This is a story about a story. The original, by Matt Stopera, appeared on BuzzFeed, and its title describes, and evokes, all of what followed in a four-part meme gone wild: “Who Is This Man And Why Are His Photos Showing Up On My Phone?” Its subtitle, “This weird thing happened to me,” is the perfect distillation of the BuzzFeed mode. The story is an agglomeration of homemade phone photos, GIFs, Twitter snapshots, listicles, and some writing, too, much of it in one-sentence paragraphs. (“Bali!” “So I go to China.”) It has no form any writing teacher would ever understand, but it’s filled with the wonder and joy that’s missing from most everything else I read. It is the story of a man in China (he’s mostly known as Orange Man, or Orange Brother) who unwittingly acquired a phone that Stopera had lost on the Lower East Side in New York, and what happened when their photo streams crossed, and then the Internet got involved.But this is a crafty recommendation, because, while I am essentially admitting that I totally enjoyed Stopera’s story, which had all the style of a DQ Blizzard, and was just as tasty, I am not actually technically saying I am jealous of it. I am saying I am jealous of Chris Beam’s sensitive, restrained, human take on his story, which probably way fewer people read. Beam, who is a terrific writer, went to visit Orange Man, the subject of Stopera’s piece, and found a much more complicated person, in a much more complicated situation. But Beam doesn’t arrive at the expected place either. We don’t learn that Matt Stopera cynically used Orange Man or anything like that. It’s just an odd, totally real story that gets more interesting with every post, or article, or tweet, or whatever. —Bryant Urstadt

Oh hey, this blog post on artificial intelligence looks like a fun quick read. At least that’s what I thought to myself as I clicked. And that’s how I fell into this 23,000-word wormhole of fact and prognostication—the format of choice at Tim Urban’s Wait But Why “blog.” I read the piece in January when it first appeared, and it basically inspired me to devote all of my 2015 book reading to science and science fiction about the near future. I know what you’re thinking: Who has the time for this? But don’t worry, it’s just a blog post ... —Tom Randall

Reading Tim Urban’s science blog Wait But Why is like having those late-night dorm room conversations you had in college, but with a lot more intelligence and a lot less weed. His breakdown this year of procrastination was worth reading to the end (which is hard for me) and was both informative and life-changing. And if you really want to break out the Graffix, dig into his archive and read Tim’s 2014 post on the Fermi Paradox, which attempts to address our eternal question of whether we’re alone in the universe, and manages to convey mind-bendingly complex ideas in the most easygoing, laid-back conversational style you could ever hope for. —Sam Grobart

This is a wicked good, two-part story in Wired by Joshuah Bearman telling the archetypal tale of a young djembe-playing crystallographer getting hooked on libertarian economic theory and launching an underground drug bazaar, which, thanks to good timing, Tor cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking, grows into a booming business, resulting in moral corruption, blackmailing hackers, Bitcoin riches, rogue investigators, murder-for-hire betrayals, and, ultimately, a suspenseful, balletic arrest inside a San Francisco public library. Goes on for something like 20,000 words and left me envious and wanting more. —Felix Gillette

I couldn’t put down this epic saga of the online drug marketplace Silk Road, and the operation to shut it down. I find the Dark Web endlessly fascinating and great crime stories have an instant appeal, but it was the characters—their faults and temptations—that left me thinking about this story for weeks afterward. Without spoilers, I will say the climax library scene is brilliant. I’m also a huge fan of Tomer Hanuka’s illustrations, and his work for Wired here set the tone for the whole piece. —Alex Dickinson

I am jealous of almost everything that Peter Hessler writes. This year’s standout is his wonderfully titled New Yorker piece, Learning to Speak Lingerie. Hessler discovered a market that's not nearly as niche as I would have thought: a community of Chinese selling lingerie (“buttless body stockings, and nightgowns that cover only one breast, and G-strings accessorized with feathers”) in one of the most conservative parts of Egypt. The story is a quirky, illuminating tale of the intersection of cultures and business. —Susan Berfield

They spent $3,000 on a MakerBot Replicator 2 and made a promise to each other: If they could get the 3-D printer to pay for itself in one month by completing orders, they would quit their jobs.

