Ever wondered about the heart-rate accuracy of the cheapest Apple Watch compared to a medical-grade ECG chest strap? I did — and to find out, I wrote a Python script that compares heart-rate data from an Apple Watch SE (logged via WorkOutdoors.app on WatchOS) with +
Have you ever put on a sock inside-out? How about “lost 10 kg just by thinking about it”? That’s how Apple’s Foundation’s Black Hole Jump Drive™ feels to someone who understands physics: “black hole” is a spur-of-the moment, unfortunate misnomer of John Archibald Wheeler +
Our current economic system does not serve humans well. As a community (fighting cruel wars in XXI centuries) or as the individual (born to compete against others, running through kindergarten to nursing home on SSRIs, painkillers and Ritalin) +
Hats off to the colleagues at Haut et Court for pooling in an impressive amount of resources and talent to shoot the “Constellation” series for Apple+. However, the end result turned out as a pseudo sci-fi light-horror semi-drama that toys with quantum mechanics in low Earth orbit +
Wear the same outfit for a month to notice that no one notices. If it’s clean — no one cares. Even if your jeans got holes. Even if you’re a woman, certain that you need a new dress and a matching handbag every day. People +
We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct? +
Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not? By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global +
Today, “Generative AI by Getty Images” launched on an NVIDIA Edify / Picasso framework, trained on Getty’s own stock of photographs. Same as previously done by Adobe. And Shutterstock. And… Send me an e-mail when you need a one-of-a-kind, human-made +
What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my +
ChatGPT. It’s a chat. Not AI. It’s not Intelligent. It’s not even a knowledge base of Humanity, like Wikipedia or PubMed. It’s a collection of statistical models of knowledge. Some licensed, some stolen*. Oh, and no one understands how the inside works. The chat predicts +
Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity +
My conversation about human happiness with ChatGPT took 5 minutes. Question: According to what is currently known to science, what 50 factors, listed from most influential to least, influence a human (male, with an IQ above 100) self-reported feeling of happiness +
Wow. The Match Group did indeed introduce chat-assist to Tinder. Just look at their suggestions to start a dialogue after a match: 😱 • Hiiii Jane! Getting into anything fun this week? • Hello Jane. How’s it going? • Hi there! Getting into anything fun +
As a civilization, we’d known about our impact on climate since the 1950-60s. We’ve also continued to fail to agree on anything that would have prevented its negative impact… since the 1970s. 50 years later, the IPCC reports, again, that nothing’s changed. We will not +
A review of Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question” is easy to write: just re-arrange a dozen of his own passages. The book itself, though, is not easy to read. Unless… you understand at least the main principles of physics, chemistry and Latin. However interesting the +
A truly “Pro” notebook computer would feature: • an ortholinear, split & probably concave keyboard optimized for touch-typing • an Apple Pencil compactible screen • a 21:9 screen ratio / form factor But hey, who’s thinking about pros these days, eh? Economies of scale rule… +
“Cheap Sex” is a great book by sociologist Mark Regnerus to compliment David Buss’ “Evolution of Desire”. It describes the current personal and interpersonal sexuality / gender relations state of affairs in the US. The local trends and stats which do or will impact the +
A good day to die. The world is heading toward ~3°C of global warming, triggering multiple irreversible climate tipping points, including, but not limited to: Gulf Stream weakening; permafrost abrupt thaw; Amazon rainforest dieback; northern forests dieback; ice sheet collapse (Greenland, Antarctic); Want to continue +
“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written for someone without any knowledge of science, its methods and branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology classes in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since? The +
We model the galaxies as a sort of fluid of stars, where the interactions are not electromagnetic, but gravitational. So, galaxies are fluids of stars, which themselves are made of plasmas of hydrogen made of frozen nuggets of quark matter. Yet again, there are no +
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