This is my place to gather scattered thoughts on politics, (in)culture, science and technology. The general tone is one of criticism of everything and everyone.
The urban middle class, once the backbone of stable economies, is facing an existential crisis unlike anything since the 18th century. And this time, the threat isn’t feudal lords or monarchs, but algorithms and concentrated capital. Image: Pavel Danilyuk An existential crisis for the urban middle class, which in the 18th century corresponded to the bourgeoisie or trade classes, making the…
What if the most commonly overlooked assumption of the simulation argument is also the most consequential? That assumption concerns time itself. Irreducible duration of interactions The Hidden Temporal Assumption Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument rests on a deceptively simple statistical premise: if sufficiently advanced civilizations can run vast numbers of simulated conscious observers cheaply…
In most computing, “time” is an external parameter. Your operating system ticks away milliseconds, trading platforms timestamp orders, and distributed systems rely on synchronized clocks. But what if a computer, or any engineered system, could measure time from its own internal causal activity rather than an arbitrary external reference? Image: AI generated This idea draws inspiration from the…
Image: Katerina Holmes We all remember how math began for us: counting blocks, fingers, or apples, writing the number “2” over and over, memorizing that 3 + 2 = 5. Arithmetic was the foundation, and numbers were treated as the most basic element of mathematical understanding. But what if that foundation is, in fact, not the most natural starting point ? What if we began math education not with…
For decades, banks and large financial institutions have served as the backbone of our economic systems. Their services were essential, their expertise exclusive, and their infrastructure unrivaled. But today, a new force is emerging that challenges their dominance not through confrontation, but through quiet, scalable substitution: AI agents . AI agents are software systems that can reason, fetch…
A Surprising Personal Discovery in Frame Proportions While designing a minimalist aluminum bicycle frame, I stumbled upon something remarkable that appears to have gone unnoticed in cycling literature: the relationship between front-center and chainstay length across most mountain bike frames approximates the golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618). This mountain bike features an almost exact golden ratio.…
In an era where we casually share vacation selfies, location data, and even our DNA and heartbeat with apps and platforms, one thing we continue to fiercely protect is… our suitcase. What's in a suitcase? - Images: Grok The average piece of checked or carry-on luggage contains nothing revolutionary: a few outfits, some toiletries, maybe a laptop or paperback novel. Yet, we insist on opaque bags,…
Many users choose Linux for reasons of control, transparency, and privacy. So it's worth paying attention when software quietly undermines those principles. Recently, I discovered that Dell’s Linux Assistant for Ubuntu contains built-in telemetry code, code intended to log and send metrics about user behavior. The kicker? It fails silently due to a minor Python bug. The result is what you might…
* Reclaiming Meaning in the Age of Instant Everything* I’m from early Generation X, raised with a particular dream: that AI and robotics would *finally* liberate humanity from drudgery. Not to make us lazier, but to give us the freedom to pursue *nobler* things: philosophy, art, reflection, even idleness with purpose. That dream still flickers. But lately, it’s flickering in the shadow of…
As "artificial intelligence" grows in power and generality, the question of how to align these systems with human values, or at the very least, with human intentions, becomes existentially important. Most of the contemporary alignment conversation focuses on optimization, feedback, and safety: how to guide a model’s behavior using techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),…
What if the stars could be dreamed of, but never reached? What if the tools of transformation lay forever out of grasp? Image generated by LLM We humans often take for granted the raw material of our progress: fire. From the first flickering spark in a cave to the controlled infernos of blast furnaces and rocket engines, fire has been our great transformer, a force that allowed us to rework the…
Image: pexels.com As Brazil undergoes a rapid digital transformation of its public services, the debate around transparency, technological sovereignty, and the role of open-source software in public administration becomes more urgent than ever. Yet, one critical point, largely absent from public discussion, raises a serious legal and ethical concern: the development and distribution of digital…
The 3D Tree Traversal Problem Spatial data structures are everywhere , from game engines to robotics and scientific simulations. But while traditional trees like quadtrees, octrees, and BSP trees do well in axis-aligned or position-based contexts, they begin to falter when direction and orientation become the dominant parameters. How do you traverse a hierarchy not by going "left" or "down," but…
The recent election of Pope Leo XIV, a priest of the Augustinian Order, has drawn fresh attention to the legacy and thought of St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians in Christian history. First of all, I must say that by no measure can I be considered a religious man. I am, in fact, a staunch rationalist , but also a lover of history and philosophy. The election of the new…
The Two Faces of Object-Oriented Programming: Inheritance vs. Composition Object-oriented programming (OOP) has evolved over the decades, branching into two distinct paradigms that shape how developers model and structure their systems: genealogical (inheritance-based) OOP and compositional (composition-over-inheritance) OOP. While both approaches fall under the OOP umbrella, they reflect…
The concept of Eternal September originated from the internet's early days, when AOL started offering easy internet access to a massive number of people in September 1993. This influx of new users overwhelmed the existing online communities, changing the dynamics of the internet forever. What was once a niche, controlled space became open to everyone, leading to a period of chaotic growth and…
As the digital age progresses, social media’s role in shaping our collective reality becomes more pronounced. The effects of constant connectivity are beginning to show, and it seems that we are standing at a crossroads. Two divergent futures appear increasingly likely: a future dominated by hyper-accelerated virtual realities and artificial intelligence or, conversely, a societal pullback into a…
In the realm of artificial intelligence, the quest for general intelligence, an AI that mimics human-like reasoning and cognition, remains one of the most ambitious goals. Today, AI excels in specialized tasks like computer vision and language processing , but we’re still far from developing machines that can reason across the full spectrum of human experience. One key reason for this gap is that…