The part arrives a few days later in a cardboard package branded with big, bold letters that spell "Fictiv." (The name is a play on the word "fictive," meaning "creating or created by imagination.") By quickly identifying the shops and machines best suited for each job and intelligently routing orders, Fictiv can offer a far shorter turnaround time than that of traditional manufacturers. The service is designed for low-volume prototype manufacturing but it is capable of handling large orders for thousands of parts. For techies like Will Rehlich, Fictiv's quick approach is critical to the innovative process.

8 Tech Trends to Watch in 2016

A letter from Warren Weaver to the computer specialist Norbert Wiener in March 1947 is considered to mark the beginning of this process. Two years later, in July 1949, Weaver publicized his ideas on the applications of the computer to translation and shortly afterwards a number of universities in the United States initiated research into the field of machine translation.

So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Society as a whole is its own loose tribe, often spanning your whole nation or even your whole part of the world, and what we call “conventional wisdom” is its guiding dogma cookbook—online and available to the public. Typically, the larger the tribe, the more general and more outdated the dogma—and the conventional wisdom database runs like a DMV website last updated in 1992. But when the cook has nowhere else to turn, it’s like a trusty old friend.

The Cook and the Chef

I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.

In 1681, English theologian Thomas Burnet published Sacred Theory of the Earth, in which he explained how geology worked. What happened was, around 6,000 years ago, the Earth was formed as a perfect sphere with a surface of idyllic land and a watery interior. But then, when the surface dried up a little later, cracks formed in its surface, releasing much of the water from within. The result was the Biblical Deluge and Noah having to deal with a ton of shit all week. Once things settled down, the Earth was no longer a perfect sphere—all the commotion had distorted the surface, bringing about mountains and valleys and caves down below, and the whole thing was littered with the fossils of the flood’s victims.

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing. 2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.

The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

Seven years ago, CWU began to build a new framework that enables people to buttress their strategic thinking skills and to follow through on their goals in the face of daily life challenges that would normally throw them off-course. Called the Bridge to Self Sufficiency, or the Bridge for short, this framework is an EF-informed “scaffold” structure that helps participants concurrently attain progress in the five areas that our research has shown to be pivotal to fostering economic mobility: family stability, well-being, education, financial management, and career management.

Recent discoveries in brain science demonstrate that stress compromises memory, making it harder for people to remember several things at one time. Stress also makes it harder to maintain mental flexibility, to shift back and forth between potential approaches to solving problems, and to weigh the future implications of current decisions. As a result, many who have been raised in conditions of significant stress—or who are currently undergoing acute stress—struggle to keep track of the multiple problems in their lives, to analyze those problems, to explore options for dealing with them, and to set priorities for how best to move ahead.

8 Rare Gems from Heidi Roizen on Building a Fulfilling Life and Career

5 Habits of Truly Amazing Communicators

101 Great Things About America (2020 Edition)

Nobel Laureate Robert Lefkowitz is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine and professor of biochemistry, pathology and chemistry at Duke University. This article is adapted from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm: The Adrenaline-Fueled Adventures of an Accidental Scientist, by Robert Lefkowitz with Randy Hall (just published by Pegasus Books).

The Art of Scholarly Mentoring

Apparatus is a hybrid graphics editor and programming environment for creating interactive diagrams. The Apparatus Editor runs in the browser and interactive diagrams created with Apparatus can be shared and embedded on the web (coming soon).

Imagination ends up being the necessary trait that allows founders to see how something small can become large. It is also what investors need in order to believe in a founder who figures out how to build something that doesn’t exist.

I think that the biggest fallacy of value investing is that people are not willing to revisit that word from first principles. Valuable means a thing that is of great worth. It's worth a great deal of money. Those are two different definitions of the word. I tend to think about value that way, as well, which is I think the biggest problem that people get wrong is they look at a cheap PE or lots of free cash flow, and they confuse it with that old Charlie Munger, Buffett-ism of a used cigar with two puffs left, or a used cigarette with two puffs left.

