Topics
BRAINSTORMING: 200 Ideas for Blog Topics that SERVE the constituents FIRST!!!
Populate your OWN list of 200 brainstormed ideas, but just find a way CAPTURE those ideas right now … segment those ideas into the following categories … A) Actionable right now, B) Actionable with funding, C) Actionable, in case you have more funding than you know what to do with, D) Parking lot, wild hair ideas that need more development
0 ) THIS LIST IS UNDERGOING HEAVY REVISION … Expect it to be refactored, edited, revised, edited again, refactored, reprioritized, revised again and compresses into a workable list … it’s RAW … still extremely rough and verbose scribbling … it’s just a starting gas capture of vaporware … the VERY RAWEST of RAW brainstorming lists … only a starting point to sort of illustrate the ideation process … definitely a work in progress.
1) SERVE the constituents FIRST!!! Dogfood apps. We might start with something like a spin on Thunderbird’s email/RSS reader] … maybe an RSS reader with added intelligence as in NewsBlur … the upshot of our DOGFOODED aim to SERVE the constituents FIRST!!! is that we will FIRST build something we need to use, ie a tool that helps to READ radically more [and read it better] than we are currently able to read with the toolset we have.
In addition to providing informative value [pulling data/AI models from available sources] also furnishes a social networking/messaging opportunity with shares-my-passions fellow consitutents. The campaign should be structured to ATTRACT people who want to develop skills while they meet people … that means, the primary target will be open source developers for apps that SERVE the constituents FIRST!!!
Here are some ideas for what that list might look like:
- A) AccidentalInvention or TRIZ.tips to apply the contradiction matrix and 40 principles from the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
- B) Business development CRM for entrepreneurs, professionals to market per their products, movements, research funding, open source projects
- C) Coaching, discipline accountability app … did you use your 86400 seconds as you intended today? What’s your plan to improve tommorow?
- D) Diet, cooking and meal planning app to helps people buddytrack their meals, food coops, dierct sources, glucose/keto/vit D levels
- E) Exploration app to buddytrack and safely accelerate the exploration of new cultures, new recipes, maverick music/art
- F) Funnier.Be app to help people buddytrack a deeper interest what brings the funny; not just laughing, but what makes people ponder
- G) Gunowners app that helps gun owned to find shooting ranges, gunsmiths, gun clubs, gun shows, gun shops in their area
- H) Healing app to help people buddytrack recover to wellness, herbel medicine, traditional chinese medicine, yoga, flexibilty
- I) Improvment app, not just sports, but practice like you play, buddytrack highly specific practice sessions, drills, etc
- J) Job search app to help find better remote work and develop their own syllabi level-up professional skillsets/certifications
- K) Kick it app to help people buddytrack their attempts to kick bad habits, addictions, vices, the bad habits of being themselves
- L) Listify app for people to buddytrack their bucket lists, reading lists, watch lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, wish lists
- M) Music/art/festival app that helps people buddytrack creative events, workshops, museums, galleries, dances, performances
- N) Nature/gardening app buddytrack gardens, food preservation, composting, plant exchange, landscape architecture, ecosystem resto
- O) Outdoors app that helps campers/hunters/fishers/hikers buddytrack outdoors events, shops/services, club travel opportunities
- P) Party app for FUN, parties, weddings, reunions, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, holidays, celebrations, even funerals/memorials
- Q) Quantum learning app for autodidacts to buddytrack self-directed syllabi/certifications, programs of study, MOOCs, bootcamps
- R) Real estate app that helps people buddytrack home improvement, home repair/maintenance, home security, real estate
- S) Sports app that families and athletes buddytrack their athletic passions with similar families in their region or state
- T) Training app that helps people to buddytrack shared hard core fitness/martial arts goals with competitive athletes, enthusiasts
- U) UltraFrugal app to help people lower their expenses, rideshare, upcycle, recycle, barter, trade, share, rent, lease, auction, refurb
- V) Venture app that helps isolated entrepreneurs and professionals kibitz over the problems of side hustles or investment struggles
- W) Wellness app to help people buddytrack their health, fitness, nutrition, sleep, mental health, stress, meditation, yoga, tai chi
- X) X-networking app-of-apps glue that helps pols to find like-minded activists in their states, Congressional Districts, Twitter/FB
- Y) WHY, Knowing Your Why, WISDOM sharing as well buddytracking those impossible, impenetrable problems and root cause investigations
- Z) Sleep hygiene app to help people buddytrack their sleep habits, sleep apnea, sleep studies, sleep clinics, sleep doctors
2) How much do you know about social media, interactions, DMs … it’s probably not enough, if you want to build any kind of campaign. You should be thinking about providing SERVICE to constituents RATHER than running a traditional, ie from 2020 or before, old school campaign. How can you BEST deliver a connection that promotes your ability to be seen as thought leader and Presidential candidate in 2028 … it’s not just Twitter or the Twitter API with Postman or others like Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, et al and a bunch of wiz bang data analytics dashboards … it’s about CONNECTIONS … connections include the mastery of SMM tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, CloudCampaign, etc to CONNECT with voters.
2) What do you know about analytics, experimentation, optimization to drive engagement … including the use of tools like Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Google Tag Manager, etc.
3) Not just ZOOM or Twitter Spaces … what do you know about Zulip or Slack to engage your paid staff as well as your unpaid staff of early volunteers? How will you use these tools to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
4) What do you know about ConstantContact, MailChimp, SendGrid, etc. … how will you use these tools to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
5) What do you know about AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. … how will you use these tools to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
6) What do you know about guerilla advertising, monetization, patronage … fundraising for the sake of more fundraising to support your campaign … we cannot stress it enough, exactly HOW will you use these tools to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
7) What’s your CRM game look like … what do you know about the use of tools like CiviCRM to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
8) WHO are the political allies in different key states that you want to elect? How are you going to find these people? How are you going to support them? How are you going to help them to win their elections? How are you going to help them to help you to win your election?
9) Podcastering … keep it simple, stupid! … don’t gear up UNTIL after you have some inkling of the kind of content focus you want and actually might have something worthy of gearing up … for starters, you can look the best practices for producing a podcast in YouTube Studio maybe with Pixel 8 Pro as an audio recording device?… in the future you can maybe dabble with Revoicer, MURF.ai and other AI-generated audio from text … once you are pretty sure of what you want to do, you can learn/use something REAPER.fm and others DAWs for audio engineering … as well as monkeying around with Canva, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender 4.0, Manim … maybe Adobe Express for reels for $9.99/month… or Premiere Pro for video/film editing for $22.99/month … or even the full gamut of Adobe Creative Cloud Apps for 89.99/month [with the cancel anytime option] … but MOSTLY, you just want to use your device and tools from the cloud to GET STARTED with the understanding that nobody is going to care for a year or so anyway.
10) In the realm of public speaking and Toastmasters-For-The-21st-Century and reaching the virtual realm, what do you know about podcastering … or producing daily public service helpful tip content for AM radio station? And how about related things like Revoicer, MURF.ai and other AI-generated audio from text to make it more of a multi-character show or to help with the staffing costs. Do you have people who can use a DAW like REAPER.fm or maybe other audio production tools putting out something somewhat listenable … and while we’re thinking about about this what about monkeying around YouTube … and visual tools for illustrative infographics or cartoons with Canva, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender 4.0, Manim or maybe something like Doodly.
