December 2nd, 2024: Everyone should have access to nature — I love the wild biosphere and I want to do everything I can to protect it. And I think there are so many great initiatives out there to do so. But if there’s one thing that’s at the top of my list, it would be to see a world where everyone has....
November 28th, 2024: Thoughts on Australia’s Under 16 Ban of Social Media — Australia passed a law that bans children under 16 from using social media sites: The major parties backed the bill that would make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars....
November 23rd, 2024: “Does technology improve life” is the wrong question — Frequently in debates about how technology affects are lives, the following question is raised: does technology improve life? In my mind, this is the wrong question, for several reasons. First and foremost, although the ways in which technology affects us can....
November 21st, 2024: Why climate change? — Why do so many people focus on climate change rather than respecting the biosphere, which includes stopping climate change? I think the answer is quite obvious. Climate change is a proxy variable for biospheric degradation that fits into the rubric of....
November 19th, 2024: Thoughts on rules against tiny houses — These days, I have been searching for alternatives to buying an expensive house. The prices of property in Canada are increasing and becoming difficult to afford for many. The only way to afford them is to either move to a very small town where the price of a....
November 14th, 2024: FrontierMath: Another dangerous tool to advanced AI — FrontierMath is a new benchmark for testing how well current AI systems do at solving math problems. According to Epoch AI, FrontierMath presents hundreds of unpublished, expert-level mathematics problems that specialists spend days solving. It offers an....
November 7th, 2024: The AI and Nuclear Fusion Project of Carnegie Mellon and Princeton — In a recent announcement, Carnegie Mellon University say they are joining forces with Princeton University to make progress on nuclear fusion using methods in artificial intelligence. They have formed the Nuclear Fusion Project, which “is the result of....
November 6th, 2024: Martial Arts Movie Review: Undisputed 2 — Undisputed 2 holds a special place in martial arts cinema for introducing the memorable character of Yuri Boyka played by Scott Adkins. Although Scott Adkins has done many top-notch martial arts films, Undisputed 3 is one of his best, and this predecessor....
November 6th, 2024: Best MacOS text editors — I write a lot. Not only am I a professional writer for Photography Life, I also just like writing. For a long time, I used Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code because it’s a pretty decent editor. However, due to the push of AI into the editor and....
October 26th, 2024: I will no longer use Visual Studio Code — I’ve deleted Visual Studio Code. For a long time until just a few days ago, I had been using VS Code to write my articles and do a little coding. Probably most of you know that VS Code is a very well-designed text editor/IDE hybrid cross-platform....
October 4th, 2024: Mechanisms by which the technological-capitalistic complex sustains itself — Technology is currently out of control, and even though some technologies such as AI are mainly destructive and will cause severe damage to human society, we have no safeguards in place to ensure that they are not invented. Technological development now....
October 3rd, 2024: Letter to the NSF — The NSF or National Science Foundations is one of the main sources of money for scientific research in the United States. A while ago, I wrote this general letter to the NSF: Dear NSF, My name is Dr. Jason Polak. I have a doctorate in mathematics from McGill....
September 30th, 2024: Boycott NaNoWriMo for its AI stance! — Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term for a collection of computer algorithms that use learning-based techniques such as neural nets in order to solve problems. A subset of this is generative AI, which, in its current state, can synthesize....
September 30th, 2024: The law of illusory improvements — Consider an optimal society. If one could measure the health of this society over time, it would fluctuate about the optimum point, somewhat like a sinusoidal curve: This is the graph of $\sin(x) + 10$, an idealized version of this phenomenon. Of course, this....
September 30th, 2024: Life would be better without abundance — Many things in life would actually be better if we limited them. We are instinctual creatures and our instincts are designed to use resources. Since these instincts evolved in a time of scarcity, we are being overwhelmed by our instinctual use of resources....
September 30th, 2024: Book Review: The armchair economist — A good way to understand price theory in economics is by reading The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. Although this book won’t give you facility for economic calculations, it will give you an intuitive idea about how prices work. I first read this....
September 30th, 2024: Technology changes us as much as we change technology — The human species is no doubt the world’s greatest toolmaker—but is that a good thing? We change physical matter into devices to do things we cannot do with our hands. But it would be a mistake to think that we are the only ones doing the changing. In....
September 30th, 2024: How to sleep in dry environments — I’ve written this because almost all “health” websites are very scanty on real information to help people like me. However, over the years I’ve developed a few techniques that go beyond simply using a humidifier, although of course that is useful. So,....
September 30th, 2024: The beauty of nature, a chance for peace — Natural places with plants and animals have a beauty cannot be replaced by anything that humans create. We need this beauty to move beyond survival and to experience true existence. The soft breeze from the mountain, the piercing look of the eagle, and the....
September 30th, 2024: What is connectionless art? — Let’s take one cup of YouTube, three teaspoons of Tiktok, a pound of big-tech and a sprinkle of global capitalism. Bake for ten years and what do you get? Connectionless art. Wait, what? Let me explain. Some years ago after getting into photography, I....
September 30th, 2024: O Detran.SP, uma jornada difícil… — Em 13 junho de 2023, eu terminei todos os passos e paguei todas as taxas para trocar minha habilitação estrangeira por uma habilitação brasileira. Eu não sabia naquele momento que essa seria uma das jornadas mais difíceis na minha vida. A parte do....
September 30th, 2024: Would I have opposed the industrial revolution? Yes — I frequently argue against unrestricted technological growth. In one recent argument, I was asked: would you have opposed the industrial revolution? Surely, you wouldn’t oppose the reduction in infant mortality! Frankly, this is one of the stupidest replies....
September 30th, 2024: The fraudulent nature of university research — Academia is said to have many problems. Having spent significant time there, and having published a few papers myself after getting my PhD in 2016, I know this all too well. But it has one incredible weakness: academia at its core is a big business dependent....
September 30th, 2024: Should you get a PhD? — A long time ago, I tried to write an article to answer the following question: should you get a PhD? I never finished it because I never figured out a clear way of answering this question. But I recently thought about it some more and now I have a good....
September 30th, 2024: Should you turn your hobby into a career? Maybe — I’ve heard time and again that turning a hobby into a career can be dangerous because it will make you lose passion for your hobby and your career. So in this article, I’m going to help you understand whether it’s a good idea to turn your hobby into a....
September 30th, 2024: Equality…but with respect to which variable? — Equality is a hot topic. Everyone is trying to be inclusive, and get more “groups” into more parts of society. But we cannot speak of increasing equality without specifying which variable of equality we are trying to optimize. For example, some talk of....
September 30th, 2024: The climate change problem is not an engineering problem — In typical climate activism, I often hear about solar power and how we just need X solar panels installations to offset Y gallons of fossil fuels. Or we have proposals to geoengineer the climate to compensate for the vast increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.....
September 30th, 2024: Grading with ChatGPT is wrong — If you are grading your students’ essays or homework with ChatGPT, then it is immoral and wrong. It does the students a disservice. Is such a strong statement justified? I think it is. Now of course, you might think that ChatGPT is just a tool and that....
September 30th, 2024: Artificial Intelligence: A diseased manifestation of monkey mind — The famous Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki wrote what is perhaps the best introduction to Zen Buddhism out there: the pair of books Not Always So and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In them, he conceptualizes the two types of mind within all of us: Big Mind and monkey....
September 30th, 2024: Putting humans first is dangerous — In the realm of biological conservation and biodiversity, there are some who believe that we should not go out of our way to save species, and that since humans are natural, we should just live moderately but without regret if we cause the extinction of other....