paragraph text

I believe the opportunity in search is not to attack Google head-on with a massive, one size fits all horizontal aggregator, but instead to build boutique search engines that index, curate, and organize things in new ways.

I think the biggest lesson of this blog post is just how difficult it is to be data driven — and to do it properly. A friend of mine likens data-driven decision making to nuclear power: extremely powerful if used correctly, but so very easy to get wrong, and when things go wrong the whole thing blows up in your face. I think about this analogy a lot.

The consulting work feels in some ways like a mindfulness meditation practice. I sit with my clients and we watch the organizations’ thoughts stream past. We label them and keep watching. We ask: “Where did this come from? Where did that come from?” Then we get to work making changes. This observer mindset can be incredibly useful for organizations, and it’s helpful to keep it separate from, and as a complement to, the day-to-day actor mindset.

heorizing interactions between knowledge, identity, and powerHaving reviewed the literature along the core themes of knowledge, identity, and power, we nowextend our review by examining how the interfaces between these themes are conceptualized inthe literature. Our thematic inductive analysis allows us to move beyond paradigmatic differencesby revealing interactions between the three conceptual themes. In so doing, we can identify andamplify connections that are present in the literature of consulting that mainly due to the adoptionof distinct paradigmatic perspectives have not necessarily been theorized explicitly andsystematically. We map the identified interactions into an organizing framework presented inFigure 2. In the following, we discuss each interface and conclude each subsection withproblematizing the research that we unpack more fully in the discussion section

How does one learn and build credibility simultaneously? Such is the challenge faced by an increasing number of professionals, who must quickly get to grips with new assignments while displaying sufficient knowledge to be regarded as experts. If they do not, they will be unable to exert influence over the situation.

Our seasons of earlywood and latewood are less dependable than those of trees, for many reasons, chief among them that we have become disconnected from natural cycles. But that doesn’t mean we cannot ask ourselves: are the conditions right for earlywood or latewood? Which type of growth do I need right now? Which type of growth does my organization want from me? How long has that been the case? Is it time for the seasons to change? And we must remind ourselves that growth occurs in intervals: there are times of growth, and there are times of non-growth. The latter isn’t a failure so much as a necessary period of rest. Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to. But don’t rush. There will be time again for running and jumping, when you’re ready.

One thing I’ll say, though, about 2023 and beyond, as I head into my 50s: I mostly want to make art, not arguments.

Today I’m formally launching Indiekit, the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish content to your personal website and share it on social networks. Think of Indiekit as the missing link between a statically generated website and the social web protocols developed by the IndieWeb community and recommended by the W3C.

A building is a thinking tool A photo essay on the first 10 months of construction of our family home. Also, on the idea of architecture as a way of knowing.

I increasingly think this goal is the most interesting one from the original list.

2022 in review

Summary.    A study of some 16,000 major projects—from large buildings to bridges, dams, power stations, rockets, railroads, information technology systems, and even the Olympic Games—reveals a massive project-management problem. Only 8.5% of those projects were delivered on time and on budget, while a mere 0.5% were completed on time and on budget and produced the expected benefits. In other words, 99.5% of large projects failed to deliver as promised. Master architect Frank Gehry consistently defies those odds, producing projects of staggering beauty while meeting time and budget targets. This article reveals four lessons, gleaned from interviews with Gehry and his colleagues, for successfully managing big projects.

The Middle Class Is Dead. Long Live the Long Tail Class. A networked, creative economy cannot produce a normal distribution of income. Our focus should shift to providing a minimum-viable lifestyle to a growing long-tail class. Cities have a critical role to play in that process.

The definition of “city” is somewhat elusive, largely because we are rarely pressed to articulate it. We know cities when we see them, and that’s usually good enough. The most basic definition is that cities are permanent, densely populated, non-agricultural human settlements, but even by that broad criteria, exceptions are possible. Nonetheless, there is something undeniably immutable about the idea of what a city is, a recognizable quality that goes back millennia, even as the reasons cities exist seem to be in constant flux.

Life After Lifestyle

A consistent challenge in my development as a researcher has been: how to cultivate deep, stable concentration in the face of complex, ill-structured creative problems?In roles oriented around operation and execution, I benefited enormously from standard “productivity” advice. Task managers and time-planning tools were essential. But now, task managers and calendars only help with the least important pieces of my work.Bill Thurston writes:Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity.This description resonates more with my experience of design research than anything Getting Things Done has to say, valuable though it was in my past life. To make progress in my present work, I need to “stare hard enough and with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion.” But if I’d read that last sentence five years ago, I don’t think I’d have really understood what it meant. I wouldn’t have grasped how difficult it is to stare this way, or how impossible progress is without this state of mind.

