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....
September 30th, 2024: Why I hate passkeys — Passkeys are an alternative way to sign into stuff like your email or bank account. They are long strings of numbers generated on your phone or computer, and they are much more secure than passwords. Due to their technical nature, they can protect you against....
September 30th, 2024: Four things I wished high school had taught me — Looking back at my high school years, there are things I wish I had been taught back then because they definitely would have helped me as a human being. That’s not to say that I went to a bad high school in Canada. On the contrary, I had some really great....
September 30th, 2024: How to increase your productivity, guaranteed! — Do you want to read books faster and absorb more information? Do you long to produce more, work longer with less fatigue, and be a beast of a machine? Some say the secret is taking a cold shower in the morning, while others swear by to-do lists, pomodoros, or....
September 30th, 2024: Two secrets to a great compliment — A compliment is a great way to bring joy to another person’s life, but there are many ways to give a compliment, which has important implications in your life. For example, have you ever handed in a report at work just to have your boss say, “good....
September 30th, 2024: Why environmental action is so hard — Over the past decades, you may have heard of endless environmental movements: recycling, solar power, land and sea protection treaties, becoming more sustainable, and other such buzzwords. Yet, we see that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere just keeps....
September 30th, 2024: Is science a ritual? — We’ve got problems. Serious, global problems. In order to solve them, we have to develop new techniques outside the mainstream ones of using specialized knowledge and the mechanisms of capitalism. One of these techniques must be a shift to a more holistic....
September 28th, 2024: Career advice for the young — In modern times, getting a job seems equivalent to living. Most people can no longer live off the land, especially since most of it is expensive private property. Instead, most people focus on their career. However, if there is one piece of advice I’d give....
September 28th, 2024: We should not push students to like math — Mathematics education is the practice of trying to make mathematics more appealing for those that have trouble with mathematics. And the reason people have trouble with math could be because they had a bad experience, or because it’s presented poorly, or....
September 28th, 2024: Why I will never use Apple “Intelligence” — Apple Intelligence is a new feature that will be coming to MacOS in Sequoia version 15.1. It is a series of generative AI tools for writing and image generation. The writing tools in particular will have a rewriting feature that will rewrite your text in....
September 28th, 2024: Art is dead, and technology killed it — What does it mean to say that art is dead? It means simply that the human aspect of art has been stripped away so that the display and sharing of art no longer has anything to do with transmitting human experience. This observation is nothing new, and art is....
September 28th, 2024: The worst problem in higher education today — There is no shortage of people complaining about higher education today. However, if you look closely, hardly any of those complaints are truly about the fundamental nature of education. We hear things like “the paper-publishing process could be better”,....
November 12th, 2024: Online accounts I have deleted — Over the years, I have found that more and more platforms out there aren’t consistent with my way of doing things. This post keeps track of them, for the purposes of inspiring others to delete as many online accounts as possible. Github In August 2024,....
August 28th, 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....
August 27th, 2024: Counting bijective, injective, and surjective functions — Here I derive formulas for the number of bijective, injective, and surjective functions from one finite set to another. Actually, computing the number of bijective and injective functions is easy. But computing the number of surjective functions is much....
August 27th, 2024: Technology is becoming a cohesive organism — It would be a serious and grave error to attribute all our current woes to capitalism. It is an all-too-common mistake made by writers, political activists, and many others. Indeed, if capitalism were the only problem, it might be possible to bring our....
August 27th, 2024: How AI will destroy us — In fiction, we typically see AI destroying humanity through physical acts as in the movie, The Terminator. Unfortunately, science fiction such as this has blinded us to the truth: AI is getting ready to destroy us, but in a far more subtle way. Namely, it....
August 27th, 2024: Is math running out of problems? — In a previous article, I claimed that math was running out of problems. But I gave very little attention to this statement, and some people were in disbelief over it, so I decided I should clarify what I meant. First, when I say math, I mean research....
March 15th, 2025: Why I don’t like sharing my photos online — The internet is an amazing invention in that it allows the near-instantaneous transmission of data such as photos. If I take a photo of a White-faced Whistling Duck in Brazil, someone in Japan can see it in a matter of seconds after I upload it. In theory....
August 22nd, 2024: Reading List — I’ve collected a list of some books I especially recommend. Boyle, Mark. The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology. Simon and Schuster, 2019. I like this book a lot. It describes the efforts of one man to live without most modern technology....