Being Human
While I usually despise big history books from the likes of Yuval Harari, I am also a sucker for anecdotes and interesting sociocultural connections. And oh boy, was I in store for some juicy anecdotes.…
Metropolis. Some thoughts.
London doesn't stop, despite the sometimes chaotic governance and the overall state of it's host country.…
Understanding the LLM RAG pipeline
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) operates on a simple yet powerful premise: before generating a response, the system first retrieves relevant information from a database or a corpus of documents.…
Coleman's bathtub
James Coleman's bathtub (or boat) is a useful illustrative framework for any theory about society, economics or finance that tries to connect the dots between the big picture, and the small picture. The bathtub aims to illustrate how a macro situation (X) creates constraints on actors, which changes their micro-level…
Truly being with someone
"Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us…
In the quest for better AI, survivorship bias hampers development
Tao points out that "[t]he data that are really precious are from when someone tries something, and it doesn’t quite work, but they know how to fix it."…
Involution (內捲)
"To roll inwards" or "involution" (內捲 nèi juǎn) became a popular phrase in China the last couple of years as a signifier of the intense zero-sum competition in Chinese society between individuals. Matches Western ideas of the rat race, burnout and diminishing returns, when putting more effort into something only…
What tourism tells us about future of European innovation
As the "fellesferie" (common vacation) is closing in Norway and other European countries, it is a good time to take a step back and look at the overall performance of the European innovation economy the last couple of years relative to our typical peers, namely the US and China.…