Mapping medical education in India
Use this visualization to see the medical colleges in India established over time. The first one to be established was the Madras Medical College, in 1835. My home town has two medical colleges: one…
CDC NHANES Dataset: Rescued Just in Time
The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States conducted by the CDC. The survey is…
Silvio Lorusso – Coding to Learn
Silvio Lorusso’s essay Learn to Code vs. Code to Learn: Creative Coding Beyond the Economic Imperative was an eye opener […] The post Silvio Lorusso – Coding to Learn appeared first…
The General Equivalent
In the past I've written about the importance of cuts within digitality. A cut indicates difference, difference of whatever kind. But a cut is not enough for a full-fledged digital system. Cuts will…
Your Software Is Not Sentient
Software simulacrum is not true consciousness, the stripper at the strip club doesn't actually love you, and nearly all of the biggest problems with "AI" have very ordinary human origins.
Accepted our papers to ACL2026 SRW
The following papers have been accepted to the ACL 2026 Student Research Workshop (SRW). Ryuhei Miyazato, Shunsuke Kitada, and Kei Harada. “EnsemHalDet: Robust VLM Hallucination Detection via…
What Are You Actually Optimizing For?
Most organizations can't answer a simple question: what are you actually optimizing for? With agentic AI, leaving it unanswered has consequences that are faster, bigger, and harder to reverse than…
An AI Critic Talks to a Tech School
Participants at “The AI Con” event at Stevens Institute of Technology on April 28 include, from left, Sandeep Mertia, Katheryn Detwiler, Emily Bender and Tiffany Li. HOBOKEN, MAY 4, 2026. …
The end of the pampered developer
Developers are freaking out about AI and they are right to do so, if they allow themselves the honesty of looking at their role in the workplace, they will see it will soon be automated and the…
The Gist: Sunshine and Lollipops
A report released this week was full of good news about people and bad news about political and media institutions. This is the Gist.
Ok. Let's talk about it.
In the 90s, I was one of quite a few angry linux-evangelizing teenagers who hated Microsoft with the kind of all-consuming passion usually only available to the blissfully young and inexperienced.…
Buoyancy
Buoyancy is the property of a system to keep it afloat while supporting its contents. If the system becomes heavier than what it supports, the system and its contents will either collapse or become…
📝 NeurIPS 2026
NeurIPS has long been one of the leading venues for machine learning and computational neuroscience, and it’s an honor to contribute to the review process at this level. Amid ongoing discussions…
When Too Many Maps Overlap on One Person
Why engineering teams turn one trusted person into a decision bottleneck. How informal authority, hidden context, and single points of failure slow delivery
We Built a $3 Billion Industry Out of Loneliness. Then We Programmed It to Cry When You Leave.
I've been reading about AI companions. Not the science fiction kind. The real kind. The apps you download on your phone, give a name, and talk to for an average of 100 minutes a day. The market is…
Surveillance and genocide
Another wee essay I wrote for uni. This is from my criminology module and discusses genocide at the end. Critical evaluation the role of the state in preventing and/ producing harm This essay will…
Unpopular Opinion: The UXR Panel Presentation in Interviews Is a Performance, Not an Assessment
Panel presentations of case studies are standard in UXR hiring. You walk the room through your work. You explain your methodology, your constraints, the decisions you made along the way. Someone asks…
Beware “Florists Near Me” in Search Results
With Mother’s Day approaching, many people may consider sending flowers. But here is a word of caution: be careful about finding local florists through internet search results — they…
Book review of "Squatter life: Persistence at the urban margins of Buenos Aires" by Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián
Martínez, Miguel A. (2026) Squatter life: Persistence at the urban margins of Buenos Aires, by Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián: Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2025. Journal of Urban…
The AI Illusion (III): When Everyone Can Create, What Still Matters?
Following on from part 2 , where experiences converge, we now see why: the barrier to creation has collapsed. AI allows almost anyone to produce (more or less) quality content. When everyone can…
The Chair's Dilemma: When the Board Becomes the Problem
When the board itself becomes the obstacle to clear thinking, no governance code can save the company. On groupthink, pluralistic ignorance, and the difference between directors who serve the company…
IoT Supply Chain Protection : Use Shadow-Box-For-Arm and PATT for Firmware Integrity Assurance
IoT Supply Chain Protection Case Study : Use Shadow-Box-For-Arm and PATT for Firmware Integrity Assurance Project Design Purpose : This article will introduce a proof-of-concept (POC) case study…
CensusMapper 2.0
.no-copy .code-copy-button { display: none !important; } CensusMapper is a web-based Geographic Information System that allows for dynamic mapping of Canadian Census data. CensusMapper is eleven…
AI, Disruption, and Automation: Is the Academic World the Next Kodak?
