonder why we have problems.
Kim of course is the author of The Seven Laws of Identity, that I have had the occasion to refer to on this very blog and it is unclear if Pablo’s call out of what he achieved in tracking Kim had any connection to Kim’s retirement - and to be sure I am not suggesting that at all, and to my knowledge nothing suggests that this was the case.
Fast Forward to last year and here he is again with another Ted Talk ‘Nuclear Reactors Can Solve Inequality’. 🤯
Both Talks were just absolutely inspiring
So imagine my delight to discover this one …. where he is talking at Charlie Muirhead’s CogX last year. I haven’t watched it yet - saved for tonight, but I sure am looking forward to it.
📺 Crooks
Netflix. Dubbed. Caper. Not much more to say, except I did watch it all the way through.
Crooks on 🔗 Reelgood
🔗 🎙️ The American Dream Is A Pyramid Scheme … Sean Illing doing his thing.
🎈111/366 Ola Has Gone Lyft Was Never Here. I Refuse To Use Uber. Now What?
I have a fundamental objection to Uber. (You might have heard.)
Which is why down here in New Zealand, when one of those kind of pickups is needed I use Ola.
Make that ‘used to use’
They pulled out! Gone. No longer here. Removed themselves …
Chatting to a ‘Corporate Cabs Taxi Driver - who was doing the usual complaining about ‘Ride Share Companies’ (to be fair - I did prompt him) and I pointed out that IF there was an app I could go to and call up a real cab like I could a Lyft, Ola or MAYBE an Uber - it would make it a darn sight more convenient … and he very kindly referred me to an app called 🔗 Your Ride.
Brilliant I said. Will try it out.
I tried to try it.
App is not available on ‘my App Store’.
My App store is the U.S.A. store.
I have written to them.
I read something this past week about ‘feeds and posts’ - and I know ‘we’ do all know that the difference is there - but ‘we’ are also aware that it is not always understood … I think maybe @SimonWoods mentioned it recently? Anyway - I was about to reply with something I considered to be an excellent riposte and then stopped and deleted. My 🔗 ‘riposte’ was a reply - not a repost - and wondering if the meaning of the original use of the word that has been subsumed by modernity and partly explains the confusion?
I know I shared this when @gruber wrote it way back - but sharing again - as he just did - and a reminder from moi .. its not a matter of if they come after you - it is when - best be prepared.
🔗 Bob’s writing about Music and Musicians, but what he described has applicability to any new business launching itself onto the world.
I saw🔗 this in Visual Capitalist today.
No mention of New Zealand where a lot of people complain about the country’s debt, so I thought I might explore - and found this in Macro Trends.
And sure - while we are higher than historical - it isn’t unprecedented - even in the past twenty years. 2003 and 2012 clearly standing out from the crowd. (I wonder what was happening around the globe at that time - rhetorical folks .. and that’s the point - whatever Kiwi leaders might like to think, they are in the gravitational pull of ‘RoW’. That said, the country is clearly doing a lotte better than average.
Who am I to disagree with Austin Kleon and in fact I still don’t .. but the conclusion to the article ends with a use case for why paper dictionaries .. which to this bear seems identical to the why online. What am I missing? 🔗 Source
Was I talking about stumbling across things? Don’t think so, but an example of just that from a few months ago. No words needed to explain the images. Just click through.
🔗 Weekend Reading — Never Again Is Now — Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)
It occurred to me watching a Martin Scorcese documentary about the life of George Harrison, how much people in music seek out opportunities to create with other musicians. In technology, it doesn’t happen, we don’t even look at each other’s software.
💬 Dave Winer
Long said that I speak three languages; English, Music and Math(s) .. sounds like @andysylvester is on a 🔗 similar track.
An Interview With An AI
There are so many of these things popping up (AIs that is), you need an AI to track the AIs.
Pi is one that caught my eye a while back, and I have had some noodles and doodles with it - when time allows. Clearly 🔗 David had a bit more time than me - because he sat down and interviewed them (?) .. or is it still an ‘it’?
Yes, as David explains at the beginning of the podcast, sometimes the flow is a bit stilted - and through my ears sounded robotic (though I think that is being fixed next week!)
The point is - which is the same point that David concludes with - yes - it is not there - but holy hell in a hand basket … the ‘interview was waaaaaay better than many I start, a darn sight more interesting and really - if you were to drop this in the middle of a bunch of reptiles … talking heads … politicians talking - who do you think is gong to hold the attention best - and I choose that particular category because they are used to being interviewed, to pitching, to telling stories. Some have even been trained ….
BUT
Even with the passionless voice - I found more passion and definitely more reasoning from Pi than a lot of people that puncture my days and nights.
Worried yet?