But to be honest with you, what it really taught me is that personal finance is not taught. Nobody knows how to get ahead. That being poor is a systemic condition in North America. It is a disease that's equivalent to diabetes and heart disease or depression or any other kind of mental illness, except that it's structural and institutionalized. It's not something that's wrong with your physiology. Poverty is just something that's conditioned into people in the way that society works in a Western.

Genius is not an absolute but a human construct that’s dependent on time, place and culture. Similarly, genius is relative. Some people simply change the world more than others. Accordingly, genius presupposes an inequality of output (the exceptional thoughts of an Einstein, or the music of a Bach) and generates an inequality of reward (eternal fame for Bach, fabulous riches for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). That’s just the way the world works. Acts of genius are usually attended by acts of destruction; that’s generally called progress.

A genius is a person of extraordinary mental powers whose original works or insights change society in some significant way for good or for ill across cultures and across time.

Genius (G) equals Significance (S) of the degree of impact or change effected (Alexander Fleming’s life-saving penicillin vs Kanye West’s latest style of Yeezy sneakers) times the Number (N) of people impacted (about 200 million lives saved vs 280,000 pairs of shoes sold) times Duration (D) of impact (antibiotics have been around for 80 years; the life of a shoe is use-dependent). Although the ‘genius equation’ was not a foolproof formula, at least here was a useful way to frame a discussion over the course of an academic term.

Here was a formula that students and the populace at large could immediately grasp: G = S x N x D

If IQ is overrated, curiosity and persistence are not. Nor is a having a childlike imagination through adult life, the capacity to relax so as to allow disparate ideas to coalesce into new, original ones, and the ability to construct a habit for work so as to get the product out the door. Finally, if you want to live a long life, get a passion. Geniuses are passionate optimists who on average outlive the general populace by more than a decade.

We’ve described a third view, in which AIs actually change humanity, helping us invent new cognitive technologies, which expand the range of human thought. Perhaps one day those cognitive technologies will, in turn, speed up the development of AI, in a virtuous feedback cycle:

Examples such as those described in this essay suggest that AI systems can enable the creation of new cognitive technologies. Things like the font tool aren’t just oracles to be consulted when you want a new font. Rather, they can be used to explore and discover, to provide new representations and operations, which can be internalized as part of the user’s own thinking. And while these examples are in their early stages, they suggest AI is not just about cognitive outsourcing. A different view of AI is possible, one where it helps us invent new cognitive technologies which transform the way we think.

This essay describes a new field, emerging today out of a synthesis of AI and IA. For this field, we suggest the name artificial intelligence augmentation (AIA): the use of AI systems to help develop new methods for intelligence augmentation. This new field introduces important new fundamental questions, questions not associated to either parent field. We believe the principles and systems of AIA will be radically different to most existing systems.

Historically, different answers to this question – that is, different visions of computing – have helped inspire and determine the computing systems humanity has ultimately built. Consider the early electronic computers. ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, was commissioned to compute artillery firing tables for the United States Army. Other early computers were also used to solve numerical problems, such as simulating nuclear explosions, predicting the weather, and planning the motion of rockets. The machines operated in a batch mode, using crude input and output devices, and without any real-time interaction. It was a vision of computers as number-crunching machines, used to speed up calculations that would formerly have taken weeks, months, or more for a team of humans.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence

In the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Engelbart, J. C. R. Licklider, Alan Kay, and others developed a vision of computers as devices for augmenting and extending human beings. This vision strongly influenced later researchers and entrepreneurs, including people such as Steve Jobs, and has now entered mainstream media accounts.

I believe this is what made MacPaint so exciting to 11 year-old me: it expanded the range of thoughts I could think. As a practical matter, this expressed itself as an expansion in the range of visual images I could create. In general, what makes an interface transformational is when it introduces new elements of cognition that enable new modes of thought. More concretely, such an interface makes it easy to have insights or make discoveries that were formerly difficult or impossible. At the highest level, it will enable discoveries (or other forms of creativity) that go beyond all previous human achievement. Alan Kay has asked*:* Alan Kay, What is a Dynabook? (2013). “what is the carrying capacity for ideas of the computer?” Similarly, we may ask: what is the carrying capacity for discovery of the computer?

