Notes & fragments
journal
Scratch pad, think pad. Ramblings, rants, raves, notes to self, ideas to revisit, recurring interests, pet peeves, and lifelong—or merely fleeting—obsessions.
Our new digital oracle
I can see our relationship with smartphones - with answer engines at their heart - evolving along very similar lines. At the same time, we tend to invest into this entity a living quality, with its attendent moods and personality. More thoughts to come …
A view into the undesirable exotic
I found this serene video of a bunch of people casually peering into North Korea - from a Starbucks in South Korea! - one of the most bizarre phenomena I have experienced online recently.
The jaguar doesn’t growl. It poses.
Thoughts on the the iconic car company’s controversial rebranding
Please die, said the ai
There seem to be a significant number of instances where our most recent non-human companion species - generative AI chatbots - are talking back to us in seriously disturbing terms.
Space is the ultimate offshore location
Ever since I read this James Lovelock’s take on habitation on Mars…
Teaching new dogs old tricks
There seems now an endless stream of force-fitting initiatives to jumpstart baby-making on a planetary scale.
Uber’s brain-breaking complexity under the hood
This is a visual depicting ‘a deep dive into Uber's machine learning solution for predicting ETAs’e where ETA stands for ‘expected time of arrival’. I stumbled on this image on a Reddit thread … it struck…
The limits to efficiency
A vast percentage of all technology businesses, especially in the ‘business-to-business’ space, are launched and become successful in trying to create efficiency - basically reduce time, effort, money from…
Falling for machines
I remember watching Westworld with a friend. We were mildly amused and rolled our eyes when one of the human characters in the series falls deeply and completely in love with a humanoid cyborg. From our…