Link tags: cooperation

Care at Scale | Comment Magazine

A superb piece of writing by Debbie Chachra on infrastructure, fairness, and the future.

Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.

Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Landridge

Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.

Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.

Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality | Tor.com

Naomi Kritzer published a short story five years ago called So Much Cooking about a food blogger in lockdown during a pandemic. Prescient.

I left a lot of the details about the disease vague in the story, because what I wanted to talk about was not the science but the individuals struggling to get by as this crisis raged around them. There’s a common assumption that if the shit ever truly hit the fan, people would turn on one another like sharks turning on a wounded shark. In fact, the opposite usually happens: humans in disasters form tight community bonds, help their neighbors, offer what they can to the community.

I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic

Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

The Evolution of Trust

Such a great primer on game theory—well worth half an hour of your time.

Further notes on scenius

Austin Kleon expands on Brian Eno’s neologism “scenius”:

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

Brief History of the Internet - Internet Timeline | Internet Society

From twenty years ago, a look back at the origins of the internet, written by its creators.

Man-Computer Symbiosis

J. C. R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper. I’ve added it to this list of reading material.

The title should, of course, read “Person-Computer Symbiosis.”

Split Postage

A nifty idea to help you people save on postage by clubbing together to make a single Amazon purchase.

Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed - WSJ.com

Matt Ridley's new book sounds like a corker.