[A]dult students beginning in art generally do not really see what is in front of their eyes — that is, they do not perceive in the way required for drawing. They take note of what's there, and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols mainly based on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know about the perceived object.

In extreme cases, to use such an interface is to enter a new world, containing objects and actions unlike any you've previously seen. At first these elements seem strange. But as they become familiar, you internalize the elements of this world. Eventually, you become fluent, discovering powerful and surprising idioms, emergent patterns hidden within the interface. You begin to think with the interface, learning patterns of thought that would formerly have seemed strange, but which become second nature. The interface begins to disappear, becoming part of your consciousness. You have been, in some measure, transformed.

Thought as a Technology

The final group project for Sarkis’ seminar was effectively an exercise in collaborative worldbuilding. We were tasked with imagining a city-world not bounded by political borders and guided by an organizing theme for a future scenario. Several groups imagined dystopian cityscapes ravaged by global warming, another envisioned an ecotopia where natural systems, biodiversity, and people coexist in the post-humanist city. My group, consisting of students in architecture, urban planning, and related design studies, addressed the consequences of extreme socio-economic stratification. We imagined parallel cities of prosperity and leisure, a late-capitalist New Babylon, accessible only through paid subscription. Not wanting to dwell on the darker side of our dystopian city-world, we quietly de-emphasized the spaces where the ninety percent live.

The World as an Architectural Project is reflexive and historical rather than megalomaniacal, as might be surmised from the title. Inherent to the imagination behind Sarkis’ editorial intent and selected case studies is the act of worldmaking, or what we will refer to here as worldbuilding—the process of designing and describing fictional, future, or alternate worlds, societies, and cities.

Luddite philosophy also rests on the notion that the adoption of a new technology may resolve an existing problem, but that it may create future problems and concerns. Thus, technology must be viewed from all angles, and, if a technology is found to have negative consequences, social resources must be devoted to changing or fixing that technology. For Luddites, the idea of voluntary and democratic adoption of technology in a sustainable fashion is a central tenet of their philosophy.

“In Evernote, Notion, and most note taking tools, your information lives in a hierarchy. Evernote’s is based on three levels: Stacks, Notebooks, and notes. Each note lives in one notebook, which lives in one stack… In Roam, notes live nowhere and everywhere… Each note has relationships to other notes, but no note lives *inside* another note or notebook. All of the information is fluid in the sense that you flow between notes based on their relationships, not because they’re all in the same folder or hierarchy.”

The half-truth is that people benefit from personalised learning which incorporates multiple modalities. The brain excels at integrating information from multiple sources, and forms deeper connections between ideas when those ideas have been communicated through more than one medium. It is therefore useful to learn from multiple sources and in different modalities (Shulruf, Hattie, & Dixon, 2008).

Mindstone’s collaborative learning model encourages peer-to-peer feedback, with synchronous and asynchronous collaboration on comments as well as notes. Learners are able to ask and answer questions, and in so doing reflect upon their own learning. Shared libraries provide a forum in which peers can contribute resources and work together in the extraction of insights and understanding, writing notes together or in teams. The notification system ensures that learners are apprised of new comments on their discussions, and are able to immediately respond to questions they have been asked.

Bittle is an open platform to fuse multiple makers' gadgets into one organic system. With our customized Arduino board coordinating all instinctive and sophisticated movements, you can clip on various sensors to bring in perception. You could also inject artificial intelligence capabilities by mounting a Raspberry Pi or other AI chips through wired/wireless connections.

“Visionary founders” such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk of Tesla, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway would be harder to replace than CEOs of large, well-established public companies, the directors indicated. They said that just two people could replace Bezos, and three could replace Buffett or Musk. 

Facebook wanting to make clothes like real in games, Microsoft trying to make sports more inclusive and Google wanting to make it easier to spy on your parents.

The photographs are poems, which I didn’t know how to write. Poems of boyhood, longing, innocence, vulnerability, mortality.

"We thought it was this big joke that would die off," laughs Palmer.

