Midsummer 2024

Some years ago, I would have listed these as problems that could be solved by now: Seamless language translation Babel Fish by Douglas Adams. No matter what language one is writing, another should be able to seamlessly read and understand the written. We do have Google Translate, DeepL and LLMs, some of them even built-in in modern browsers, but...

One thing that surprised me when I moved to the Netherlands was the difference in how the seasons are observed. It turns out that there are at least two ways: astronomical and calendar-based. I was used to calendar seasons, where each season has three months, starting on the first and ending on the last day of the respective months. While some...

Quitting social media is like quitting smoking — easy, done it several times. E-mail correspondence I suggested in my previous update didn’t really work out. Not that I expected it to. So here are some links I found interesting recently: A story how on 1700s Spanish King ordered to an accurate map of the kingdom and that resulted in 500 different...

No updates here for a long time. And 2023 has ended, so why not to journal some results. Then I saw others' posts online and realized I would be writing roughly the same, and for some reason, it stopped me. Then, having found no rationale why not to, I thought it still was worth writing about the disenchantment which feels now not transient but...

I'm afraid of being that bear to the gardener, but let's talk about burnouts. Good things first. Burnout is not a stable condition. Once you remove yourself from the environment that caused it, you recover. I did. I even got curious about the work again. A thought of returning too soon and spoiling the time spent recovering was quite scary. At...