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David Ing

A retired IBMer goes shopping at Costco in Toronto, Canada:

> Standing in front of a freezer filled with riced cauliflower on Monday, Michael Orr squinted at an $11.49 bag of frozen vegetables. He was trying to decipher, from the tiny print on the bag, whether it had been produced in the United States. He and his wife had agreed before coming to the store that they would adopt a Buy Canadian approach.

> “I’m very angry about the actions the U.S. is taking,” said the otherwise mild-mannered retiree, leaning against the handle of his cart. Mr. Orr had been following the news closely, and U.S. President Donald Trump had not yet announced a pause on his threat of tariffs on Canadian imports.

> Mr. Orr said he doesn’t consider himself anti-American. He worked for IBM – even lived for a time in the U.S.

> “If anything, I’m quite pro-American. But the situation right now, I just find intolerable.”

> In his cart was a two-pound bag of Balzac’s coffee – an Ontario-based company. He’d chosen it over his usual Kirkland brand beans, which are roasted in the U.S. He’d also chosen crackers made in B.C. Melatonin tablets made in Canada. He’s even sworn off his favourite Napa Valley wine for the time being, opting instead for Italian.

> The contradiction of shopping at Costco was not lost on him. It is, of course, an American company, headquartered in Washington State. And, as a symbol, Costco is about as synonymous with the American dream as it gets: a car in every garage – because you need a car to get to Costco – and a (bagged) rotisserie chicken on every table.

> “I did think, ‘Should I be coming here?’ ” Mr. Orr said. But the store, he rationalized, supports Canadian jobs. And many of the products it carries are Canadian.

> (And, as a company, Costco has in fact pushed back against some of Mr. Trump’s policies, doubling down in recent weeks on its commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.)

> Across the concrete warehouse space was evidence of the inextricable links between the two countries – the extent to which the American dream and the Costco dream have also become the Canadian dream. Bags of Tim Hortons coffee. Denim in bulk. Poutine at the snack bar.

"The trade war is running hot in the Costco frozen food section" | Ann Hui | Feb. 5, 2025 in The Globe and Mail

theglobeandmail.com/life/artic

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David Ing

Web video of Understanding Systems week 2 lecture on Systems Approaches. Incorporates doing literature reviews aided by Gen AI.

coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Web recording of "Generative AI and Inquiring Systems: Ways of Patterning and Ways of Knowing" from Ontario. Leisurely dialogue and live challenge demos with ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Mistral LeChat, NotebookLM, Perplexity.
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Proceedings published for "Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes: From rearranging objects to repacing rhythms” in CEUR-WS for STPIS 2024. More details than the 15-minute presentation in August.

coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

From the 1982 publication of _Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems_, W. Richard Scott in 2004 reflected back on the history of organizational sociology.

> Before open system ideas, organizational scholars had concentrated on actors (workers, work groups, managers) and processes (motivation, cohesion, control) within organizations. Scant attention was accorded to the environment within which the organization operated.

Scott, W. Richard. "Reflections on a half-century of organizational sociology." Annu. Rev. Sociol. 30, no. 1 (2004): 1-21 at annualreviews.org/content/jour

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David Ing

For those interested in detailed distinctions between systems approach, systems thinking, General Systems Theory, system science, etc, Aleksandra A. Nikiforova (Lomonosov Moscow State University) started an entry in the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization in 2022 that has been revised to 2024.
isko.org/cyclo/systems .

The International Society for Knowledge Organization is a “scholarly society devoted to the theory and practice of knowledge organization, bringing together professionals from different disciplines such as information science, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science, as well as special domains such as health informatics".

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David Ing

The Future of Life Institute Safety Index is criticized by Mark Daley as too narrow, with an implicit bias disfavoring open sourcing.

> The “Future of Life Institute” released their FLI Safety Index this week. [....]

> By celebrating only those models that impose rigid controls on allowable thought and scorning those that grant the user genuine choice, the FLI Safety Index risks becoming equally a barometer of cultural authoritarianism.

“The future of human thought”, Mark Daley, Dec.14, 2024 at noeticengines.substack.com/p/t

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David Ing

In understanding the precursors to the Gunderson and Holling 2001 _Panarchy_ book, it's good to keep in mind that when ecologists refer to "Adaptive Management", the clearer longer label is "Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management".

Holling, C.S. (1979). Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management -- Current Progress and Prospects for the Approach: Summary Report of the First Policy Seminar, 18-21 June 1979. IIASA Collaborative Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: CP-79-009 at pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/119

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David Ing

In describing "go energy" and "stop energy", @pahlkadot approaches yang qi and yin qi, in a dyadic processual approach.

> This is a useful nuance as I develop a framework for building state capacity. One of my admittedly obvious and oversimplified tenets is that systems have both “go energy” and “stop energy,” much as a car has a gas pedal and a brake. You wouldn’t drive a car without a brake, but you also wouldn’t drive a car in which the brake was pressed all the time, even when you were trying to accelerate.

eatingpolicy.com/p/the-trump-a

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David Ing

Web recording of the 125th meeting of Ontario: A retrospective, introspective, and prospective discussion about systems convening, in coordination with .
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

In which directions should advance? In 1985, Bela H. Banathy promoted engaging into systems inquiry in (i) systems theory, (ii) systems philosophy, and (iii) systems methodology, towards application and competence.
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

From late September into October, researchers met for 5 intensive days for Banathy Conversation event in Lugano.

coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Web video of launch of book "Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness" by . Joined by of , making Systems Process Theory of accessible.

coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Web video presentation complementing preprint of "Reifying Socio-Technical and Socio-Ecological Perspectives for Systems Changes: From rearranging objects to repacing rhythms" for International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in IS (STPIS’24)
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Invited paper to International Conference on Socio-Technical Perspectives in IS (STPIS’24) on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, stpis.org/program/ online to Sweden.

Preprint at coevolving.com/commons/2024-08

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David Ing

Web video from U. Hull Centre for Systems Studies expert-led session on "Resequencing : Practising, Theorizing and Philosophizing as Systems Changes Learning", 4 parts, ~ 3 hours.
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

Slides at coevolving.com/commons/2024-05 need talk, animation.

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David Ing

Scholarly rankings of may not line up with popularization. Counting h-index is different from number of citations.
coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

Serious about a postcolonial philosophy of Chinese science? Web video of "Yinyang and Daojia into through Changes" for traces through history + the contextural-dyadic shift for

coevolving.com/blogs/index.php

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David Ing

If an LLM is going to run in your phone, the model is going to have to be small.

> Paradoxically, smaller models require more training to reach the same level of performance. So the downward pressure on model size is putting upward pressure on training compute.

"AI scaling myths" | Arvind Narayanan + Sayish Kapoor | AI Snake Oil | 2024-06-27 aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-my

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David Ing

Running an open source LLM requires a lot of resources. The smallest model may run on a powerful laptop, but beyond that, you'll need a server. Besides the GPU (probably Nvidia), check out the disk space requirement for Llama 3.1

8b parameters, 4.7GB
70b parameters, 40GB
405b parameters, 231GB

ollama.com/library/llama3.1:70

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