Autodidact. Generalist. Synthesist. Writes Sentiers, a carefully curated weekly newsletter on the futures of technology, society, and culture.
I love MUTEK Forum. They just launched the partial 2026 speaker lineup , but didn’t include links and bios, so I asked Claude to use the context of the forum and the list, to give me 1-2 links for each speaker. I did a super quick check of every links, replaced one, and posted here. So be warned, I don’t think there are errors, but they might not be the best links for each. Claude’s research…
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are always charging our electronics, some days feel like we’re working for them, not the other way around. Granted, one could hardly have a more “first world problem” than this. It means I have too many electronic thingamaggigs. Still, most of our things drain batteries fast and we’re pluggin them in left ant right. Around here we don’t do much grownup gift…
I’m not sure if I agree, but it’s an intriguing take, and I’ve been saying that the main question for the near and medium future of AI is where we are in the s-curve , where in the steep part? The plateau will change a lot of things, including, I think, the reduced importance / influence of frontier models. Many people, myself included, didn’t try to build a product around a language model because…
I haven’t read the whole thing, it’s too loony and bonkers, I just breezed. But I wanted to keep a note somewhere of some of the nuggets to be found in there, considering some of the parallels with The Felon’s actions today. The Canadian roots of Elon Musk’s conspiracist grandpa : Around that time, Howard Scott — a 6’5” man with broad shoulders and a magnetic personality — began delivering fiery…
Un article dense et fouillé par Robin Berjon qui permet de donner un cadre de réflexion sur la souveraineté numérique. Mon unique souci est que c’est un cadre de pensée qui est profondément ancrée sur les grands systèmes, qu’ils soient de gouvernement et/ou de compagnies. Je suis plutôt dans la recherche d’une recréation des communs, d’un véritable espace public (comme la bibliothèque, les chemins…
Driving back from family travels for the holidays, two things happened on the way, which I thought connected in a useful way. There was “dry smog” over Montréal, caused in good part by all the fireplaces burning wood to have nice holiday fires going for Christmas the day before. On the radio, a short report on the popularity of fireplace videos on YouTube and Netflix. When critiquing technology,…
This hex (tweet) circulated a bit over the last few weeks. https://bsky.app/profile/karenattiah.bsky.social/post/3ld2et5ighs24 I don’t really have an “official” list of “personal foundational texts,” especially not books I reread, there are so many things to read, I tend to not reread anything. Except younger, where I reread Tintin and Spirou a few times. In lieu of specific title, what I always…
Comme bien des montréalais depuis quelques années, des travaux sont en cours sur notre rue depuis deux semaines. Aqueducs, conduites d’eau contenant du plomb, remplacement de ci et de ça, la totale. Ce matin un camion avec tuyau articulé mêne un bruit d’enfer en pompant ou injectant quelque chose au fond d’un trou, je n’ai pas investigué. En revenant à la maison tantôt, autre camion au coin de la…
Two weeks ago Jason celebrated the 25th anniversary of his blog. I mentioned it in Sentiers but somehow (well, ok, largely because it’s kind of dead) didn’t consider my own blog and its age until I saw Jay’s mention of his own blog’s 14th . Depending how you count, my blog started January 17th 2003 (it was actually just a link in a “linklog” but now appears as a normal post) or January 26th 2003 .…
Over at Sentiers , I’ve turned some of the different “buckets” of writing into just a blog and I’ve been writing a bit there, if you want to follow that too. I might include the RSS of it in here so you can get both personal and “professional” together. We’ll see if I have the time. For today though, I wanted to share and note for myself the video below, because it puts into words something I’d…
Once in a while, I’ll read an article that makes me take stock (again) and realise how absolutely insane our* civilization (species) is. Today, it’s this article from The Economist , If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed (paywalled but you can see the chart below, and it’s nothing new data wise). Now, granted, chances are that we’ll never have a 100% vegan…
After a very quiet summer, suddenly a few excellent meetings / opportunities this week, and a couple of fun calls. It’s not often that that happens or that I spend so much time productively on Zoom, so a very irregular (as in, almost never) weeknote to keep a small trace of the moment(s). Excellent meeting related to curation. Very fun General Seminar on AR but more importantly a two hour…
Yesterday a friend mentioned he was kind of disappointed at the level of “pandemic anniversary” articles he was seeing and asked what we take away from that year. I’m not sure my reckon written as a stream of consciousness will be any more useful, but here goes. TL;DR: I think the year, and here I include the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and ever-clearer signs of the climate crisis, amplified…
Nice way of framing what many indie publishers feel but don’t necessarily put into words. The print world serves as a kind of refuge from that feeding frenzy. In a field where success usually means ‘breaking even’, I think what motivates print publishers most is the belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to their chosen niche. It sounds corny, but adding something of value and…
Realizing I’d completely forgotten about this series!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PoXfZdYVU&feature=emb_title
Love this quote! Mostly noted for the future generations and planet bits but it’s also a great way to look at the current pandemic and mask wearing. We have an obligation to others to wear masks to protect them . Even with all we know, too many people still see it as whether they feel they need to protect themselves. That’s not the point! The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous…
Hallin’s spheres is a theory of media objectivity posited by journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin in his book The Uncensored War to explain the coverage of the Vietnam war. Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate…
This Guardian piece has been making the rounds, they title it like it’s written by a “robot” by itself but it’s actually eight different “essays” edited together. Austin Kleon has an excellent take on it. “We chose instead to pick the best parts of each… We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places.” Honey, that means a human wrote this piece. Writing is editing. It…
Very interesting thought by Robin Sloan, on what he calls orthographic media . Here’s the Wikipedia definition of orthographic projection . Orthographic projection is a means of representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. It is a form of parallel projection, in which all the projection lines are orthogonal to the projection plane, resulting in every plane of the scene appearing in…
Interesting mini-trend with a couple of countries offering new year-long “digital nomad” visas. Digital nomads and remote workers have long faced ambiguity when working while they travel, often skirting the law by working while visiting a country with a tourist visa. While other countries like Costa Rica, Mexico, Portugal and the Czech Republic have introduced visas for digital nomads, so far…