When YouTube creators scale to millions, information drifts from education into entertainment. The business model reveals what’s really happening.
Continue Reading “Selling Information Has Always Been a Strange Business”
My friend Mike and I rode the Engelberg-Trübsee gondola in February 2015. It was one of those overcast days where the fog sits in the valley like a blanket, and you can’t see more than a few hundred meters in front of the gondola. We got on at the base in Engelberg, rode up through
A friend of mine lent me a book a few months ago at Angel Falls, our usual coffee spot in Akron. It’s called Taekwondo: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Warrior by Doug Cook. He’s into martial arts, and I think he thought I’d appreciate the philosophical side of it. He was right, but maybe not
The first time I saw someone use a terminal to control a remote computer, I didn’t understand what I was watching. I was a student at the University of Akron. An IT support guy sat down, opened a window, and typed something. Then he was somewhere else. He was executing commands on a different machine,
The data on AI and suicide doesn’t support the panic — and the panic itself may be costing lives. Twelve documented AI-linked deaths against 49,000 annual suicides. The ratio matters.
A few weeks ago, I had a hankering for some sci-fi. Not Marvel sci-fi. Not blockbuster sci-fi. I wanted the weird stuff — cerebral, indie, atmospheric. The kind of movie that leaves you staring at the ceiling afterward. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I Googled it. What I got was a
How a conspiracy video became a case study in AI-assisted fact-checking — and why dismissing AI as a research tool might be the wrong move.
Continue Reading “I Don’t Trust AI Either — But It Just Out-Researched Me in 3 Minutes”
I was in Brussels for FOSDEM and discovered that Europeans have hardcore bathroom capitalism — tap-to-pay turnstiles to use the toilet. Meanwhile, in “capitalist” America, bathrooms are free. The labels don’t match reality.
Who We Are I was sitting at a bar the other night, just leaning into the hum of the room. The guy on the stool next to me was easy to talk to—the kind of stranger you feel like you’ve known for years after just ten minutes. We talked about the local football scores, the
Table of Contents Toggle Secular Incrementalism The Components of Human Existence Gaming the System On Suicide The Primitive Primitives Conclusion: The Recursive Mandate Secular Incrementalism Modern life often defaults to a “passive nihilism” – the quiet assumption that if there is no God and no absolute meaning handed down to us, we are free to