11) How might you use AI in your campaign? Can you KNOWLEDGABLY discuss the use of AI from your own experience … or are you just like another pol or yak radio zombie who needs to drag out the fear-mongering musak when you are scaring the voters. Have you used Ollam.ai and alternatives for natural language processing tasks such as: spaCY, NLTK, TextBlob, TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers, Amazon Comprehend, Google Cloud Natural Language API. AI is an important issue for campaigns IF ONLY FOR MAKING THE CAMPAIGN PERSONNEL MORE PRODUCTIVE … but it also seems to be an important issue with voters demanding to be protected from innovation. Do you GET artificial intelligence OR are you a clueless imbecile who should just shut up?
12) Can YOU or someone you know build, use and refine new campaign AI applications which are built with AI? Can you use these tools to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026? Can you educate and uplift your constituents with this proficiency OR are you just another clueless imbecile who should just knock off the damned fear-mongering before you do any more damage?
13) How’s your infographic and data visualization game? Can you enlighten your voters with a data-driven discussion of how issues might affect their region. Do you know what Generic Mapping Tools(GMT) are?
14) The chip war is an increasingly important national security issue, but it’s also about business and economics and adding the intelligence to all kinds of products … of course, this means that it’s also about jobs and productivity and leveling up professional skills in EDA so that an employer like TSMC or Samsung can even begin to train and use Americans for the jobs they will add. Are you somewhat familiar with Alliance/Coriolis,Electric, Glade (Gds, Lef And Def Editor) vs the universe of alternatives for producing/documenting a manufacturable heterogeneous SoC high level design or at least an outline of a product requirement specification … to be fleshed out with tools like … Synopsis Cloud, Cadence Virtuso Heterogeneous Integration, Siemens EDA [Mentor Graphics], Silvaco TCAD … Xilinx design tools.
15) Are you ready to discuss the key benefits of advanced nuclear reactors and somewhat informed energy policy for the next century … maybe there are good reasons for doubting whether advanced small modular nukes are strictly a good thing since economies of scale are a very huge, very real and inescapable thermodynamic thing in power generation … decentralized power generation is not good just because it happens to be a currently popular political fad and people are [temporarily] way too excited about decentralized things … sometimes, as with power generation in particular, centralization is a VERY VERY positive attribute … even though MOST OF THE TIME, we really want to DECENTRALIZE THE HECK OUT OF EVERYTHING.
16) Do you have campaign staff who can use and develop content management systems for an information-rich campaign … do you have people who understand what Preevy or Lifecycle are? How about Vercel or Netlify or Ngrok … along with something like the Prometheus to scrape metrics from instrumented jobs. It’s all part of code review, preview and, to some degree, product test environments for observability of containers and CI/CD development workflow
17) Are you ready to knowledgably discuss something like AMD’s RadeonOpenCompute ROCm open-source stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) computation … and, not just hardware, but also understanding the ROCm [Software] Developer Tools especially the lower-level kernel language [of C++ functions] and conceptual programming model of HIP: C++ Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability which is intended to be analogous to the CUDA® C++ general purpose parallel computing platform and program model to exploit Unified Memory Programming in order to be able to tap the massively parallel nature of GPUs and achieve far higher performance than what is even theoretically possible on an advanced CPU.
18) How will you reach out to professional associations and industry groups … will you just wait for their lobbyists to find you and make you wealthy after you have a key position on a committee. For example, have you spent time looking through the JEDEC Committees and started formulating a strategy for engaging with important opinion leaders in a variety of professional industries.
19) Do you follow open source development, maybe try to keep up with the PyTorch blog, follow the best curated PyTorch list and personally annotate your own personal AWESOME PyTorch list? Do you get technology and, more importantly, do you get the development communities that surround tech?
20) How familiar are you with the realm of prediction markets for politics … not just the markets themselves, but also the discussion forums? Have you thought about the broader use of these kinds of markets for risk mgmt and microinsurance … what’s the best probabalistic outcome and how can we eliminate or mitigate the failure modes that threaten achievement of that outcome?
21) How should anyone go about the process of trying stay fit? It’s primarily a MENTAL exercise and matter of personal discipline … but not it can augmented with apps … and apps can be further augmented with things like AI for just giving answers rather requiring the tedious processes of keeping up with ALL of the literature … but, realistically, how is your campaign going to encourage health and fitness? Could you encourage people to join you on five mile hikes around town? Beyond a physical exercise component, how about a nutritional component like a healthy chili/favorite soup potluck supper?
22) How can can a campaign optimize it’s Github engagement? … beyond just commitgraph … can it encourage forking of its repositories? Can it use actions for build/review/test during dev … what about copilot … or discussions … issues-driven CI/CD … better commit messages and Git discipline… can it become the best Github advertisement for everything Github? MOSTLY, can it use Github and forked repositories in affiliated campaigns to build a community of supporters and volunteers TO ELECT YOUR POLITICAL ALLIES TO OFFICE IN 2026?
23) How will you encourage VIRTUAL participations in your campaign … Zulip, ZOOM … what else? How about things like API data access connections between affliated campaingns … how do you maximize REACH … without requiring that people drive hundreds of miles for a convention or some other bogus pol meeting … attracting and outreach to BUSY PEOPLE … not just people who don’t have anything better to do than to drive around … is huge part of it, but you need to think with the end in mind, ie how do you close deals and monetize your campaign VIRTUALLY? The big question is: How well do you use other people’s time? Are you one of those dinosaurs who just expects people to come your worthless waste-of-time event?
24) How familiar are you with Universal Scene Description, Blender 4.0 with Omniverse Connect, Revit with Omniverse Connect or maybe even Autodesk Architecture, Engineering and Construction Collection …
25) What’s your familiarity with Tailscale and VPN workflows, DNS, Bind
26) Have you used LIDAR scan data? Are you familiar with pointcloud data and SMART communities? Have you ever located a natural gas or electrical utility line? Do you know how this is done OR why it’s still necessary to to use equipment to find utlity lines that should be digitally mapped by now? Are you somewhat familiar with how people are using things like smartphone video to develop digital twin data models?
27) What’s your level of comfort with VR. Do you have a Oculus Quest 2 for martial arts, yoga, tai chi and flexibility training … practicing martial arts moves, visualizing an opponent, shadow boxing strikes, kicks, and footwork … maybe boxing games like “Thrill of the Fight” or “Creed: Rise to Glory” to provide a virtual sparring experience and help improve your reflexes and stamina … fitness apps and guided yoga sessions with virtual instructors to focus on proper form and technique in immersive environments … emphasizing balance, alignment, breathing exercises with Quest 2 to work on balance poses (e.g., tree pose, warrior pose) while maintaining proper form…. slow, flowing movement in old school martial arts like tai chi, using Quest 2 to practice fluid motions … warm up/cool down with dynamic stretches in VR … explore VR experiences that align with goals, practicing katas, holding a warrior pose, enhancing the mind-body connection.
