recent posts
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As software grows more complex, and personal time dwindles, AI allows tech-interested users to overcome the arcane hurdles that OS software often requires. Recently, it let me move completely off Windows (to Mint), spinning up docker images, debugging and inspecting arcane resources. It made this kind of system accessible in a reasonable timeframe to somebody who didn't, can't, or won't devote the time to understanding the details of how the compatibility tools work.
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The Five Minutes Hate in 1984 exists to redirect frustration away from the system and toward something you can never actually fight. Social media does the same thing — it manufactures division and outrage because anger keeps you scrolling.
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Planned cities are built on the assumption that you can predict how people will live. They usually can't.
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Architects and city planners from Ebenezer Howard to Walter Burley Griffin have always believed they could redesign not just space, but human behaviour. The drawing board is where optimism goes to become ideology.
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Social media companies have spent years avoiding accountability by being neither fully responsible for their content nor fully neutral about it. What if we made them choose — publisher or distributor — and held them to whichever they picked?
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Social media locks you in with your followers, your history, your network. AI has the opposite problem — everything about you is already everywhere. That's actually the model worth building toward: you earn my presence by being the best option, not by making leaving too painful.
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Climate change is the only problem where solving it makes most of your other problems smaller too. Cheaper energy, easier transport, efficient food — fix those and a lot else follows.