Last update: 18 June 2026. Hello World! I am a wanderer, I wish to remain anonymous, and from time to time I will publish the contributions of my Whanau...
If... If only those chatbots that replace customer service agents were more useful or helpful than the average customer service agent... But no. I mean NO. I mean: one way or another, it is definitely a casting failure. I have three simple propositions to explain why it happens. Organisations (companies and public services) try to replace people who can not – here and now – act like stellar…
I discovered Ted Chiang's novel – The story of your life – soon after watching the movie in a plane on my way to Norway, where I was enrolled for my Ph.D. It was 2016, I had wrapped up all the experiments, that demonstrated that my model of neuron and nervous system was able to mimic 3 key things that any representative of any animal species do, and that no other model had been able to mimic even…
Some time ago I vented about A.I. in a post named Assistive Incompetence . All my posts are written from a humanist and disinterested perspective. I have no control whatsoever about what people do with what I write, good or bad. I have the power to withhold my thoughts, but I feel I have the duty to air them. And so I do. This was the most read post I ever wrote, by far, and after surprise came…
I will always remember when I made sense of this song, when it resonated with my own life, when I finally heard someone talking about something that happened to me, when I visualised there was no point trying to talk to such people, because they will never acknowledge the pain they cause to others and amend themselves. I was in my early 40s. The lyrics express what an adult goes through when he…
S3e2 - S3e1 - S2e3 - S2e2 - S2e1 - S1e1 And so we got the DNA result of my Aunty from Ancestry, and it says we're family. In other words, the man who recognised me as his child was my biological father. And there's no second backlash. In the previous instalment, I had mentioned this could be an outcome and that, in this case, I had no explanation for what I have been through. The outcome of the…
There are consequential differences between the French and the English languages: Unlike English the French language has no concept of variable vowel duration, and it's not explicitly taught at school from the beginning. No wonder why French people pronounce beach like bitch , sheet like shit , and so on. The syllables of all French words can be stressed or smoothed as much as the speaker wishes…
Yesterday I experienced yet another of these ugly shortcomings in MacOS and that was the trigger I needed to air a few improvements I've in mind for a while with both iOS and MacOS. 1. I'll start with the trigger: I spent way too long to recover old data from OmniFocus. Let's be clear: the only function of a backup is to be restored. Restoring data is all about availability 1 in terms of…
S3e1 - S2e3 - S2e2 - S2e1 - S1e1 The obituary I published in the local newspaper in the area where my parents lived got people to talk to my uncle and my aunt. They happen to live in the same area. The word on the street is that my parents entered a viager contract with people, who share the same sickness in their minds. Another rumour is that my parents were saying they had no family . The first…
S2E3 - S2E2 - S2E1 - S1E1 This is no real-time blogging here. It takes time to unpack everything that happens at the moment. We had a family reunion on Sunday night: my uncle, his wife – my younger aunty –, my older aunty – the sister of the defunct –, my cousine... We all felt some elation to be together. For the first time we were not speaking of him because he had yet caused more grief to other…
S2E3 - S2E2 - S2E1 - S1E1 He is definitely dead. He got crushed and trampled over by his lawn tractor. He was in the process of changing the battery. I've been told it was rather gruesome. When he was found, the machine was powered on and the tires were slipping on the ground. I don't have more details, and I don't need more. To sum it up, he died in the same way he treated most people for most of…