prediction-markets 5

This week, I learned: I had GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 analyze a few of my conversations and learnt that I need to ask myself: “What must they take away? What must you take away?” in my conversations. That lets me speak with intention rather than instict. (Instinct has its place. I happen to over-use it.) Turns out there are several well-established taxonomies. It makes sense to align with these. Linked data is powerful and AI makes linkage easy. General Knowledge: Wikidata, DBpedia, YAGO. People: VIAF, ISNI, ORCID, LC Name Authority, GND. Places: GeoNames, Getty TGN, ISO 3166. Organizations: LEI, ROR, Wikidata. Books/Media: Open Library, WorldCat, MusicBrainz, IMDB. Chemicals/Biology: PubChem, ChEBI, GBIF, ITIS. Legal/Units/Math/Events: EuroVoc, QUDT, OEIS, PeriodO, etc. BitWarden supports a bw CLI that seems handy for quick CLI access to passwords. It’s a step towards me moving away from saving passwords unencrypted on my local file system. Singapore has banned prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. Pity. I was hoping to use AI coding agents to play them. Yahoo flipbook.page is a fascinating generative UI exploration. It’s a visual browser, i.e. it generates an image based on text, you click anywhere, it generates an image interpreting based on where you clicked, and so on. A very different style of exploration! Vercel’s deepsec uses Codex / Claude to search for vulnerabilities, but “scans can cost thousands or even tens-of-thousands of dollars for large codebases”. When I charge my Lenovo Thinkpad (P1 Gen 7) with the 170W charger that came with the laptop, it delivers ~60W of power to the battery, charging the laptop in about an hour. A 65W laptop delivers half the power and takes twice as long.

Google markets. It’s not a new Google service. Just Google “putting the wisdom of crowds to work” by using online markets.

Yahoo’s Buzz Game tracks various technology markets, and lets people bet on which one will win. So, for instance, C leads language, Livejournal leads blogs, Flickr leads tags, and Bittorrent leads P2P.

Alternate exchanges: Hollywood Stock Exchange, Innovation futures, Blogshares. These exchanges are supposed to be remarkably accurate in predictions.

Among all concepts I have encountered on the Web, this one is the most intruiging. Ideosphere has created a futures market for ideas. You put a claim on this website, and people can buy/sell coupons based on these ideas. When the claim becomes true/false, these coupons increase/decrease in value. Of course, no real money is involved – it’s just a score. Very interesting, nevertheless, to get a feel of what people think. (There’s a similar exchange for Bollywood.)