Entries Tagged - "essay"
- A Professor in Every Pocket
The scale of the cheating crisis in higher education is staggering. Depending on the survey, between 60% and 92% of college students now regularly use AI for their coursework. Professors are ill-equipped, and administrators are broadly turning a blind eye to the entire situation. Treating this as...
- Logistics is Dying; or - Dude, Where's my Mail?
In March 1860, William H. Russell established the Overland Express Route, colloquially called the Pony Express, to carry express mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and California; an area with no colonialist settlements between. Russell failed repeatedly to get funding from the Senate Post Office...
- Truth Functional Logic for Hackers - Part One
Bob and Alice are two hackers working on an embedded system with a severe computational constraint - there is a bug in their low-cost microcontroller making OR operations significantly slower than any other operation on the chipset. When they profiled their micropython code, they found that OR...
- Greg & the Eternal Brunch
The year was 2036. OpenAI had finally done it. After decades of press releases, quarterly existential crises, and machine learning papers so esoteric they made Finnegans Wake read like PopSci, they’d finished gpt-6z (revision 3) - a perfect, autonomous general intelligence. Its unveiling was...
- The $500 Question - How Media Framing Shapes Our Reality
“In this season of giving, what are we to make of a billionaire with a soft spot for striving graduates who draws a hard line on being present for the pomp and circumstance, no matter the circumstances?” - New York Times The modern media apparatus doesn’t just report news - it...
- An AI Horror Story
So I’m reading the teachers subreddit for my daily dose of misery and sense of doom about the future when I come across an unusually worded comment. As an educator, I’ve got to agree - while crystals and essential oils can be lovely, they won’t replace a solid IEP or therapy....
- Ricotta Cheese is a PsyOp
I categorically refuse to believe anybody actually enjoys ricotta cheese. For those unfamiliar, this Italian cheese comes out of a mistaken way to boil milk in the Bronze age, and for some reason hundreds of years later, it’s still an ingredient people try to eat. It’s tasteless, so all...
- They Don't Make It like They Used To
Nostalgia for the past has supplanted our yearnings for the future, becoming the default marketing tool for corporations. Instead of asking ‘what’s new?’, they ask ‘what have we done before that you liked?’. This trend transcends marketing tactics, reflecting a...
- The Incredible Power of Oil & Steel
There is Teflon in your bloodstream.1 Dupont knew about the toxicity of their chemicals since as far back as 1976, and to this day fight responsibility for their part in creating a ubiqitous chemical that does not naturally deteriorate. 2 The chemicals used in the production of Teflon (PFOAs and...
- Three Dimensions - An Analysis
Marman & Borins “Three Dimensions” was a tri-installation pop-minimalist art exhibition open at Contemporary Calgary until March 17th, 2024, composed of three mini installations: Balancing Act, THX2020, and ABCD. We wanted the viewer to walk away with ideas that we didn’t even...
- Changing Grocery Shopping Habits
It is easy to forget how recent the phenomenon of the modern grocery store actually is - it only dates back to 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Before that, grocers operated as “over the counter”, as in you would walk up to the counter at the front of...
- Laundry & The Responsibility of Search Engines
I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines. In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and...
- The Death of the Search Engine
In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly...
- Batman Is Kind of Strange as a Concept
Have you ever really sat down and thought about Batman? I had a surplus of spare time on my hands recently, so I went back and played through Batman: Arkham City. When it originally came out, people consistently told me it was good, but I never got around to playing it because I just never cared...