Posts

The erosion of democracy follows a predictable rhythm—one that echoes through literature and reverberates in our current moment. Today’s headlines blur into yesterday’s warnings, and the distance between fiction and reality shrinks with each news cycle. Free-ish Today: The Illusion of Intact Liberty We live in the “free-ish” moment—where rights exist on paper while practice tells a different story. Constitutional protections remain formally intact, yet their application becomes increasingly selective. Court decisions that once seemed foundational are suddenly “wrongly decided....

America isn’t retreating on the world stage by accident. It’s echoing a deeper crisis: an internal implosion of cultural confidence that has left the country squabbling over who it is and what it stands for. Even after the traumas of World War I, the U.S. regained an outward focus by World War II. Today, that pivot outward is hampered by partisan fatigue, social-media tribalism, and eroding unity. Ronald Reagan once described America as a “shining city on a hill,” built not by ethnicity or lineage but by shared ideals....

Has everything already been thought before? Of course. But that won’t stop us from pretending otherwise. Every generation rediscovers the same truths, slaps on a fresh coat of intellectual branding, and declares a revolution. Yet knowledge doesn’t progress in a straight line—it loops, it stalls, it decays, and, if we’re lucky, it resurfaces in richer form. This isn’t an argument for fatalism. It’s an argument for patience. Ideas don’t just stack up like bricks in a tower; they operate more like ecosystems—cycling through dormancy, renewal, and occasionally getting burned to the ground when they’ve grown too tangled....

Stupidity isn’t just annoying — it’s an existential threat. It spreads faster than a bad meme, wrecks civilizations, and somehow still gets invited to dinner. The worst part? It isn’t about IQ points. It’s about people willingly handing over their critical thinking card because thinking is hard, and following the crowd is easy. Look around. Political tribalism, influencers peddling nonsense, social media arguments that make kindergarten disputes look Socratic—none of this happens because people are dumb....

The pendulum swings, and middle management once again finds itself scapegoated in the grand flattening experiment. Elon Musk rails against “managers managing managers”; Mark Zuckerberg dismisses them as bureaucratic bloat; even Satya Nadella tips his hat to “leaner” teams. The message is straightforward: snip the middle, slash the overhead, and efficiency will set you free. It’s a catchy mantra, but history—being the patient teacher it is—reminds us that the middle doesn’t just vanish; it bounces back....

Quantum computing is where science and speculation swirl together like an overpriced latte: part substance, part froth. It’s a field that promises to transform industries, solve problems we can barely comprehend, and—as investors are hoping—make someone very, very rich. And at the heart of this swirling potential sits Rigetti Computing, a company emblematic of the quantum dream and all its contradictions. But here’s the rub: Rigetti may not be the one....

Inductive reasoning: the punching bag of armchair philosophers and data hawks alike. For the rest of us, it’s barely on the radar—just another abstraction that doesn’t seem to matter in the daily grind. But let’s be real: social policy, the rules we live by, depends on how we connect dots in messy, incomplete data. And inductive reasoning is the duct tape holding it all together. Before we dig deeper, here’s a quick primer: inductive reasoning is about drawing general conclusions from specific observations....

There’s something faintly dystopian about being rated as a person. Consumer rating systems—those five-star verdicts on your conduct as a passenger, diner, or tenant—promise to distill accountability into a single tidy metric. But peel back the veneer, and what emerges is less a utopia of transparency and more a grim carnival of mutual suspicion. The stars don’t align; they collide, flattening nuanced human interactions into a transactional scoreboard. The Illusion of Accountability Take ridesharing platforms as an example....

How far we’ve come We’ve come a long way in User Experience (UX) design. We’ve moved from just making things work to creating experiences that truly connect (with) people. But we’ve also been guilty of shortcuts and mis-applying heuristics like “reducing cognitive load” or “creating frictionless experiences” just because they sound cool. As digital experiences evolve (likely to become LESS noticably digital yet MORE impactful), we need to rethink our approaches and smoke out well meaning yet counter-productive UX design thinking patterns....

Portuguese Saudade: A profound, melancholic longing for someone or something absent, with the knowledge that they may never return. Fado: A music genre that expresses deep feelings of loss, longing, and melancholy, often seen as the musical embodiment of saudade. Desenrascanço: The ability to artfully disentangle oneself from a difficult situation, often through creativity and resourcefulness. Nguni Bantu Ubuntu: “I am because we are.” A philosophy that emphasizes community, connection, and mutual support, highlighting the shared bonds of humanity....