Sarah Jaffe’s book Work Won’t Love You Back is an extremely timely analysis of how we arrived at these brutal inequalities and of some of the ways in which a deliberately atomised workforce is beginning to organise to challenge them. Through a series of detailed case studies of modern “labourers of love” – the unpaid intern, the overburdened teacher, the 24/7 domestic help, the NGO employee, the fixed-term academic, the discarded Toys R Us worker, the working single mother – Jaffe, a New York-based journalist, examines two of the most damaging philosophies of our times. The first is the idea that we need to get used to a “disrupted” world in which job security and regular hours and living wages are necessarily a thing of the past, quaint, pre-internet relics such as affordable housing and three TV channels; the second, perversely, that work is supposed, more than ever, to bring us pleasure, meaning, fulfilment, that we should be grateful for it and happy in it and if we are not, we are simply not trying hard enough or being “smart” enough. (Or, as she writes: “How dare we ask questions about the way our work is making other people rich while we struggle to pay our rent and see our friends.”)

All work and low pay: are we too devoted to our jobs?

Pending future publication of my more extensive account of this in the journal Urban History, one early example must suffice here. Beginning in 1914, New York City designated some streets as “play streets,” where children could roam freely. These were cordoned off to motor traffic, but trucks were permitted in to make local deliveries. On Valentine’s Day in 1949, a truck driver drove his coal truck into a play street in East Harlem to make an early afternoon delivery. He had beaten a charge of vehicular homicide 14 years earlier. According to accounts by the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, two 10-year-old girls, Carmelita Rodriguez and Maria Rodriguez (unrelated), on their lunch hour from Public School 121, strode out of a store with the candy they just purchased, confident in the safety of the play street. The truck driver struck them with his vehicle, killing both girls. Maria’s nine-year-old sister witnessed the girls’ deaths. {"contentId":"Q9RXWHT1UM0W01","position":"in-article2","dimensions":{"mobile":[[5,19],[300,250],[3,3],[1,1],"fluid"]},"type":"In Article Flex Native Ad","positionIncrement":1,"targeting":{"position":"in-article2","positionIncrement":1,"url":"/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidden-history-of-american-anti-car-protests"},"containerId":"in-article-2-Q9RXWHT1UM0W01"} The next day, local residents formed a “parent and baby-carriage blockade,” stopping and turning back all delivery vehicles. According to a New York Daily News reporter, 100 women participated; photos of the protest show an ethnically diverse population. Mary di Stefano, president of the Parents’ Association of P.S. 121, made their position clear: “They’ll have to kill us to get through here, ” she told the Daily News. The next day, parents set up a second picket one block north.The demonstrators extracted a concession: The city would close the play street to delivery vehicles on weekdays during the hours when children were walking to and from school, including the lunch hour.

The Hidden History of American Anti-Car Protests

For an opportunity at breakthrough invention (and massive wealth creation), it is important to understand what went right at Xerox PARC. PARC assembled the best people in the field and gave them license to build “the office of the future” (including the license to define what that meant). PARC managers, especially Robert Taylor, had the wisdom to separate responsibility from control and never presumed to “direct” the invention. Instead, Taylor focused on creating an environment safe from meddling and a culture that promoted cooperation when appropriate. The proof of this approach is all around us—and embodied in the device with which you’re reading this article.

We had a contest [at CDG] to come up with the most innocuous name that didn’t sound ridiculous. “Communications Design Group” is pretty vague, because what we’re likely to [invent] will be something other than what we’d put on a list. [But] the communication and design aspects do mean something. People communicate with each other, with themselves, in groups, with computers, and computers communicate with each other. If you take all the things in the world that can communicate and think of a future in which all those communications are qualitatively richer, then you have a vision.We live in a world full of hype. When I look at most of the Silicon Valley companies [claiming to do invention research], they’re really selling pop culture. Pop culture is very incremental and is about creating things other than high impact. Being able to do things that change what business means is going to have a huge impact–more than something that changes what social interaction means in pop culture.

Our process starts with using one’s own intuition to define a step-by-step plan thought to potentially solve a complex problem. The algorithm then looks at each individual step and gives feedback about which steps are possible, which are impossible and ways the plan could be improved. The human then refines the initial plan using the advice from the AI, and the process repeats until the problem is solved. The hope is that the person and the AI will eventually converge to a kind of mutual understanding.