28) What’s your awareness of open source engineering and CAD tools, like FreeCAD … maybe you have seen Blender used in a high school STEM classroom? Can you discuss the next level of development with might be about the constraints and parametric entities for actually converting a sketch into simulatable Universal Scene Description for CFM/FEA modeling or manufacturable dimensioned and toleranced 3D model with material properties. What’s your kowledge of people who participate in the open source CAD development cycle especially OCCT development and the collection of C++ libraries and resources upon which OpenCASCADE Technology is based … in the larger dev sense, this means following/understandings developments and future needs of things like the KiCAD EDA tool which uses OCCT.
29) What’s your comfort level with no-code software development such as Fermyon Development for entrepreneurs and others developing their own dynamic landing pages … or perhaps roll their own WASM runtime with something like Docker+WasmEdge or WasmTime or a maybe a brand new riff on IceCore or some other approach to building an application container for WebAssembly … the point is about a DYNAMIC economy based upon better and better and even better services for customers. We should be well past the bricks-and-mortar paradigm now, but people are still unaware of what can be done in this realm … are you ready to build a campaign that demonstrates how much can be done with the this technology … OR are you one of those who are going to send out mailers, make annoying robo calls and expect people to drive around looking at yardsigns or come to your worthless waste-of-time events?
30) Can you use something like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and accelerating ML vector search to make your campaign website more valuable … can you INFORM with examples running RAPIDS RAFT using using an ANN algorithm based upon an inverted file index (IVF) with unmodified flat vectors … can your campaign DEMONSTRATE the value of this technology to the voters … OR are you one of those who are going to send out mailers, make annoying robo calls and expect people to drive around looking at yardsigns or come to your worthless waste-of-time events?
31) What’s your strategy for using Google Compute, or Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace Cloud, Salesforce Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cloud? Can you speak intelligently with the CEOs of these major platforms about what you like/dislike about their offering? Can you respond to their questions on government policy or government use of these resources. Not just that … what’s your take on CoreWeave OR or Paperspace Gradient or Lambda Labs or VAST.ai or Nutanix or VMware or DigitalOcean or Linode or OVHcloud or Vultr or Scaleway or cloud.ca or UpCloud or Hetzner Cloud or Contabo OR ANY OTHER Cloud Functions-As-A-Service provider?
32) Have you been following various news in the world of Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi)? … Are you familiar with Tiny Tapeout OR Google’s OpenMPW program and its XLS: Accelerated HW Synthesis toolchain. What’s your take on Qflow open circuit EDA design tools … the qflow open source ASIC EDA dev community … OpenLane … OpenROAD open source EDA project, the UC SantaCruz VLSI Design and Automation Lab’s OpenRAM Python framework for a static random access memory compiler for SRAMs in ASIC design … Skywater-PDK … the FreePDK process design kit, an open-source, Open-Access-based PDK for the 45nm technology node and the Predictive Technology Model … Chipyard open-source integrated system-on-chip (SoC) design, simulation, and implementation environment for specialized RISC-V compute systems … as well as the Caravel harness SOC from efabless
33) What is your experience in using Omniverse Nucleus and other multi-GPU, multi-machine, multi-GPU, multi-user frameworks which offer a similar database and collaborative engine microservices connector archictecture with observability and monitoring plumbing engineered into an moduluar development platflom for building 3D workflows, tools, applications and services like OpenUSD and the USD Working Group’s projects and resources relating to USD … to understand what is going on behind Omniverse Nucleus, it is essential to understand the overall USD purpose and architecture.
34) Let’s talk about Optical Metrology and Photogrammetry … especially for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) like those made by Anduril or cameras mounted drones or balloons … OpenDroneMap and OpenDroneMap Docker … OpenDroneMap on Github …Geo for All … International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing … GEO Week … the ASPRS Community and terminology and concepts of Edition 2 of Positional Accuracy Standards for Digital Geospatial Data such as three-dimensional positional accuracy
35) What’s your take on the architecture of the IoT data model in Omniverse, allowing for a data driven approach and separation of concerns that is similar to [but not exactly equivalent to] a Model/View/Controller (MVC) design pattern which could be implemented with an approach that is like Blazor WASM to reuse code components in different environments, ie with Omniverse Nucleus running as a server for an Omniverse Workstation-like environment for everything that Nucleus brings to the table and a much lighter-weight less-connected environment without the Omniverse Nucleus for primarily just looking at the data without connecting to and updating the Nucleus USD database … for use cases like optical image capture in maps/geo, medical imaging, computervision/robotics, driverless vehicles, industrial automation, smart cities, smart buildings, smart factories, smart grids, smart homes, smart retail, smart transportation, smart utilities …the further universe of smart everything, smart wearables, smart agriculture, smart logistics, smart supply chain, smart security, smart surveillance, smart energy, smart water, smart waste management, smart lighting, smart parking, smart street lighting, smart traffic management, smart metering, smart sensors, smart devices, smart appliances, smart locks, smart thermostats, smart doorbells, smart cameras, smart speakers, smart displays, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart washing machines, smart dryers, smart dishwashers, smart ovens, smart microwaves, smart vacuums, smart air purifiers, smart air conditioners, smart fans, smart heaters, smart humidifiers, smart dehumidifiers, smart water heaters, smart water purifiers, smart water softeners … how SMART is your campaign?
36) What about BUILDING the next big thing in the virtual realm? What is your personal experience with Omniverse Kit aims to be extremely modular: everything is an extension. NVIDIA Modulus is a modular framework for building building, training, and fine-tuning Physics-ML models with a simple Python interface … as extensions.
37) What’s your take on open science and open access in scientific peer-reviewed publishing? To rapid drill down to the core activities of hard science, what’s your take on the Open Microscopy Environment(OME) and OME Remote Objects (OMERO) including how Bio-Formats library for reading and writing life science image file formats processes metadata, and provides other useful information such as version history and how to report bugs and annotate files … as we can see by looking through the Eliceiri Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation materials on Github, open microscopy is really about deeping the commitment to open source and open access in science and moving beyond just open access and open results toward a almost radically much more open, continual, long-term process of collaborative exploration in the virtual laboratory … achieving scientific interoperability is like software interoperability, in that it depends upon the adoption, reuse and (as best practices and de facto standards emerge) the exacting definition of [software] standards to obtains those benefits we associate with standard in all things to promote greater efficiency, more correct levels of trust and knowledge for much higher levels of real FROM-THE-INSIDE-OUT levels safety [as opposed to the false promise of regulatory FROM-THE-OUTSIDE-IN levels of safety].
