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Why Kyoto is the way it is — A review of “Kyoto: An Urban History of Japan’s Premodern Capital”
I first came to Kyoto in 1999 for university. My first jobs out of school were here. My second daughter was born here. I lived in a dorm, four apartments, and a house, all in different areas of the city. Walked…
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The Santiago Boys — a podcast series by Evgeny Morozov
Today is the 50th anniversary of the coup of Chilean president Salvador Allende, under which the legendary Project Cybersyn was initiated. Cybersyn is an oft-referred to hypothetical in the socialist calculation debate, and was partially masterminded by the infamous cybernetician Stafford…
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LoFi software and inverting our relationship to The Cloud
The CTO of my company appeared in a recent Wired article about Local-First Software. Gotta say, it is pretty exciting to be in the pages of Wired. “LoFi” is something Fission is trying to enable with the protocols and SDK we…
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Sights from traveling northern Japan
In writing my newsletter I gathered up all the photos I posted this month from our summer break trip in Tohoku. I thought I should just post the photo round up here, and I can give a little a bit of…
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Driving Fukushima: The 3/11 nuclear disaster 12 years later
See the first part of this travelogue on Iwate and the tsunami Speeding along the highway along the gently curving coast of the Sendai plain, we enter the more hilly Fukushima Prefecture from its northernmost border. Immediately we are greeted with…
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Driving Iwate: The 3/11 tsunami 12 years later
3/11: the triple disaster in March of 2011 when the world’s fourth largest earthquake since 1900 caused a massive tsunami to ravage the northeastern coast of Japan, triggering three nuclear reactors to meltdown, the deaths of nearly 30,000 people, and displacement…
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Spatial Computing, Infinite Canvas, and new perspectives
Over the past couple of months (years?) I have been overstimulated and generally unable to keep on top of all the information I consume. My zettelkasten practice certainly needs a rethink. I still love Obsidian though, it is by far my…
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Possible LLM future and the inequity of a Reverse Turing Test
All the videos are up for Causal Islands, a “future of computing” conference my company put on in Toronto. There are a ton of amazing talks, I highly recommend you check them out. I would like to take a moment to…
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Golden week archery
”Golden Week” is a stretch of consecutive holidays in Japan, that combined with a weekend a day or two of PTO can be like 10 days off. Lots of people take the opportunity to return to their hometowns to visit family…
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Maker Faire Kyoto 2023
Last March, while hanging out at the Engineer Cafe in Fukuoka I heard about the annual Maker Faire in Kyoto. Some of the Engineer Cafe folk planned on coming up to Kyoto to attend. I have never been to a Maker…
Got any book recommendations?