“Communities and dedicated spaces for people to talk about what’s happening will be at the forefront,” he told Co.Design in late 2020. “These community spaces will be safe and have a multitude of controls. Successful social media services will be those where people feel safe, comfortable, heard, and connected within their communities.”

Nextdoor’s feed-ranking algorithm feels less aggressively optimized than those of larger networks. There’s no such thing as “followers,” so there’s little incentive for users to post clickbait or engagement bait. The network’s intimate scope, with each user identified by their real first name, last initial, and neighborhood of residence, can make using Nextdoor feel less like a game of influence and more like, well, actually talking to your neighbors. It’s hard to go viral when your audience is limited to your immediate area.

Nextdoor has gradually evolved into something bigger and more consequential than just a digital bulletin board: In many communities, the platform has begun to step into roles once filled by America’s local newspapers. “Anecdotally, Nextdoor has gone from being kind of sub-Facebook to actually being the main platform you hear people discussing as a vector for local news and events and discussions,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

We can explore the ways in which our attention is generated, manipulated, valued and degraded. Sometimes attention might simply be a lens through which to read the events of the moment. But it can also force us toward a better understanding of how our minds work or how we value our time and the time of others. Perhaps, just by acknowledging its presence, we can begin to direct it toward people, ideas and causes that are worthy of our precious resource.

Attention is a bit like the air we breathe. It’s vital but largely invisible, and thus we don’t think about it very much unless, of course, it becomes scarce. If that’s the case — to extend a tortured metaphor — it feels as if our attention has become polluted. We subsist on it, but the quality has been diminished. This is certainly true in my life, where I’ve become so reliant on the constant stimuli of our connected world that I find myself frequently out of control of my attention. I give it to others too willingly — often to those who will abuse the privilege. I’ve also become dependent on the attention of others, even those who bestow it in bad faith. I’ve become a version of the very person Mr. Goldhaber described in 1997, for whom “not being able to share your encounters with anyone would soon become torture.”

we tend to ignore his favorite maxim, from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”

“The idea of using physical objects as the computational medium is the focus of the group. What you see here is just the surface of where we want to go with it. We don’t want you to write code to make these things. You should be able to draw a diagram and have this interpreted as a diagram,” he said.

each individual piece of paper on the walls and tables, here, is essentially its own snippet of the Lua programming language. Some pieces of paper have their working code printed on them. Dynamicland can actually perform OCR on that code and run it in real-time, but generally, it uses that code symbolically in the real world and has its own digital portion stashed on the server-side. However, when an object is changed, the system can highlight the changed lines on the paper printouts, and it has the ability to tag code sheets that are out of sync with their updated digital counterparts.

When Bezos describes his primary goals for the Amazon.com interface, he becomes a whistle-stop campaigner for a new politics of consumerism. "We want to turn visitors into customers, and we want to make the experience as welcoming as possible," he says. He insists that the lures and aids Amazon.com provides for its online shoppers - the one-click ordering system that stores credit card and shipping information; the variety of helpful suggestions and information that seem configured to exploit a customer's most impulsive tendencies - are far removed from the world's entrenched consumerist come-ons.

The vast bulk of store-bought goods - food staples, paper products, cleaning supplies, and the like - you will order electronically. Some physical storefronts will survive, but they'll have to offer at least one of two things: entertainment value or immediate convenience.

It’s tempting to argue that Amazon’s true innovation has been the ruthless exploitation of human labour in service of speed and efficiency, but that’s really only part of the picture: the aim is removing humans – with their need for toilet breaks, their stubborn insistence on sleeping, their tendency to unionise – as much as possible from the equation; the grim specifics of the labour conditions are only ever a byproduct of that aim. This has been an aim of capitalism since at least as far back as Henry Ford, and in an obvious sense it’s precisely the dynamic you experience every time you wind up with unexpected items in the bagging area at Tesco. As usual with Amazon, it’s not that something new is happening – it’s that an old thing is happening with unprecedented force, speed and efficiency.

