Everyone seems to be suddenly proposing RFC-like protocols - Robin Sloan’s Spring ‘83, Tom Critchlow’s Library JSON

Worldly Wisdom, some proverbs from around the world.

Winnnie the Pooh in Latin. When it reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1960, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “It is hard to conceive of a Latin work more calculated than this attractive volume to fascinate the modern public, young and old.”

GCHQ puzzles. Daily ones on their Twitter feed as well.

“piece of writing advice that has helped you most”.

He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal – an interesting profile of June Huh. In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math – a profile of Maryna Viazovska who became the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history

Patrick Collison’s Questions. A lot to chew on.

Gödel’s Loophole. “In 1947 Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam because they were concerned about his unpredictable behavior: During his voluminous preparation for the exam, Gödel said, he had uncovered a flaw in the U.S. constitution that could lead to a dictatorship.”

Putin’s Philosophers, NATO’s Philosophers and An International Relations Theory Guide to the War in Ukraine — interesting reads to understand how we got here and what lies ahead.

10 Lessons I learned walking 10,000 Kilometers in 2021’s Pandamic Year. Meditative and reassuringly approachable. Long read, and therein lies its comtemplative beauty.

The Chinese Room Thinks. “In my view, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy, John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, has been decisively answered by science.”

Crony Beliefs and and an addendum on this topc. A great set of essays - “Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they’re also our best solution.” From the author of The Elephant in the Brain

An app can be a home-cooked meal - Robin Sloan’s essays are always a treat to read. “When you liberate programming from the requirement to be general and professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether.”

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known. Kevin Kelly on his 70th birthday. Every single one of them is worth thinking over.

Edsger W. Dijkstra: a Commemoration, “a multiauthored portait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his” (PDF).

chez baldwin, “Some of the sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin in St. Paulde-Vence,. These songs document the vinyl records left behind in Chez Baldwin after his death in 1987”. A Spotify playlist.

Here we go again, a personal post by one of Kaspersky’s Threat Intelligence (GReAT) team members on working for a Russian cyber security comapny in the current charged world.

The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness. “A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice.”

Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings. “Choose joy” and what an impactful choice it will be.

How a man who washed his own underwear built investment colossus GIC. “It was also Goh who nursed the then radical idea that the nation’s reserves could – and should – be invested to yield returns, a notion that eventually led to the formation of GIC.”

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation. Interesting mental exercise topic as always. What the author shys away from, which is a pity, is the angle of questioning as to what it means that “slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we” can even start to think of these simulations.

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. Provocative, interesting discourse.

I gave myself three months to change my personality. “The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed.

Our Universe is SO big, it’s mindblowing! 21st-century remake of Charles and Ray Eames’ short documentary film Powers of Ten from 1977. Mind blown.

The last one of this year!

The ESG Mirage. “MSCI, the largest ESG rating company, doesn’t even try to measure the impact of a corporation on the world. It’s all about whether the world might mess with the bottom line.”

The Top 22 Security Predictions for 2022. Comprehensive and some unique ones in there.

Testing Firefox more efficiently with machine learning. “If we simply ran every test on every configuration on every push, we’d run approximately 2.3 billion test files per day!” Now, that is a problem.

Amy Jordan in conversation with Naomi Klein on “Branding, privacy, and identity: growing up in surveillance capitalism.” Too short a discussion, but so many interesting tangents of thoughts to follow up on.

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3, by Tim O’Reilly. Some thoughts to ponder on (not all bubbles are bad, building useful infrastructure is key) though not a lot of new ones.

Robin Sloan’s Notes on Web3 “I do not think Web3 is a desirable or even tolerable path forward for this web right here, but I take its lesson well. “Code wins arguments”, and so do clubs, and cults; time remains to build all three.” The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency, straight talk - “There are indeed a lot of fools in this world, but to presume an infinite chain of them as the core of an investment thesis is beyond absurd.”

topher fixed it - “parody alternate endings to beloved but problematic children’s literature”, featuring the fixed ending of The Giving Tree

Tim Ferriss with Noah Feldman. Interesting discussion on building constitutions, Supreme court of Facebook, ‘crypto’ organisations (DAOs) and others.