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.
The future fault lines of identity
Where some of the old boundaries loosen, what else starts to matter in how people identify themselves and sort one another?
Your face is your ultimate asset now.
Now the quantified self has reached the face. A better face promises more control over what happens when you walk into a room.
The wind has no reason to keep you playing
When I recognise my own taste in what the machine gives me back, am I catching it in the act of forming?
The superficial is the core
What do we actually know about someone from a haircut and a coat?
McKenna sounds like he could be talking today
The eerie thing about this clip is that if you gave me the transcript without the date, I’d think it was from this week.
No maps for these territories
Then I get to art and wonder what I wanted the afternoon back for.
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…