Technology

I. The Object’s Triumph Grady Booch is a convenient name to pin on something that happened in the 1980s and 1990s: the triumph of the object. Before that, software was process — COBOL verbs, Fortran subroutines, C functions. You described what the system does, not what it is. Programs had flows, instructions, verbs. The machine executed a sequence; you followed the sequence. Then came the Unified Modeling Language, the design patterns, the notion that you could abstract reality into classes and hierarchies and responsibilities. The Gang of Four’s catalogue promised order: Observer, Strategy, Adapter. Each pattern was an object shape, a way of organizing code around nouns instead of verbs. Grady Booch’s Object-Oriented Analysis and Design became the grammar of a new way of thinking about computation: things that know things, things that do things, things that inherit from other things. …

The last pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude are among the strangest in modern literature. Melquíades—the ancient gypsy who has haunted the Buendía household for a century—turns out to have written the entire family history before it happened. Every birth, every obsession, every death, encoded in Sanskrit parchments locked in a room while the family lived out the story they did not know was already written. Aureliano Babilonia deciphers the manuscript in the novel’s final moments and reads the history of his own life as it is ending. The text and the event are simultaneous. …

A human brain holds, on average, one lifetime of knowledge, and then it dies. Every technique, every story, every map of the territory accumulated inside it — the name of the plant that heals, the angle of the spear throw, the face of the ancestor — goes with it. Evolution gave us language as a partial fix: knowledge that can be spoken can outlast the speaker, if someone else hears it and repeats it. Oral tradition is the first external memory system. It is also the most fragile: dependent on faithful transmission, distorted by each relay, bounded by the range of a voice and the attention of a listener. …

I. The parable In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published a six-sentence parable. He attributed it to a fictional traveler — Suárez Miranda — and buried it in El Hacedor, a collection his admirers would later call Dreamtigers. The parable describes an empire whose cartographers, unsatisfied with every previous map, built one at the only scale that could not lie: one province to one province, point for point. The map was complete. It was also useless. Subsequent generations, with more practical priorities, let it decay in the western deserts. …

In 1654, in a fragment now numbered 139 of the Pensées, Pascal wrote a sentence that has been quoted so often it has lost most of its weight, and it is worth taking down from the shelf and looking at it again: all of humanity’s misery comes from a single fact, namely, that we are unable to sit quietly, alone, in a room. Three hundred and seventy years later we have built the most extraordinary device in human history for the express purpose of ensuring no one ever has to. …

The public conversation about AI and work is stuck on the wrong question. “Will my job be replaced?” is the framing everyone reaches for, because it has a clean visual: a robot taking a specific seat. The headlines love it. Goldman: AI to replace 300 million jobs. McKinsey: half of all work activity automatable. The displacement frame promises an event — an announcement, a layoff, a press release — and the policy answers it suggests are familiar: retraining, universal basic income, regulation. …

Revised on 2026-04-28 to v1.1. See revision history below. Look at any AI-skeptic feed in 2026 and you’ll see the word slop doing heavy work. It names something real: low-entropy, mass-produced text without an author behind it, flooding feeds, search results, comment sections, product reviews. There’s now a small genre of essays explaining why this is bad for civilization. Some of them are excellent. Some of them are slop themselves. I want to ask a different question. Not whether AI slop is bad — clearly some of it is — but why we’re so confident we can recognize it. Because if you squint at a lot of professional life, much of what we produce on a normal Tuesday already qualifies. Legal boilerplate. Corporate memo-speak. Quarterly reports that survive only because nobody reads them. Status updates that say nothing. Standardized medical notes whose function is mostly forensic. …

Communication is often seen as a straightforward exchange between an emitter and a receptor—a sender and a receiver. But what if the real issue lies not with the participants but within the system of beliefs that frames the entire exchange? The Power of Belief Over Message At its core, communication depends on a shared understanding of words, concepts, and intentions. However, what often determines the success or failure of a message isn’t its clarity or truth, but the beliefs of the audience. People tend to interpret information in ways that align with their preexisting worldview, often disregarding contradictory evidence. This cognitive bias ensures that even the most carefully crafted messages can be ignored, misinterpreted, or rejected outright. …

As technology evolves, so too does the art that reflects humanity’s ever-changing relationship with the universe. The convergence of art and science stands at the crossroads of inspiration and innovation, reshaping our cultural narratives and the very fabric of creative expression. This blog delves into the transformative possibilities emerging from these intersections, considering their potential to redefine both creativity and human experience. The Next Evolution of Art The flow of artistic expression, influenced by hyper-consumption, hyper-addiction, and hyper-automation, offers a glimpse into the future. Digital tools and AI have become integral to the artist’s palette, challenging conventional norms and enabling hybrid forms of creativity. Virtual and augmented realities are expanding artistic horizons, making immersive and participatory art more accessible to audiences. …

In the realm of computing, two paradigms have competed for dominance: binary computers and analog computers. While binary systems have emerged as the prevailing model, their exponential growth in costs, especially in error correction and handling large-scale matrix computations, raises intriguing questions about their future. This blog delves into the historical evolution of these technologies, exploring why binary systems triumphed and at what cost. Historical Development The Analog Era Analog computers date back to ancient times with devices like the Antikythera mechanism, advancing significantly in the early 20th century. They excelled in solving differential equations and simulating physical systems, with applications in military, engineering, and scientific research. …