Headworx

I'm about to leave for a 4-week mostly off-grid holidays. This takes some preparation: planning places to visit, updating topographic maps, completing the gear. At the same time I've been preparing my online / electronic side of things for the prolonged absence. This basically includes two things: 1. Minimizing the stuff that will bloat my inboxes. Mostly to avoid the post-absence trauma of dealing with hundreds (if not thousands) of different kinds of notifications and messages. These days just about everything wants keep you "up to date", and this is an enormous trap. The mails and notifications are mostly useless, outdated or conflicting. And they contribute to 90% (or more) of messages you get. So very patiently I have been removing myself from any distribution lists and subscriptions. That has worked, as over the recent days I have been receiving significantly less traffic. Calming and liberating this feels. 2. Making sure the phone battery lasts as long as possi...

Another year behind us - time flies. Steps - wise I more or less matched the 2024 numbers, which I called "definitely below expectations". Now the expectations were trimmed and I am quite happy with the outcome. Yes, lowering expectations is the easiest path to happiness! The knee and ankle injuries took longer to heal than I expected and affected my walking distances at the beginning of the year. 2025 was also very travel - intensive (if not the most!). And especially considering the long distance nature of my business trips, I am quite happy with the amount of physical exercise I was able to put. This physical exercise is BTW the best way to fight jetlag and quickly accommodate to new time zones. So no real downs in 2025 and my total is now about a half of the Earth's circumference: 19667 kilometers (with the watch on). Some TZ changes were quite brutal. In late August I flew from Poland to California (9 hours shift) for the 3-day IES Annual Conference and then overnigh...

It took me several more days to complete the move to the new iPhone. Generally speaking this is a fail of the industry. But on the other hand I understand why certain things are difficult. But still - stepping up just two generations of hardware (from 15 to 17) withing a single ecosystem (Apple) should not be that complicated. Especially as they have not just the operating system but the entire apps ecosystem under control. And people are pushed to pay monthly recurring service fee (iCloud) on the promise to have things taken care of. The Revolut eSIM did not migrate. This was kind of expected (I have no idea if other eSIMs can be migrated, but anticipating that I waited with the migration until returning from my final 2025 international trip). On the other hand Apple itself pushes the developments to get rid of physical SIM cards entirely (iPads do not have SIM slots since 2024). So once Apple gets rid of the physical SIM slot in iPhones, I'm not sure what we are supposed to be d...

I'm on iPhone 17 now. Despite all my publicly heralded views about not replacing phones (and cars) too often, I pulled the trigger. Well, to my defense, I still drive the 2005 Subaru Forester. And the 15 is going into really good and caring hands. The key reason for the upgrade has been the telephoto lens , upgraded from 3x to 4x optical zoom and from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels. That let Apple introduce the 8x feature which is basically the 4x optical and 2x crop (equivalent to 12 megapixels, albeit with smaller pixels). On top of that ShiftCam promises a 240mm (equivalent) Super Zoom Tele add-on lens . I'm yet to see how it works as mine is somewhere in transit. More when it arrives. For the iPhone 15 I bought the Tele 58mm Mobile Lens from Moment , but it has been a lie. While it can be physically mounted on the iPhone's periscope telephoto lens, it does not work well. Only with the standard 1x lens, so not much long lens joy.  And I love taking photos with long lense...

I have recently had a chance to play with a new prototype Bluetooth Low Energy Audio device. Or - should I be more specific - a new application (firmware) for an existing audio device that uses Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. Think of it as any type of wireless earbuds or headphones or - increasingly popular - smart glasses with audio microphones and tiny speakers. The feature allowed an unlimited number of people who were in the radio range to talk to each other. Essentially a voice group chat. That does not sound too exciting (definitely less than a space AI data center), but really brings the Bluetooth audio experience to a completely new level. Thing of it as voice chat rooms. Virtual rooms that you can "enter" with your earbuds and then chat with people. In a similar way to a Zoom call, but locally, peer-to-peer, without any supporting infrastructure or Internet connectivity. Great for events but also great for variety of other activities such as hiking or white water raftin...

Email has clearly become cheaper and cheaper to push advertising messages. This has become apparent during the recent days - the US Thanksgiving followed by the Black Friday which now seems to last for two weeks. I had several brands I liked, that I still was subscribed to, but this time most of them went just too far. Some of them were sending me multiple (three or more) promotional emails per day. So I have radicalized myself cutting off somewhere between 80% and 90% of email subscriptions. One reason is (maybe I'm aging) - I really don't need more stuff. I definitely need more peace and less time spent on keeping my inbox tidy. Gmail has recently introduced a helpful feature - [Manage subscriptions]. Shows you the complete list and for 90% of subscriptions it offers a on-click [Unsubscribe]. So if anyone is stull using email, I highly recommend going through the list and cutting down stuff.

The energy crisis was the leading theme throughout the 2025 COSM conference. And people were really crying rivers about it. With the two most severe loses articulated: We will not be able to scale the AI infrastructure sufficiently enough China will overtake us Both are - I would say - purely "American" worries. First of all, nobody knows if AI progress is really limited by energy. Dwarkesh Patel has recently discussed this with Ilya Sutskever - and the headline is "We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research". Returns from scaling out the AI infrastructure have been diminishing. Ilya argues we need to do other things than just building more capacity. And I could not agree more. The existing LLMs have already swallowed all that was ever written. And probably more. And they still remain language models, increasingly more sophisticated statistical engines, not having a clue what they are talking about. I'm not saying that LLMs are totally usel...