Journal

I'm a big fan of Dieter Rams' principles of design. I'm a big fan of distilling practice into principles in general. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People stresses that good principles last—they don't change often, and stand the test of a changing world around them. While I would probably interpret things a bit differently, I agree with the thrust...

I've often wondered this. I live in a tourist town, and see an increasing number of EVs on the roads here, but still probably 1 in 20, at best. I knew sales were up (I thought they were around 20%, but Hannah's figures say 15%), but wasn't sure how that translated into "% of cars on road." This is a fabulous "back of the napkin"–resolution tool to work that out.

My partner Juliette is launching the latest cohort of her amazing Know Thyself! course. I've done this course and the insights that emerged were life-changing...

This smells of the current US administration playing "silly buggers" (as we say in Australia), in retaliation to the ruckus Anthropic kicked up by renouncing the contract with the Dept of War. I like that Anthropic has said that no-one, incl. US companies and individuals, can have it then...

I just added this to my "installed plugins" list... as a replacement to the (now very much outdated) Waves "Vocal Rider".

I saw this via their pre-launch ad campaign on Instagram. I love the concept, and while it's pricey, it strikes me as actually innovative, and thus warrants the premium.

The way this tech is presented risks feeling like it's jumping on the "AI-as-buzzword" train. But... it is a very interesting bit of tech, by the looks of it. Tailored enzymes to break down synthetic fibres, to be recycled into fresh plastics.

I understand the impetus of the backlash towards cloud-hosted LLMs, but some of the impacts are being overblown in the media, using selective framing and stats that make them appear a lot worse than the reality. This free calculator draws upon a relatively conservative and independent data source to put your per-prompt usage into perspective: across a number of models. (Note that it does not include emissions/water usage during training.)

China approved the world's first commercial brain-computer interface, beating Neuralink to market. The technology restores movement for paralysed patients, but the ethical frontier is wide open.

For a long time I joked that I'd be first in line for the Google Implant, when it was released. I'm not convinced now, but this sort of technology obviously holds a lot of potential for supporting less able-bodied people to interact with others, and the physical world. This is a fascinating development, amidst the ethical quandary it inevitably opens up...