Category: tech
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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 Beer. Many books and articles have been written about the project, but earlier this…
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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 have been working on. The Wired article is a good primer on how The…
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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 most used daily app. Recently the Metamuse podcast (Ep 81) hosted Stephan Ango, the…
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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 focus on Maggie Appleton’s excellent “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI”, exploring the…
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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 Faire before so I decided to join. After canvassing on the HN Kansai slack…
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Obsidian vs Logseq
After using Logseq for a solid week, I thought I would capture some observations if anyone else is considering the app, or Obsidian, which is my main tool for thought. I started using Obsidian at the end of 2020, switching from a couple of months working on my zettelkasten in Roam. My Obsidian is pretty…
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The nearly 400 year legacy of a cutting edge ceramic coffee filter
This NY Times piece on a 1,020 year old shop in Kyoto has been making the rounds online. It got me thinking about other examples of products or skills that have traversed centuries, and a random discovery we made at a shopping stall: a paperless ceramic coffee filter. Last October we travelled to Imari and…
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Writing macrons on macOS and iPadOS
This is a quick tutorial on how to easily type macrons on Apple devices with a hardware keyboard. The onscreen keyboard on the iPad makes this easy, but not when you are using an external hardware keyboard. This will be particularly relevant to academics needing to write Japanese terms in rōmaji. I searched the web…
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Advocating for the teaching of knowledge to kids
Having been in the Canadian education system for a few years now, I am very impressed with the high-minded ideals of the early education system here. Things like teaching critical thinking, creativitiy, breaking down a problem, LID, etc are challenging and interesting, and meant to get a jump on the future. However it is pretty…
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Nostalgic utopianism — a review of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff Power corrupts and money ruins everything. These are basically the premises that Douglas Rushkoff starts from in his latest book, a critique of the concentration of power in the digital economy and the inequality it breeds. He uses the…