In response, and to better position us to achieve our long-held mission, we’ve formed Anno, a public benefit corporation (aka “Annotation Unlimited, PBC”) that shares the Hypothesis mission as well as its team. We’ve done this so that we can take investment in a mission aligned way and scale the Hypothesis service to meet the opportunity in front of us.

On this view, our actions start with intentions or goals, which enables a representation to be formed of the desired state of the motor system. Controllers within the motor control system then use this information about the desired states to generate a motor command. This motor command produces a movement, which changes the state of the motor system, and generates sensory feedback. On the basis of this information the new state of the system can be estimated. This estimate is compared with the desired state at a comparator. If there is a mismatch then an updated motor command is issued. This process can continue until the desired state is achieved (indicated by the absence of a mismatch at the comparator).The issue with a motor system operating only in this way is that it is slow to respond to error. Because of this, the organism is vulnerable. The solution, it would appear, is to have an additional predictive component within the motor system, and it is this that is thought to be particularly relevant to sense of agency. This predictive component uses a copy of the motor command that is issued (a so-called ‘efference copy’) to predict the future state of the system. This includes predictions about changes to the motor system as well as the sensory consequences resulting from those changes. On the basis of these predictions, a representation of the predicted state of the system can be formed, and this representation can be compared both with the desired state of the system and with the actual state of the system. The former comparison is important for motor control, as it allows the organism to rapidly adjust motor commands in advance of incorrect actions being performed. The latter comparison is thought to be important for sense of agency. According to the comparator model, the output of the comparison between predicted and actual states determines whether or not we feel a sense of agency. If there is a match, then we feel a sense of agency; if there is mismatch then we do not.

Failed Perfection presents objects that failed in production and explores how researchers use them to study ancient economy and technologies. Deliberate Imperfection features beautiful and finely crafted objects whose makers purposely introduced asymmetries or other unexpected elements into their products—and considers why artists may choose to make imperfect things. Repairing Perfection highlights artifacts that were repaired in antiquity and asks why and how individuals worked to restore usefulness and beauty to certain broken, worn out, or damaged objects. A lot of what I love in art is “deliberate imperfection,” which you see in everything from Japanese wabi-sabi to Navajo rugs to punk rock.

TL;DR: Link-in-bio companies found initial product-market fit as a demilitarized zone (DMZ) that created a buffer between authoritarian, puritanical social media platforms like TikTok/Instagram and debaucherous, prosperous monetization channels like OnlyFans ($932M revenue, $4.8B GMV)

In short, link-in-bio as a category is dead—what’s emerging out of it is vertical SaaS for creators

Companies spend heavily on executive education but often get a meager return on their investment. That’s because business schools and other traditional educators aren’t adept at teaching the soft skills vital for success today, people don’t always stay with the organizations that have paid for their training, and learners often can’t apply classroom lessons to their jobs.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.  It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life.

This project is in stealth

My workflow feels cumbersome for those posts today so I want to try and build a better workflow, probably while still using Jekyll + Github Pages… If anyone has ideas I’m all ears.

my close friend Jim runs Part & Sum which is his brand for the consulting work he does.

In fact, if you’re curious - for now the whole site is still online here: yesand.nyc

(PS - if you think this idea is nuts, wait till you hear the expanded version of this pitch that includes Mozilla acquiring Tumblr….)

I’m quite amazed that I don’t have to change anything by hand: it’s just…nicely presented!

Will there be templates for formatting one’s quotes in different ways?

I’d love to see my quotes be fed into Readwise even though I’m unsure whether I really want that; I somehow like the tool not being synced to any cloud storage.

How to think on your feet without bullshitting

workshops as portals

concrete examples from other indie consultants

in-line comments just like Google Docs

hackathon

age. Made

What we would end up with is not only a bunch of personal websites but a whole interconnected personal-website-verse

Update 5

Corsair mutiny

Sea

Check it out and see how you like it

business entity can be a means of self-expression and an aesthetic medium of its own

an endless homogeneity of Instagram lifestyle influencers

The status associated with aesthetic novelty is eroding, and novelty itself has become increasingly difficult to eke out of a system in which everything is visible, accessible, and relativized. The graphic design profession is being strangled in a race to the bottom of the market, and the distributed network topology of the internet is largely responsible; aesthetics has, simply put, been disrupted.

Cheap

The combination of ubiquitous exposure and the obliteration of predictable context desensitizes consumers to aesthetic novelty. Just as aesthetics can no longer truly die, it is now difficult to create an aesthetic that will be experienced as truly new.

The 70s are always coming back to someone

the market values aesthetic edginess

In-line comments

http://tomcritchlow.com/feeds/

BigSocial