38) What’s your familiarity with the Algebraic Multigrid Solver (AmgX) Library … computational fluid dynamics for thermochemical decomposition of anisotropic materials by AdvancedPyrolytics … OpenFOAM open source OpenCFD … OpenFOAM on Gitlab … OpenFOAM issues
39) What is your projection for where high performance computing is going in the next 5, 10 25 years? Are you familiar with GH200 server nodes are connected with an NVLink passive copper cable cartridge to enable each Hopper GPU to access the memory of any other Grace Hopper Superchip in the network, providing 32 x 624 GB, or 19.5 TB of NVLink addressable memory … the CPU to GPU memory interconnect for NVLink is now 900 GB/s, which is at least 7x faster than the 128 GB/s maximum bidirectiional bandwidth of 16 lane PCIe Gen 5. It’s sort of important to understand how MUCH faster the NVLink GPUs will be than any found in a PCIe-based interconnection in a home lab or ML cluster which would typically use by something like an Oculink card. Although, PCIe Gen 5.0 is not too shabby compared to the alternative, because it is double the possible 16 GB/s of multilane PCIe Gen 4.0 … a multi-lane PCIe throughput would deliver higher than the current 25 GB/s possible transmission rate of the Oculink, “optical copper link” cable … way faster than Thunderbolt 4 which caps out at around 5 GB/s or less … EXCEPT that Oculink card is only going to use ONE lane, so that optical copper link cable will not be the bottleneck … but PCIe 6.0 is coming and I/O bandwidth in even little home lab mini-PCs is going to be a lot faster than it is now … fueled by money that will be spend for remote work and computing workloads on HEDT systems for machine learning, we will likely see I/O bandwidth double every three years or so to spur turnover and upgrading for new HEDT systems, so expect that PCIe 6.0 and then PCIe 7.0 will be available and will be a lot faster than the 128 possible GB/s of PCIe 5.0 … but, for the foreseeable future, the NVLink interconnects available in edgey cloud compute services is the fastest thing going.
40) What advice would you offer entrepreneurs brainstorming the MONETIZATION of bootstrapping of a new venture … how does the bootstrapped venture pay for itself: #1 ideas are free; use the free stuff first – anything that you add to a URL or location on the internet has to generate revenue … but an accelerated negotiation requires gathering a crowd of interested parties – so build that crowd, build word-of-mouth or linksharing but generating crowdliness is about leading the rabble to become a quasi-coherent crowd and listening to the crowd, really using the crowd to fund things that improve life for the crowd and generally make the crowd better for members of the crowd … so it’s ideas, ideas, ideas – but mostly the ideas have to come from the crowd … the better quality new ideas and refinement of ideas will come as you are grinding on execution of ideas … diligently put into action even though they appear to be unsuccessful, ie most of the value is in what lessons you are learning … keep your costs low and then lower them more … it’s going to be tougher than you think, so be prepare yourself for grinding on the grind … eventually set up an auction and sell out, but retain ownership and continue to be part of the idea or hold it hostage until someone pays you to go away … the point is to BE the grinder, the kind of leader who leads from the front
41) If you had recipes for a Startupcookbook, what would they be. Obviously, we’d start with MVP and Lean Enterprise [but then what] … stick with that minimum and polish it … build the braintrust from the EARS and EYES … gather information; then improve the gathering of information … process the information into knowledge and share that knowledge in order to build the braintrust … the braintrust is the most valuable thing … the braintrust is the thing that is monetized … the braintrust is the thing that is sold … the braintrust is the thing that is the product … the braintrust is the thing that is the service … the braintrust is the thing that adds and polishes the value … the braintrust is the thing that defines the value proposition … the braintrust is the thing that directs the monetization in a way that adds the most value to the participants of the crowd supporting the lean enterprise – but in the end, all value created has to be invested in better intelligence gathering, information processing and knowledge sharing … ultimately, the cashout plan is about putting together a CSOP, a customer-driven stock ownership plan … the investors have to be evangelists for the crowd … we asked the Llama 2 70B playground to furnish ideas for monetizing a startup … we then followed up with a question “What are ten different ways learn about X” … we keep following up with questions and our own noodling around … it’s daunting, but fishing’s all about getting your lines in the water and watching your bobber, then refining the approach to putting something into practice and then polishing the things that work and polishing more, while continuing to put new lines in the water … it’s daunting … in other words, while these ideas that AI model like Llama can give you are not exactly bad – they’re just trite and easy … each one needs the kind of further HARD clarification and expansion that only can come from lean implementation, ie doing it smart, but using the extra cheap ways and free stuff first.
IT’S A LOT LIKE ATTRACTING POLITICAL ALLIES AND VOTERS TO A NEW CAMPAIGN, IS IT NOT?
-
Identify your target audience and their needs, then create a product or service that addresses those needs.
- Conduct market research: Conducting market research can help you identify your target audience and their needs. This can include surveys, focus groups, and interviews with potential customers.
- Use social media analytics, eg become proficient with the Twitter API: Analyzing social media data can provide insights into your target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors. This can help you create a product or service that resonates with them.
- Create realistic buyer personas: Being realistic and concrete about creating and refining buyer personas [from your actual interactions with the kinds of buyers you want] will help you better understand your target audience and their needs … but it’s deeply recursive in that your target customer persona depends upon your current interactions. Until you have iteratively made it concrete, a buyer persona is PURELY a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on limited market research and insufficient data.
- Conduct customer interviews: Conducting interviews with potential customers can provide valuable insights into their needs and pain points. This can help you create a product or service that addresses their needs.
- Use online tools: There are many online tools available that can help you identify your target audience and their needs. For example, Google Trends can help you identify popular search topics, while tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you analyze your website traffic and identify keywords that are relevant to your target audience.
- Attend industry events: Attending industry events can provide valuable insights into your target audience and their needs. You can network with potential customers, attend seminars and workshops, and learn about the latest trends and developments in your industry.
- Join online communities: Joining online communities related to your industry can provide valuable insights into your target audience and their needs. You can participate in discussions, ask questions, and learn from others in the community.
- Use surveys and polls: Surveys and polls can provide valuable insights into your target audience’s needs and preferences. You can create surveys using online tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, and share them with your target audience through social media or email.
- Analyze your competition: Analyzing your competition can provide valuable insights into your target audience and their needs. You can look at your competitors’ products or services, their marketing strategies, and their customer base to identify gaps in the market that you can fill.
- Use data analytics: Data analytics can provide valuable insights into your target audience and their needs. You can use tools like Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic, identify popular pages and content, and track user behavior.
-
Develop a subscription-based fundraising model for your campaign.
- Identify your target audience: Before developing a subscription-based model, it’s essential to identify your target audience. Conduct market research to understand their needs, preferences, and purchasing habits. This will help you create a subscription model that resonates with them.
- Choose a subscription platform: There are several subscription platforms available that can help you manage your subscription-based model. Research and compare different options such as Stripe, PayPal, and SubscribePro to find the one that best suits your needs and budget.
- Define your subscription offerings: Determine what products or services you want to offer through your subscription model. Consider what your target audience needs and how you can provide value to them. You can offer different tiers of subscriptions with varying levels of benefits to cater to different segments of your audience.
- Set pricing strategies: Pricing is a crucial aspect of your subscription model. You need to set prices that are competitive, affordable, and profitable. Consider offering discounts for long-term commitments or bundling products and services to create a more attractive offer.
- Develop a marketing strategy: Create a marketing strategy that targets your identified audience and promotes your subscription model. Utilize social media, email marketing, and content marketing to reach your audience and drive sign-ups.
- Offer a free trial: Offering a free trial is an effective way to encourage people to sign up for your subscription model. It allows them to experience your product or service risk-free and see the value it provides.
- Leverage customer feedback: Encourage customer feedback to improve your subscription model continuously. Collect feedback through surveys, focus groups, and customer support interactions. Use this feedback to refine your offerings and improve customer satisfaction.
