And Solve the Political & Content Moderation Issues Too! — This is an idea I’ve borrowed from Ben Thompson at Stratechery, but it’s such a good one that it bears repeating, in the hopes that it might spread. Twitter on Deathwatch Even before Elon’s ill-fated buyout offer, Twitter was besieged on all sides. From its inability to stop losing money to perennial content…

Artists are livid about AI-Generated art. Should they be? — There’s an uproar right now in the digital arts community over the new machine-learning denoising algorithms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. It’s because these systems can quickly and easily render original imagery from nothing but a text prompt. …

Why gallivanting in space may be the best thing Bezos, Branson and Musk can be doing for us all. — Ten months ago Jeff Bezos blasted off in a private rocket — Blue Origin’s historic first crewed flight — and popped a bottle of Champagne in zero gravity. He was preceded that same week by Richard Branson riding in one of his own Virgin Galactic rockets. Both were soundly ridiculed…

Read this before you invest! — So much hype, so little understanding. I write this because after listening to people around me, it turns out there is much excitement around NFTs, but few understand what an NFT actually is. So here’s what you need to know before jumping on the bandwagon. Consider yourself warned. What’s an NFT? An NFT is a digital token which resides…

And look what happened. — Much talk has been made lately of the so-called “Metaverse,” most recently surrounding Facebook’s corporate re-brand (and accompanying massive investment) to signal its ambitions in the space. Evidently Mark Zuckerberg truly believes the Metaverse is “the next chapter for the technology industry.” But what exactly is it? What is the Metaverse? Good question. As…

I would humbly submit that in reference to a Git repository, it is an entirely different 'master' in use. In this case, the word is deployed in a 'master - copy' semantic, a metaphor to analogue media. This is in clear contrast to, for example, an IDE channel, where the…

I recorded an audiobook! — Last year when I wanted to listen to Empire and Communications, no audiobook was available (except a useless TTS robo-read). So I recorded one myself, in case anyone else might find it useful. Help yourself — it’s free. (But be warned: I am not a professional reader) What is Empire…

Change the metaphor; change the reality. — “Why do you want to make movies?” my mom once asked me. “Wouldn’t you rather do something that helped people? Like a doctor? “A doctor can only help one person at a time,” I tried to explain. “A storyteller can help the whole world.” Notwithstanding research doctors, I still hold this to…

De-abstracting presence and agency matters in a big way. — I’ve been hearing a lot of talk recently denigrating VR. It seems as though wave of hype has finally crested and the pessimists are having their day. “It’s just a fad” they say. “Remember 3D TV? Google Glass? VR in the ‘90’s?” “What does VR bring to the table that…