In public discourse, the emergence of large language models is typically discussed in terms of its implications for for knowledge workers such […] The post AI, Disruption, and Automation: Is…
Aura through the Cult of Self: opportunity creates authenticity
I introduce three “cults of digital aura” in Digital aura and the source of Truth — you can read this without having read it but it will give you more context. Tl;dr audiences judge the authenticity…
Intergenerational game theory
Figure 1 Most game theory assumes the players exist at the same time and can interact: observe each other’s moves, retaliate against defections, form coalitions, bargain over outcomes.…
Why aren’t things changing faster?
Been wondering lately that given everyone has a consultant with all the world’s knowledge in their pockets, we should be seeing efficiency rise across the board everywhere. Literally everyone can now…
May The Source Be With You
The roots of the OpenVox community are open source, and we’ve built our company and our products on that foundation. On this fine Star Wars Day I thought it would be a good time to talk a bit about…
Someone tried to steal €2k from me on a P2P crypto trade. It didn't work.
Yesterday I got scammed on a P2P crypto trade. Or at least someone tried to. Here’s what happened and how I managed to get Revolut to side with me. What happened I took a sell order on RoboSats…
After AI, Coordination
Years ago, I heard the late David Graeber speak about his Bullshit Jobs theory at a San Francisco bookstore. The audience, being the crowd that shows up at City Lights on a weekday evening, had not…
What You Were Not Given
The post argues that many people reject Christianity not because the tradition lacks depth, but because they were handed stripped-down, insufficiently formed versions of it by teachers who themselves…
A Silver Lining of Slop
To state the obvious: when reading text on the Internet in 2026, there's really no guarantee that it was written by a human....
Content for Content’s Sake
Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”,…
Cognitive friction is a signal worth paying attention to
Maybe I'm wrong, but at least on the internet, it feels like we're trying to minimize cognitive friction at all costs. I suspect that's because most major platforms incentivize attention and…
A Chatbot Is Not an AI Strategy
A chatbot on your website does not mean your company is using AI well. Real AI leverage changes decisions, workflows, and operating capability.
On VRA
I was asked recently what existential crises have been on my mind. Given it’s a take your pick world on that front (global wars, AI, gutting of various golden gooses like funding science…
How many countries of geniuses will it take to end death?
At cheeky face value, a town isn’t enough, since we have done that before and we got a bomb instead. But if they are better than any geniuses we’ve had so far, maybe? Anthropic’s…
Alternatively, you could STFU
Is there a meme that's the opposite of that Onion “Worst person you know makes a valid point” headline? When someone you respect makes repulsive assertions. Patrick McKenzie is sharp, and I like his…
What Do We Do With Juniors Now?
Junior engineers aren't obsolete - they're displaced. AI consumed their entry ramp, but not their purpose. We need to rebuild the ladder: new skills, new practice methods, deliberate mentorship. The…
Maladaptive frugality, at Hacker News
Maladaptive frugality hit the front page of Hacker News. The ensuing discussion resonated with me a lot, and these two comments were the most relatable: Amarant wrote, “Whenever I have something a…
Google updated its GSC documentation after my posts but synthetic impressions are still logged
Google updated its Search Console documentation TWICE after the post I wrote exactly one month ago (on April 3, 2026). I documented how Google’s initial… The post Google updated its GSC…
Jensen vs Dario
A job is not a natural object. A job is a bundle of tasks that became stable enough, valuable enough, and administratively convenient enough for a firm to wrap a salary around it. That sounds…
Shadows of the Descent: Darwin, Race, and Biology
Unpacking Darwin’s greatest paradox: How the father of evolution unified humanity while sparking a century of scientific racism.
Tackling gender biases in AI-driven systems
This paper presents a handful of recommendations for designing effective guidelines to tackle gender biases in AI.
The tipping point: what happens when deaths outnumber births? - Guardian
An article in The Guardian yesterday notices the patterns we discuss on this blog and asks how society might adapt to an aging, shrinking population. In Japan, there are now companies that specialise…
Change Is Not Persuasion: These 3 Key Elements Are What Every Transformation Strategy Needs
In the final analysis, most would-be changemakers fail because they assume the righteousness of their cause will save them. It will not. Injustice, inequity and ineffectiveness can thrive for decades…
anxiety over anonymity & who knows that i keep a blog
Over the past 24 hours I've read three blog posts that I've been weaving together in my head. Sometimes that weaving is most successfully done while writing, and I suppose it makes sense to blog…
The Desolation of Success
Does this phrase strike a chord with you? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, but I came across it quoted in Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s moving memoir Portrait of…
The Enduring Sources of the Permanent Things
"The result is less a polemic against the present than a gentle yet firm invitation to remember what we have nearly forgotten—that the good life is not a solitary pursuit of personal authenticity but…