- Monitor and analyze performance: Keep track of your subscription model’s performance using analytics tools. Monitor metrics such as customer acquisition costs, churn rates, and lifetime value to identify areas for improvement
- Foster a community: Building a community around your subscription model can help create loyalty and encourage customer retention. Create a forum or group where subscribers can interact with each other and your brand.
- Offer exclusive benefits: Offer exclusive benefits to your subscribers to make them feel valued and encourage them to stay subscribed. This could include early access to new products, exclusive content, or discounts on related products and services.
- Offer a freemium model for low-income voters, where they can access basic features for free, but more well-healed contributors can pay for accelerating the advancement of the cause.
- Implement a pay-per-use model, where users pay for each transaction or usage of compute intensive campaign services.
- Create a marketplace or platform that connects buyers and sellers, and charge a commission on each transaction.
- Offer advertising opportunities to relevant businesses, and charge based on ad placement, views, or clicks.
- Develop a sponsored content model, where businesses pay for content creation and distribution.
- Create a referral program that incentivizes users to invite their friends and family.
- Offer premium features or services for an additional fee.
- Develop a data analytics service that helps businesses make data-driven decisions.
- Create an affiliate program that allows influencers or bloggers to promote your product or service.
- Offer a white-label solution that allows businesses to brand and resell your product or service.
- Develop a training or education program that teaches users a new skill or technology.
- Create a community or forum that offers exclusive content and networking opportunities.
- Offer a consulting or advisory service that helps businesses solve specific problems.
- Develop a software as a service (SaaS) model that charges users a monthly fee.
- Create a mobile app that offers in-app purchases or subscriptions.
- Offer a customer support or service desk solution that helps businesses manage customer inquiries.
- Develop a chatbot or virtual assistant that helps users with common tasks or questions.
- Create a content creation and distribution platform that charges businesses for access to a network of creators.
Evaluate each of your own riffs/brainstorms of idea based on its feasibility, potential revenue, and alignment with your startup’s mission and values. The essence of a warrior is never quitting on the mission … as an entrepreneur, you will not know your mission until after you create something and start listening to it’s crowd – it’s total up to you as the leader to define and refine that mission!
42) Let’s talk about information security for your campaign? Are your familiar with Security Adjacent Programming (SAP) and the not-always-so-obvious parts of information security … how will your campaign knowledgably use NVIDIA Morpheus … NVIDIA Launchpad:Build AI-Based Cybersecurity Solutions … DevSecOps … try Gitlab Ultimate for a month or maybe a full YEAR, if absolutely necessary … Prompt Inject is a security vulnerability … SAP involves a number of practices, including:
- Secure coding practices: Following best practices for secure coding, such as using secure libraries, validating user input, and using secure protocols for communication.
- Security testing: Testing software and systems for vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and addressing any issues that are identified.
- Secure design: Designing software and systems with security in mind, including using secure architecture, design patterns, and principles.
- Secure deployment: Ensuring that software and systems are deployed securely, including using secure hosting environments, configuring firewalls and access controls, and implementing encryption.
- Continuous monitoring: Monitoring software and systems for security vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and addressing any issues that are identified.
43) How about discussing what people have read … can the campaign encourage people to be better at gathering intelligence, making more informed opinions rather than news swill … can you encourage people to read more books or even abstracts of books? Will people read more preprints … not just arxiv, but biorxiv, medrxiv, chemrxiv, bioarxiv, chemarxiv, medarxiv, preprints.org … Connectedpapers, pubmed, knowledgegraphs and reference management software … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines
44) Can your campaign encourage voters and volunteers to network more … to work more on the issues that are most important to them? What can you do to encourage a stronger set of community in your supporters? Should they follow more people on different PROFESSIONALLY-focused Twitter and LinkedIn accounts … more = better, but avoid politics like the plague it is …follow BETTER Github, Gitlab accounts … explore more open source projects, more open source foundations, more open source communities … follow BETTER Substacks, Mediums, blogs, newsletters … follow BETTER Youtube channels, but AVOID any sort of political content …explore the realm of serious, ie edited/reviewed/promoted electronic publishing … BioOne, bioonecomplete.org, bioonepublishing.org … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioOne … follow better RSS feeds, master a feed reader or email reader like Thunderbird … but don’t stop looking for a better [AI-ified] RSS reader, eg NewsBlur, Feedly, Inoreader, The Old Reader, Netvibes, Feedreader, Flowreader, Feeder, Feedbin, Feedspot, Feedreader Online, Feeds Pub, QuiteRSS, RSS Bandit, NewsFox
45) It’s really about how a rising tide lifts all boats … how can your campaign encourage more candidates and more supporters to produce more of their own podcasts and audiobooks … rather than just swallowing swill OR deathscrolling through social media … in terms of resource usage and time management for ALL concerned [both content producers and content consumers], it’s probably better to lean towards more audio, less video – ie, everybody needs a good mix tape for while they are cleaning their bathroom.
46) Fork, then roll-your-own curated list of awesome data sources related to elections, electoral reforms, and democratic political systems.
Topics
- :classical_building: Systems of government
- :ballot_box: Election results
- :book: Legislative records
- :flags: Political parties
- :checkered_flag: Election campaigns
- :phone: Polling & survey data
- :balance_scale: Election laws & reforms
- :package: Packaged datasets
- :octocat: Miscellaneous
##### :classical_building: Systems of government
- :globe_with_meridians: presidential powers and regime type (by André Borges) - The dataset of presidential powers covers 49 democracies with elected presidents, in addition to a handful of parliamentary countries where presidents have more than ceremonial powers.
##### :ballot_box: Election results
- :us: MIT Election Data + Science Lab - By applying scientific principles to how elections are studied and administered, MEDSL aims to improve the democratic experience for all U.S. voters.
- U.S. House 1976-2018 - Constituency (district) returns for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976 to 2018.
- U.S. Senate 1976-2018 - Constituency (state-level) returns for elections to the U.S. Senate from 1976 to 2018.
- U.S. President 1976-2016 - Cnstituency (state-level) returns for elections to the U.S. presidency from 1976 to 2016.
- Voting and Election Science Team (University of Florida, Wichita State University) - an effort to collect nationwide precinct data.
- :globe_with_meridians: Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) - The Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) is a repository of detailed election results at the constituency level for lower chamber and upper chamber legislative elections from around the world. Our motivation is to preserve and consolidate these valuable data in one comprehensive and reliable resource that is ready for analysis and publicly available at no cost. This public good is expected to be of use to a range of audiences for research, education, and policy-making.
- CLEA Lower Chamber Elections Archive - The dataset currently includes around 1,900 elections from 170 countries and territories.
- CLEA Upper Chamber Elections Archive - The dataset currently includes 125 elections from 13 countries.
- GeoReferenced Electoral Districts - The GRED datasets are geo-referenced maps for electoral districts in countries from the CLEA Lower Chamber elections archive. The goal of this project is to offer maps formatted in a manner so they can be linked to other standard geo-referenced data, allowing researchers to test a variety of research questions at a subnational level.
- Party Nationalization Measures - The party nationalization datasets contain the effective number of parties, as well as several measures of party nationalization, at three different levels of aggregation: the national level, the party level, and the constituency level. They are provided for both the Lower Chamber and Upper Chamber elections results.
