The appearance of a new technology often changes how art is created and consumed but never replaced it.
The invention of camera made photography a new art form and shifted the portrait and landscape painters to focus more on styles than realism.
A similar trend is happening with language-based picture generation, which can shift from the traditional painting and rendering techniques towards ideas in language prompts.
2022-06-01
Art and tech
2022-05-17
Executive compensation
I takes a special kind of arrogance for the current Intel CEO to think that he deserves to earn more than 1700 times of a typical employee.
I voted yes to executive compensations for NVIDIA, AMD, and Microsoft because their CEOs are truly transformative, but would not do so for Intel until it can compete with TSMC and Samsung as a global foundry.
2022-03-20
Workout
Before the industrial revolution humans got enough physical exercises in their daily routines without needing extra workouts or diets, which are signs of unnatural design for the modern environment and activities.
Should our cities be centered around driveways for cars, or walking/biking lanes with public transports?
Why are we sitting in front of stationary devices instead of walking around manipulating objects for work?
2022-03-06
Autarky and innovation
A major tech company would like to own an entire meta-verse platform from hardware (servers, HMDs) to software (standards, libraries, applications), and plans to start reproducing the capabilities of existing components.
This sounds less innovative/fun than building on top of what is already out there (e.g., existing hardware and libraries), and innovation benefits more from collaboration than isolation, aside from the purpose of learning/experimentation (like this guy building chips in his parents’ garage).
SaaS and sanctions
A cloud-based software or data storage can be switched off at any moment to deny access to anyone, and is harder to pirate or circumvent than software sold as digital copies.
2021-10-28
2021-09-08
Claiming ignorance
A founder/CEO who claimed to have no knowledge of whether the technology of his/her company is actually working is either lying or grossly incompetent.
2021-08-25
VR poker
In this podcast, Peter Jackson, CEO of Flutter Entertainment, said that some people prefer to play poker in VR so that they can wear virtual avatars. I was a bit surprised to hear that as I thought online poker can be perfectly played on 2D displays, including the cards and the virtual avatars of the players.
2021-08-23
The past future
I found science fictions from the recent past (like Star Trek and Dune) very interesting in that they envisioned alternative futures that are mostly extrapolated from the science technology around their time (e.g., talking computers hosted in giant mainframes and inter-galactic messages sent through physical tubes), serving as a reminder that our future may turn out to be very different from what we can possibly imagine today.