If you believe that capitalism is an inherently just and meritocratic system, whereby the most worthy people – the hardest-working, the cleverest, the most innovative – amass the greatest wealth, then it stands to reason that you would have to make some kind of argument for a man who had amassed more than $180bn in personal wealth as a presiding genius of our time. And just as Hegel looked at Napoleon and saw the world-soul on horseback, Isaacson views Bezos in similarly heroic light: the world-soul dispatched by delivery drone. The effort to portray him as such is, though, inevitably beset by bathos. “An example of how Bezos innovates and operates,” he writes, “was the launch of Amazon Prime, which transformed the way Americans think about how quickly and cheaply they can be gratified by ordering online.” There is no question that the introduction of Amazon Prime marked a major moment in the history of buying stuff off the internet, but to present it as the work of an ingenious inventor seems a stretch. For all the vastness of Bezos’s wealth and power, the banality of its foundation is undeniable. (There is, here, an unintended comedy to Isaacson’s hagiography, taking on as it does an almost mock-heroic tone: Bezos fomenting a kind of revolution in consciousness, around how “quickly and cheaply” consumers can get the stuff they order off the internet.)

much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!

Amzn nearly died in 2000-2003. But without this crisis, it's unlikely the company would have made the hard decision to shift to a completely new architecture. And without that shift, AWS may never have happened. Never let a good crisis go to waste!

Around this same time, Jeff was also interested in decoupling internal dependencies so teams could build without being gated by other teams. The architectural changes required to enable this loosely coupled model became the API primitives for AWS.

As a retailer we had always faced huge seasonality, with traffic and revenue surging every Nov/Dec. Jeff started to think - we have all this excess server capacity for 46 weeks/year, why not rent it out to other companies?

The oldest reference on the topic I know of dates back to 1979 in a book by Zelkowitz, Shaw, and Gannon entitled Principles of software engineering and design. It said that most of the development time was spent on maintenance (67%).

What I Think of Bitcoin

The Snowy Day

How Artificial Intelligence "Works" in Literary Translation

Much like a brain deciphering pieces of information, the artificial neural network looks at the information it hasbeen given and generates the next word, based on its neighbouring words. Over time, it “learns” which words to focus on, and where to make the best contextual connections based on previous examples. This process is a form of “deep learning” and allows translation systems to continuously learn and improve as time goes on. In NMT, deciphering context is called “alignment” and happens in the attention mechanism, which is situated between the encoder and decoder in the machine’s system.

The Forgotten Dimension of Diversity

Buckminster Fuller // "Evolution consists of many great revolutionary events taking place quite independently of man’s consciously attempting to bring them about... I remind you quickly that none of you is consciously routing the fish and potato you ate for lunch into this and that specific gland to make hair, skin, or anything like that. None of you are aware of how you came to grow from 7 pounds to 70 pounds and then to 170 pounds... All of this is automated, and always has been. There is a great deal that is automated regarding our total salvation on Earth, and I would like to get in that frame of mind right now in order to be useful in the short time we have."

To be selected for the Top 100 is to be anointed by Jobs, an honor not necessarily based on rank. Jobs referred to the group, but not the conclave, in an interview several years ago with Fortune. “My job is to work with sort of the Top 100 people,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors. So when a good idea comes … part of my job is to move it around [and] … get ideas moving among that group of 100 people.” Privately Jobs has spoken even more strongly about the Top 100’s importance. “If he had to recreate the company, these are the 100 people he’d bring along” is how one former Apple executive describes Jobs’ characterization.

At Apple there is never any confusion as to who is responsible for what. Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Often the DRI’s name will appear on an agenda for a meeting, so everybody knows who is responsible. “Any effective meeting at Apple will have an action list,” says a former employee. “Next to each action item will be the DRI.” A common phrase heard around Apple when someone is trying to learn the right contact on a project: “Who’s the DRI on that?”

Keep in mind: There is no such thing as "an artificial intelligence". AI is a collection of methods and ideas for building software that can do some of the things that humans can do with their brains. Researchers and developers develop new AI methods (and use existing AI methods) to build software (and sometimes also hardware) that can do something impressive, such as playing a game or drawing pictures of cats. However, you can safely assume that the same system cannot both play games and draw pictures of cats. In fact, no AI-based system that I've ever heard of can do more than a few different tasks. Even when the same researchers develop systems for different tasks based on the same idea, they will build different software systems. When journalists write that "Company X's AI could already drive a car, but it can now also write a poem", they obscure the fact that these are different systems and make it seem like there are machines with general intelligence out there. There are not.