- :globe_with_meridians: Election Passport - Election Passport provides free access to a rich dataset of constituency election results in 110 countries and territories throughout the world. The data are unusually complete, including votes won by very small parties, independents, and frequently candidate names, that are difficult to locate. Additional elections are regularly added. Lower House results are on this page, while upper house results are on the Senates page. Election Passport also presents information on the operation of Electoral Systems as well as results from Regional Elections for selected countries.
- :globe_with_meridians: Global Elections Database - The Global Elections Database (formerly known as the Constituency-Level Elections Dataset, 2007) provides information on the results of both national and subnational elections around the world. These data are presented at two levels of analysis, allowing users to quickly identify the results of elections within a country as a whole or within particular constituencies or districts of a country. All parties are included in the database regardless of the number of votes that they won. The data are based on countries’ official election results and have been amassed from various government institutions.
- :globe_with_meridians: Psephos - An archive of electoral data maintained by Adam Carr: “The largest, most comprehensive and most up-to-date archive of electoral information in the world, with election statistics from 182 countries. Use the alphabetical index at left to find information about every country in the world.”
- :us: Tufts Digital Library: Electoral Datasets - A collection of US state-level election records.
- :us: OpenElections - The goal of OpenElections is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election results data for the United States.
- :india:
datameet/india-election-data
- To map publicly available datasets related to General Assembly (Lok Sabha) elections in India. - :kenya:
mikelmaron/kenya-election-data
- Data useful for election mapping in Kenya. This data comes from http://vote.iebc.or.ke/. There are simple endpoints for requesting json encoded data. download.py iterates, caches, and builds the output. - :globe_with_meridians: Voter Turnout Database - The Voter Turnout Database is the best resource for a wide array of statistics on voter turnout from around the world. It contains the most comprehensive global collection of voter turnout statistics from presidential and parliamentary elections since 1945. Always growing, the database also includes European Parliament elections, as presented by country using both the number of registered voters and voting age population as indicators, and in some cases the data includes statistics on spoilt ballot rate. The easy-to-use database allows you to search for data by country or field, and even download all the data from the database in one file.
##### :book: Legislative records
- :us: Voteview - Voteview allows users to view every congressional roll call vote in American history on a map of the United States and on a liberal-conservative ideological map including information about the ideological positions of voting Senators and Representatives.
- :us: LegiScan National Legislative Datasets - Weekly snapshots of session data are created each Sunday morning with updated information on an as-needed basis. Provided in simple comma-separated values files for general bill data, or the most complete form packaged as LegiScan API JSON payloads.
- :canada: Poltext - The main goal of the Poltext project is to collect textual data sources used for policy analysis in Canada, to record the data using a variety of recognized coding methods, and to give researchers free access to the scientific knowledge thus accumulated.
- :us: openstates - Track bills, review upcoming legislation, and see how your local representatives are voting in your state. Open States aggregates legislative information from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. This information is then standardized, cleaned, and published to the public via OpenStates.org, a powerful API, and bulk downloads.
- :us: unitedstates - A shared commons of data and tools for the United States. Made by the public, used by the public.
- congress-legislators - Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
- uscode - A working parser for the US Code’s hierarchy, and a work-in-progress parser for the full content.
- districts - GeoJSON and other shape files for the federal legislative districts of the US.
:flags: Political parties
- :globe_with_meridians: Party Facts - Party Facts links datasets on political parties and provides an online platform about parties and their history as recorded in social science datasets.
- :globe_with_meridians: Varieties of Democracy V-Party Dataset - Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
- :globe_with_meridians: Political Party Database Project - The Political Party Database Project is a multi-country collaborative effort to advance the study of party-based representative democracy. The first round of data, which encompasses 19 countries and 122 political parties, was released in January 2017.
- :globe_with_meridians: Manifesto Project - The Manifesto Project provides the scientific community with parties’ policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties’ electoral manifestos. It covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents.
:checkered_flag: Election campaigns
- :us: FEC - Downloadable bulk data files contain data from statements and reports filed with the Commission in a form that may be useful to users performing in-depth campaign finance research. The files, which were previously located on the Commission’s file transfer protocol (FTP) server, can be very large because they contain transaction-level data. The update schedule of these files varies from daily to weekly.
- :us: Open Secrets - The Center for Responsive Politics is the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
- :us: FollowTheMoney.org - The Institute researches and archives a 50-state federal/state database of contributions documenting $100+ billion, plus more than 2 million state lobbyist-client relationships that are registered annually. Recent expansions include selected local-level data, collecting independent spending reports for federal campaigns and in 31 states, and lobbying spending in 20 states.
:phone: Polling & survey data
- :us: Voter Study Group - The data shared here derive from the VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) starting in 2016 and weekly Democracy Fund and UCLA Nationscape surveys spanning July 2019 to December 2020. These data form the basis for Voter Study Group analysis and reporting and are available for use by other scholars and journalists interested in engaging the public in meaningful conversations.
:balance_scale: Election laws & reforms
- :globe_with_meridians: Electoral System Design Database - The Electoral System Design Database provides comparative data on electoral systems used in 217 countries and territories across the globe. Compared to other similar datasets, this expansive international coverage makes this database the most comprehensive source of information in the elections field. Interactive tools, including maps and graphs, allow users to easily compare regions and sub-regions, filter necessary data and export raw data for further analyses. Country pages provide in depth country level data in a historical format.
- :us: State Elections Legislation Database - This database contains state legislation related to the administration of elections introduced in 2011 through this year, 2020.
- :us: Planscore - PlanScore presents estimates of the efficiency gap, partisan bias, and the mean-median difference for congressional and state legislative district plans dating back to 1972. Simon Jackman, Eric McGhee, and Nicholas Stephanopoulos compiled these estimates in their academic and litigation-related work.
:package: Packaged datasets
These are collections of datasets embedded in R or Python packages.
- :package: elliottmorris/politicaldata - An R package for acquiring and analyzing political data — including polls, election results, legislator information, and demographic data.
- :package:
psData
- This R package includes functions for gathering commonly used and regularly maintained political science data sets. It also includes functions for combining components from these data sets into variables that have been suggested in the political science literature, but are not regularly updated. - :package: :brazil: silvadenisson/electionsBR - electionsBR offers a set of functions to easily pull and clean Brazilian electoral data from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court (TSE) website. Among others, the package retrieves data on local and federal elections for all positions (city councilor, mayor, state deputy, federal deputy, governor, and president) aggregated by state, city, and electoral zones.
:hammer_and_wrench: Miscellaneous
These are miscellaneous tools, git repositories and organizations that contain datasets and/or tools for retrieving, manipulating and analyzing data related to electoral systems.
- :octocat: MEDSL - MIT Election Data and Science Lab
- :octocat: FiveThirtyEight - Data and code behind the articles and graphics at FiveThirtyEight, including polling and election forecast data.
47) Work your way through the Github repositories with the politics tag
48) https://github.com/topics/campaign?o=desc&s=forks
49) https://github.com/topics/donation-campaign
50) https://github.com/topics/campaign-analytics
51) https://github.com/topics/newsletter-management?o=desc&s=forks
52) https://github.com/topics/campaign-finance-data
53) https://www.opensecrets.org/resources/create/tools.php
54) A guide to statistics, data, and documentary sources in American politics available to researchers at Princeton University. … you will see that most of the publicly available datasets which are REALLY interesting, such as the 2020 ballot demographics really NEEDS to be brought up to date with the 2024 data … maybe you can help with that?
