innovation culture

This essay argues that intelligence is not defined by what a system stores or how it computes, but by what it can access and stage into use under constraints of cost, availability, and time . Storage is cheap. Computation is cheaper still. The real bottleneck—the hard part—is memory access. And where the cost is, intelligence is.

To Know is to Stage

There will be future crack-ups and future attempts at radical reform and the possibility of great accomplishments in our time. The current settlement is too sick to be sustainable. But the crucial ingredient that will make the difference will be some new class of elites with a discipline of craft capable of actually achieving the great things you w... See more

Wolf Tivy • Entrepreneurial Statecraft Gets the Goods

echoes of anastasiya’s crisis theories?

The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.

Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal Pistory

JavaScript and the Browser :: Eloquent JavaScript

When you expand a technology, you expand it towards both ends. The divine and the profane. With AI we receive breakthrough medical research AND waifu porn bots. With crypto we receive community owned infrastructure and endless memecoin rugs.

The Heart of a Nation

Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted. "I've been in the US for almost a decade," a Chinese-born data scientist and UC Berkeley graduate told me. "Many of us left to escape that political environment, and are the most liberal-leaning Chinese you can find. We spend so much time going through the American education and i... See more

Link

The "zeitgeist" of ARPA-Parc stretches back to the WWII musterings of scientists and engineers, much of it fostered by Vannevar Bush. One of the things they learned how to do was to "do Art at scale". The ARPA funding by Licklider starting in 1962 carried that context forward into computing, and the results speak for themselves. It's not that it is... See more

Alan Kay • (Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails)

alan kay

In my first week, diving into the Linear UI redesign, I realized how powerful this focused environment could be. Without the constant need to over-communicate or ‘prove’ productivity, I could pour all my energy into the craft itself. Over time, this environment has allowed me to work with a sense of calm and purpose, even when tackling high-stakes ... See more

A journey of craft built on trust, confidence, and focus

Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that “ideas are getting harder to find.” We build a new 46-year panel tracking the universe of U.S. firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas

Just a moment...

But as more tech folks jump aboard the progress train, I’d suggest that they go one click deeper in illustrating what kind of society we’re hurtling toward. Which technologies they’d like to see in abundance, and which they’d prefer stay scarce. And put away the cyberpunk for a second: What about our relationships to each other? The kind of “good l... See more