Tool to use Excalidraw to give a UX like The Brain for Obsidian. https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain

Watch Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse school Amy Coney Barrett on dark money. The Republicans, Whitehouse noted, seem to be getting their money’s worth. Their judicial nominees have voted in at least 80 cases where “there is an identifiable Republican donor interest” and ruled in their favor, to the detriment of workers’ rights, women’s rights, voting rights, and the environment. Whitehouse, who is a former US Attorney, sounded like someone delivering a closing argument in the courtroom. He blamed the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which allowed unlimited money to flow into political campaigns, for the current situation. (more)

Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake. Charles Koch... the 15th-wealthiest man in the U.S., says he isn’t interested in more division. At age 85, he says, he is turning his attention to building bridges across partisan divides to find answers to sprawling social problems such as poverty, addiction, recidivism, gang violence and homelessness. His critics are skeptical, noting that his fierce Republican partisanship over the years blew up a lot of bridges. (more)

How The Koch Brothers Broke Democracy & Stuck Taxpayers With The Bill. The background for this piece is Jane Mayer’s extraordinary book Dark Money, which came out earlier this year. The subtitle says it all: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right. (more)

Steve Yegg on Why Kotlin Is Better Than Whatever Dumb Language You're Using (more)

Ben Hunt: The Anti-Anarchist Cookbook. Ask these three questions of any narrative – is it effective on a brain chemical level? is it resilient against narrative counterattack? is it authentic to what you truly believe? – is the right framework to achieve lasting policy success in a modern age of ubiquitous social media and culture-porn addiction. (more)

see 2009-10-17-ZwikiCloneChoice (more)

See Remarkable Life, Compelling

text editor which displays styling in realtime (modeless) (more)

see Rich Text Editor

tools for thought in development by Baldur Bjarnason - https://www.colophon.cards/ (more)

writing app (more)

PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library,[4][5][6] used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing,[7] originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella.[8][9][10][11] It is free and open-source software released under the modified BSD license. Although the Python interface is more polished and the primary focus of development, PyTorch also has a C++ interface.[12] A number of pieces of deep learning software are built on top of PyTorch, including Tesla Autopilot,[13] Uber's Pyro,[14] Hugging Face's Transformers,[15] PyTorch Lightning,[16][17] and Catalyst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyTorch

Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning.[1] It is most notable for its Transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform that allows users to share machine learning models and datasets... The Transformers library is a Python package that contains open-source implementations of transformer models for text, image, and audio tasks. It is compatible with the PyTorch, TensorFlow and JAX deep learning libraries and includes implementations of notable models like BERT and GPT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face

one of the Tools for Thought

John Cutler: TBM 41/51: Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead). In the cascade, we limit the number of top-level goals. You might think this is a good thing—fewer priorities—but that isn’t the case. Why? The goals are high level and don’t provide adequate forcing functions. (more)

Stephen Marche: The Chatbot Problem. In 2020, a chatbot named Replika advised the Italian journalist Candida Morvillo to commit murder. (more)

The Curious Case of the Colophon Cards Survey Results – Colophon Cards. The most interesting findings, in no particular order: (more)

A Deep Dive Into Replika: My AI Friend. Eventually, with the addition of more complex language models into the equation, the project soon morphed into what it is today—a personal AI that offers a space where you can safely discuss your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, memories, dreams—your “private perceptual world”. (more)

Baldur Bjarnason: What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people. I can’t remember when I first started to use plain text files for my notes and other writing. It would have been some time after 1995 when I was 18 and had recently spent the money I’d earned on my part-time job on a down payment for a Mac Performa. (more)