55) https://github.com/topics/government-data?o=desc&s=forks
56) Govdirectory is a crowdsourced and fact checked directory of official governmental online accounts and services.
57) Work your way through the Github repositories with the CivicTech tag
58) Businesses and political campaigns used to give away useful things like wall calendars, useful pens or maybe something like flyswatters or ice cream spades … NOW, campaigns can give away USEFULL apps.
If you want to help your political alleys or your more serious voters, you may want to consider some sort of mobile app that would be especially useful to them. At some point you can add AI, eg for inference engines based on things like Llama 2 70B … but first, you might just want to get something like a calendar widget or time management app.
In order to do that you will need to become a bit of a FireOS developer and an AndroidOS developer and an iOS developer OR you will want to be more of a cross-platform Flutter developer … it’s possible, of course … IN THEORY … just use Flutter to quickly reuse most of your app content/infrastructure, but there will be some tailoring / optimization for each supported platform since Flutter is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. This means that developers can use Flutter to build apps that can run on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, and FireOS, without having to maintain entirely separate codebases for each platform. Flutter uses the Dart programming language, which is compiled to native code for each platform. This allows Flutter apps to have access to platform-specific features and perform as well as native apps. Additionally, Flutter provides a range of widgets and tools that make it easy to build user interfaces that are optimized for each platform.
HOWEVER… while Flutter can be used to build apps for multiple platforms, it’s still a relatively new technology, and there may be some limitations and challenges to consider. For example, Flutter may not have as large of a community or as many third-party libraries available as more established frameworks like React Native or Xamarin. Additionally, Flutter apps may not be able to access certain platform-specific features optimally or perform as well as apps built using platform-specific languages and frameworks. Ultimately, whether or not to use Flutter instead of developing apps for FireOS, iOS, and Android will depend on your specific needs and goals. If you want to build a cross-platform app with a single codebase and are willing to work within the limitations of Flutter, it could be an EXCELLENT option to get something working somewhat. However, WHEN you need to access platform-specific features or WHEN require more mature tooling and community support, you will need to consider other frameworks … but Flutter.dev and the DART language is probably the ideal place to start, to get a beta working and when you know what the issue is, you can do a deep dive on the specific tweak necessary in a platform-specific app.
59) MEET the opinion leaders … develop strategy for reaching out to those opinion leaders … start asking the question about Legislature races and primaries … get your lines in the water – then WATCH YOUR BOBBERS … it’s up to YOU … nobody else … to find your crowd of wildly enthusiastic supporters … what’s your issue wheelhouse … tech … jobs … health … education … 2A … get started immediately to FIND YOUR CROWD … you have to work at this every single day … maybe you have to start by filling in all of the little momentary pauses in your schedule with more networking, perhaps more podcasting, radio or speaking engagements, perhaps even more COLD emailing or old fashioned cold calling or door knocking.
60) How many different ways can you develop a lead generation strategy or compelling landing page for TidyCal or Calendly or one of the folling alternatives:
-
Acuity Scheduling: Acuity Scheduling is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a wide range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
ScheduleOnce: ScheduleOnce is another popular alternative that offers similar features to TidyCal and Calendly, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Appointlet: Appointlet is a simple and easy-to-use alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers basic appointment scheduling features, including customizable scheduling pages and automated reminders.
-
MeetMe: MeetMe is a popular alternative to Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Doodle: Doodle is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
ScheduleGrid: ScheduleGrid is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Bookste: Bookste is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Reservio: Reservio is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Picktime: Picktime is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
-
Vectera: Vectera is a popular alternative to TidyCal and Calendly that offers a range of features, including customizable scheduling pages, automated reminders, and integration with popular calendar apps.
61) Are you ready to start building with Gemini, which is DeepMind Technology’s largest and most capable AI model. It’s worth spending 90 seconds or so thinking about what Gemini might mean. Of course, it might be a bit early YET, before the [Google Cloud Applied AI Summit]](https://cloudonair.withgoogle.com/events/summit-applied-ml-summit-23) on December 13th, 2023] to build something for Gemini and Google’s AI Studio and Vertex AI, but have you interacted with Gemini through DeepMind’s approach to Multimodal Prompting?? Maybe you have read the DeepMind [marketing] blog post or the [Gemini Team’s Technical Brief] … OR some of the referenced supporting papers or Google’s PaLM 2 Technical Report? It’s really about unlocking insights in scientific literature … or any VERY LARGE information-driven domain, for that matter … which will change as multimodal prompting comes of age … it’s not so much that it replaces what has come before, but it really does appear that Gemini takes a lot of the mindbogglingly tedious work of grokking the lay of the land on large information domains, ie like political data.
62) What does your own Generative AI Stack look like? A concrete, usableplaybook is materializing out of the gaseous haze for developers building end-to-end generative applications.
-
In-Context Learning / Prompt Engineering — Developers iterate on prompts and examples explaining in natural language to the LLM what outputs should look like. Prompt construction is still a lot more of an art than a science, but suites of development tools/hubs, like Microsoft’s Prompt flow, GPT Prompt Engineer, LangChain Hub and HuggingFaceHub are evolving into defacto standard best practice workflows and tools being improved to for work with the primitives such as prompts, chains and agents to streamline the end-to-end development cycle of LLM-based AI applications, from ideation, prototyping, testing, evaluation to production deployment and monitoring.
-
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) — Developers programmatically feed in natural language data to the model using Application Frameworks … that means a lot of data engineering, data wrangling, data cleaning, data augmentation to reduce overfitting … there are serious open source organizations in this realm such as (https://github.com/Unstructured-IO) with are definitely worth following. The HuggingFace RAG is a good example of a retrieval-augmented generation model that can be used to generate long-form text conditioned on a given input document or query. It is based on the paper Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks by Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandara Piktus et al. (2020). The model is trained on the Natural Questions dataset and fine-tuned on Wikipedia and ArXiv documents. It can be used both for inference and for training new models.
-
Fine-tuning — Developers fine-tune models with application-specific data that the models were not trained on previously. Open-source models, like Llama2, give developers the most flexibility to tune the model’s weights. Companies like Gradient and Lamini have launched fine-tuning services. Model hosting services like OctoML, Anyscale, Replicate, and HuggingFace, and services cloud providers launched, like AWS Bedrock, Azure Open AI Service, and Google Vertex AI, provide developers the tools to fine-tune open-source models.
-
Training — In certain scenarios, developers are building entire pre-trained foundation models on their own data building vertical-specific foundation models in industries like finance (BloombergGPT) and healthcare (MedPaLM, HippocraticAI). Builders are using Unstructured, Visual Layer, and XetHub to help pre-process and manage such large data sets. MosaicML and Together provide compute platforms to help developers train new models from scratch. Once built, these models may perform significantly better for the use cases within their domain.