Some advice for journalists writing about artificial intelligence

Everything that moves, says a16z partner Frank Chen, will go autonomous. But what does that really mean? In this presentation from our a16z Summit, Chen goes over the 16 most commonly asked questions about autonomous cars, and what their answers might be:  Will we progress level by level, or go straight to Level 5, i.e. full automation? Will they use LIDAR or not? What blend of software techniques will be used? What rules of the road (traffic lights!) will become a thing of the past, and how will insurance be affected? You can’t understand autonomous vehicles without understanding these 16 basic and essential questions — and the issues at stake tied to them — in this concise overview that covers everything you’re wondering about autonomous vehicles in a nutshell.

“Look Steve. You know, you’ve made something that is perfect for 2-year-olds and perfect for 92-year-olds. But everybody in-between learns to use tools.”

We need to debate what kind of hypermedia suit our vision of society - how we create the interactive products and on-line services we want to use, the kind of computers we like and the software we find most useful. We need to find ways to think socially and politically about the machines we develop. While learning from the can-do attitude of the Californian individualists, we also must recognise that the potentiality of hypermedia can never solely be realised through market forces. We need an economy which can unleash the creative powers of hi-tech artisans. Only then can we fully grasp the Promethean opportunities of hypermedia as humanity moves into the next stage of modernity.

Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first Difference Engine project received a British Government grant of £517,470 - a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of- computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM corporation built the first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late '30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuze, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs and electronic logic gates.

Back in the 60s, Marshall McLuhan preached that the power of big business and big government would be overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. The convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably result in an electronic direct democracy - the electronic agora - in which everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship.  Encouraged by McLuhan's predictions, West Coast radicals pioneered the use of new information technologies for the alternative press, community radio stations, home-brew computer clubs and video collectives.

The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith P has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete.

The Californian Ideology

We’re in the middle of a data revolution. Business processes everywhere are becoming digitized. Firms like Walmart and Target know exactly what you search for and what you end up buying. Other firms like ADP, Mastercard and FedEx are intimately involved in payrolls, transactions, delivery and every other stage of the commercial pipeline. And every single action that these firms take is recorded and stored for analysis. Human interactions are also becoming digitized. Social networks, instant messaging and web search paint a dynamic, real-time picture of what people are interested in and who they’re talking to. Again, every single action is recorded and stored for posterity. Smartphones are ubiquitous. This means an accurate location sensor, audio recorder, still/video camera, radio transponder and internet connection in every pocket. Almost no part of the world is outside the limits of cellular coverage. Cars and trucks now have embedded sensors, tracking position, velocity, traffic and much more. Satellites and GPS have gone from the preserve of the few (military) to the plaything of the many; imagery and position data are today a public good. As a result of these technological innovations, we are swimming in a sea of data. Yet this data would be meaningless if it weren’t for another, parallel advancement in the area of computation. Thanks to the relentless progress of Moore’s Law, we have the bandwidth to capture all this data, the memory to store it and the cycles to analyze it and extract commercial value from it. This capacity has transformed industries everywhere.

And companies will evolve to make use of all this data. Today, for every Amazon or Target that runs a rigorous program of data collection, analysis and action, there are dozens of companies that still operate by old-school rules. As time goes by, these firms will either adapt or become extinct. Either way, the future belongs to businesses that embrace the data revolution. This means that the amount of business data available to analysts will only continue to grow.

Detail-oriented without ever losing a strong strategic perspective. Calm under the pressure of implementation and deadlines. A strong listener with great skill at asking questions. Able to vary the direction of a project (or a tactic or task) in smart ways to keep moving toward the objective. Adept at anticipating potential problems and addressing them early. Able to successfully interact at senior and junior levels within the organization. Resilient in order to recover from setbacks. Consistent in how he or she responds to comparable situations.