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Gordon Brander is the author of Squishy Computer, a Substack publication focused on learning to build living software, with thousands of subscribers.

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Context folding enhances AI research by allowing multiple agents to explore diverse sources, leading to richer insights and creative breakthroughs.
Deep Future is an AI that utilizes scenario planning to navigate uncertainty in strategic foresight, distinguishing between risk and uncertainty to develop robust strategies.
The blog post discusses the development of Deep Future, an AI agent designed for scenario planning, which allows users to conduct rapid analyses of complex topics like supply chains and technological trends. It emphasizes the impo...
The post draws connections between generative music and AI programming, highlighting the creative opportunities presented by ambiguity in both fields.
The podcast episode delves into scenario planning and the Deep Future AI engine, highlighting its role in enhancing strategic decision-making amidst uncertainty.
The text discusses the impact of the internet on society, drawing parallels between the global network and the human nervous system. It explores the implications of living in a network society, focusing on the role of cities and n...
The text discusses the concept of McLuhan absolutism, which states that the medium is the message. It explores the idea that the medium through which information flows determines the behavior of the system. It compares different m...
The text discusses how cryptography scales trust by solving problems related to authenticity, privacy, integrity, proof-of-x, and contracts. It also explores the history of trust scaling through language, writing, money, and relig...
The text discusses the idea of rebuilding software ecosystems and the challenges associated with it. It uses examples of Python3, JavaScript, and Deno to illustrate the difficulties and costs of forking an ecosystem. The author ar...
The text discusses the concept of compositionality and modularity, and how it is necessary for working at scale. It emphasizes the importance of drawing lines and boundaries to divide a system into modules, and the impact of inter...
The text discusses the places to intervene in a system, as outlined by Donella Meadows. It delves into the spiritual aspect of systems and the need for a change in mindset. The passage also includes quotes from various sources and...
The text discusses the centralized architecture of apps and the problems associated with it. It explains the concepts of centralization, federation, and peer-to-peer networking, and introduces the Nostr protocol as a new fundament...
The Zombocom Problem is about the need for specific solutions to succeed in the tech industry. It discusses the failure of many platforms due to the lack of a specific problem to solve. It uses Amazon and Excel as examples of how ...
The text is about the author's raw intuitions about startups and how he wants to build them going forward. He emphasizes the importance of starting with the customer experience and working backward to the technology, prioritizing ...
The text discusses the transition of the newsletter 'Subconscious' to 'Squishy Computer' and the author's interest in organic, evolving software ecosystems. The author explores the idea of software as a form of gardening and empha...
Subconscious, a project aimed at amplifying intelligence using a decentralized knowledge graph, is winding down its active operations. The team faced technical challenges and missed a crucial market window, leading to the decision...

0Decentralizability

2024-04-12

The text discusses the concept of decentralizability in software, focusing on the challenges and solutions for building decentralized software products. It emphasizes the importance of prioritizing the customer experience over tec...
The text discusses the concept of creating good problems to have, which are problems that emerge after a system is already functioning at scale. It emphasizes the importance of not trying to build perfect technology and instead fo...

0Freedom to exit

2024-02-05

The text discusses the concept of 'freedom to exit' in relation to data ownership, and how it is not supported by the web and most mobile apps. It explores three ways to guarantee freedom to exit: decentralized protocols, local-fi...
The text discusses the concept of bureaucracy as a social technology for distributing power via rules, and its evolution from charismatic authority to traditional authority to rational-legal authority. It explores the impact of bu...

0Ritual technology

2023-11-28

The text discusses the concept of ritual technology and its importance in shaping our lives. Rituals are described as feedback loops that help us construct ourselves, shape the medium of time, orient us, and make meaning. Rituals ...
The text discusses the concept of Artificial Intuition and how it differs from Artificial Intelligence. It explores the idea that LLMs simulate reasoning by reaching for pre-baked reasoning-like behavior in their training data, ra...
The text discusses the concept of provocation-driven development, which has been the foundation of many computing projects. It explores the impact of various provocations and the questions they pose, and how they have led to the c...
The text is a teaser for a talk about Noosphere at the Summer of Protocols program. It covers topics such as Noosphere, tools for thought, the centralization of the web, the dream of collective intelligence, and how decentralized ...