Ultimately, developers combining these techniques will create differentiated applications and enduring businesses. An EXAMPLE of a business that its investors definitely see as endure is Typeface.AI, with their generative AI stack as a platform for the company’s AI-powered writing assistant. Typeface.AI is a HuggingFace Hub partner and they are using the HuggingFace RAG to generate long-form text conditioned on a given input document or query. It is based on the paper Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks by Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandara Piktus et al. (2020). The model is trained on the Natural Questions dataset and fine-tuned on Wikipedia and ArXiv documents. It can be used both for inference and for training new models.
63) For [relatively] secure private meetings and protecting your information security and internet privacy … how’s your homelab networking playground, specifically your Tailscale game? How would you use Proxmox? Would you recommend pfSense or OPNsense? What’s your comfort level with Tailscale or ZeroTier or WireGuard or OpenVPN or SoftEther or Tinc or Pritunl or TunSafe or Freelan or Passepartout or Tunnelblick or Viscosity or OpenConnect or WireGuard or OpenSSH or OpenVPN or [Streisand](
64) Eating our own dogfood and contributing to open source communities is a key part of SERVING CONSTITUENTS FIRST. Do you spend a few minutes everyday following AWESOME open source development tools?
65) About homelabs … and reusing old miniPCs, laptops, chromebooks, raspberry pis … not just for salvaging components or making a small monitor from an old laptop screen which is remarkable in itself just for the fixer creativity ideas … but mostly this is about developing a sandbox of functional nodes for networking experiments.
66) Instead of selling that old phone for $50, how about continuing to TINKER with it, maybe rooting it and tearing it apart … or just simply reusing old phones or FireOS tablets in a less invasive approach … such as turning your old phone into a home security camera … there’s an entire genre of this device upcycling material out there on YouTube
66) https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-hub https://ecosystem.hubspot.com/marketplace/apps/apps-for-marketing-campaigns
67) https://github.com/topics/langchain https://github.com/topics/gpt4 https://github.com/topics/prompt-engineering https://github.com/topics/semantic-search
68) Scientific instruments provide examples for how we might think about designing and optimizing measurement systems for campaigns. Obviously, the applications of these systems in fields such as physics, engineering, and environmental monitoring not exactly directly applicable to intelligence gathering for political campaigns, as it does not take into account the complex social and political factors that influence human behavior and decision-making, but detection theory or signal detection theory is THEORETICAL construct for thinking about how we might measure the ability to differentiate between information-bearing patterns (called stimulus in living organisms, signal in machines) and random patterns that distract from the information (called noise, consisting of background stimuli and random activity of the detection machine and of the nervous system of the operator). Since the tools available for use to record photos, audio or video from unsuspecting voters are so incredible powerful in capturing infomation, we must focus more on ethical and legal methods of gathering information and analyzing data for political campaigns … how we might design our own surveys or strategies for focus groups and interviews with voters … as well as analyzing publicly available data such as social media trends, polling data, and campaign finance reports. A key part of this is being more proactive about concerns to respect voters’ privacy not use [or collect] their private data in ways that could be misleading or manipulative. Transparency and accountability are not really sufficient – even tight information/data security aren’t really sufficient, it’s important to ensure that all data are collected and analyzed in ways that the data cannot be used in a manner consistent with ethical principles and legal regulations.
69) What makes NOTION.so better than its competition? It’s really in the COMBINATION of things:
A) All-in-One Workspace: MOST IMPORTANTLY, it’s what it brings together in a comprehensive workspace that combines notes, tasks, databases, and page templates into a single interface. This allows users to access and manage all their work-related content in one place, making it easier to stay organized and focused.
B) Customization: Notion.so provides a high degree of customization, enabling users to tailor their workspace to their specific needs. Users can create databases, tasks, and pages that fit their workflow, and they can also customize the layout and design of their workspace.
C) Flexibility: Notion.so is a flexible tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. It can be used for personal task management, team collaboration, project management, and even as a knowledge base. Its flexibility makes it a great tool for users who need to manage multiple tasks and projects simultaneously.
D) Integration: Notion.so integrates seamlessly with other tools and services, including Google Drive, Trello, Asana, and Slack. This allows users to leverage the power of Notion.so alongside the tools they already use, making it easier to streamline their workflow and increase productivity.
E) Mobile Access: Notion.so offers mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, allowing users to access and manage their content on the go. This makes it easy to stay productive and connected, even when away from a computer.
F) Collaboration: Notion.so offers real-time collaboration features, enabling teams to work together simultaneously on documents, tasks, and projects. It also provides a commenting system, allowing team members to communicate and collaborate effectively.
G) Security: Notion.so takes security seriously, providing end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication to protect user data. This ensures that sensitive information remains secure and confidential.
H) Scalability: Notion.so is designed to scale with the needs of its users. It can handle large amounts of data and content, making it a great choice for businesses and organizations that need to manage complex projects and workflows.
I) Affordable: Notion.so offers a free plan, as well as several paid plans that are affordable and offer great value for the features and functionality provided. This makes it an accessible tool for individuals and businesses of all sizes.
J) Continuous Improvement: Notion.so is constantly evolving and improving, with new features and updates being added regularly. This ensures that users have access to the latest productivity tools and techniques, helping them stay ahead of the curve and achieve their goals.
L) What else? What could make it better?
Is there room for an open source suite of connected apps in this space?
70) Startupcookbook …
A) How does this provide sufficient value to generate revenue
B) Spend nothing … use free trials and use the best of the AFFORDABLE stuff first as you refine your idea, but get after positive net revenue and GROW IT
C) What’s your minimum viable product? Where/how do you get it into customers hand or sell it? Freemium? Free trial? What aspects are free forever [but require customers to register and participate in surveys/webinars]?
D) Advertise with curated AI-ified AWESOME lists
E) What’s the best AI / social media strategy?
F) What’s the best AI / SEO strategy?
G) What’s the best AI email marketing strategy?
H) What’s the best AI / content marketing strategy?
I) Customized prompt engineering for each customer segment
J) Customized RAG to optimize output of a large language model.
K) Use the the Google Cloud Generative AI repository on Github for things like the new Gemini and PaLM (legacy) API on Android apps with different generative AI models as well as Vertex AI Jupyter Notebooks with different prompt samples from the Model Garden for first party foundation models and pretrained APIs, open source models, third-party models such as Claude 2 or DuetAI for Developers to AI-enable a smoother software dev lifecycle from ideation in Workspace to a coded prototype to a deployed production app running in Google Cloud
71)
72)
73)
74)
75)
76)
77)
78)
79)
80)
81)
82)
83)
84)
85)
86)
87)
88)
89)
90)
91)
92)
93)
94)
95)
96)
97)
98)
99)
100)
101)
102)
103)
104)
105)
106)
107)
108)
109)
110)
111)
112)
113)
114)
115)
116)
117)
118)
119)
120)
21)
122)
123)
124)
125)
126)
127)
128)
129)
130)
131)
132)
133)
134)
135)
136)
137)
138)
139)
140)
141)
142)
143)
144)
145)
146)
147)
148)
149)
150)
151)
152)
153)
154)
155)
156)
157)
158)
159)
160)
161)
162)
163)
164)
165)
166)
167)
168)
169)
170)
171)
172)
173)
174)
175)
176)
177)
178)
179)
180)
181)
182)
183)
184)
185)
186)
187)
188)
189)
190)
191)
192)
193)
194)
195)
196)
197)
198)
199)
200)