Headworx

There seems to be this universally accepted opinion that entrepreneurship is something special. A mission, a crusade with sacrifices. And together with that goes the whole martyrology and glorification of the efforts, the risks, the commitments: The Hard Thing About Hard Things . As a person which can be considered an entrepreneur, I strongly disagree with all that. Entrepreneurship is a sport, a competition. Some win, some lose. And as with every sport you need to have predispositions for a certain discipline. And then you need to work hard. Just because you decided to compete, and if you don't work hard enough, there will be others working harder and outcompeting you. As every sport, it involves a certain lifestyle, generates a lot of sweat with the rewards of becoming a glorified celebrity, the financial gratification - and - important and motivating in many cases - the adrenaline while competing and the dopamine when achieving the results. So please don't mix this with mart

One thing we have learnt during the digital era is that digital information can easily become inaccessible of permanently lost. Of course the internet is redundant enough to keep going - information is copied in many places, but that still poses the risk of "it all" going down at some point. It seems we have already gone past the point of no return. By that I mean if all the digital information is lost (say due to a catastrophic event like a huge electromagnetic pulse (EMP), the entire civilization is endangered. But back to much personal and everyday practical things to worry about - making local static copies of "information services", or even analog copies - makes sense. One example are flight boarding passes. Typically they are present in an airline app, and yes, it is convenient (and no longer "cool") to have the pass in a phone. But things may go wrong, and guess what - the pass may just disappear from the airline app. This happened to me repeatedly

Most of us are familiar with the 6-character airline reservations numbers. Today it is almost impossible to travel without one. They uniquely identify a booked trip (which may include multiple tickets) and any related action requires that number. Check-in, itinerary change, cancelation...  To make sure the reservation number is used by an authorized person, airlines typically ask for a surname, before allowing any changes. But the surname is rarely a secret. So when someone shares the ticket information which includes the reservation number, basically anyone can access that reservation. Twitter is full of stories when a person innocently posted a flight ticket only to realize someone called the airline to cancel her flight. Hard to say tru or fake but possible nonetheless. So be careful. It seems now at least some airlines learned the lesson and have rolled out additional authentication steps, such as a temporary code. So unless you have your email account hijacked, this additional pro

There was a lot of privacy - protecting noise when Google was conducting their initial StreetView image scans. Then many countries banned the use of dash cam video recorders. These include many European countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Portugal. And now we have learned that each Tesla car, spiked with recording video cameras, transmits the video footage, which then has been shared openly. Ars Technica has a full article on that here:  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/tesla-workers-shared-images-from-car-cameras-including-scenes-of-intimacy/ . Now it really does not matter this is an opt-in feature: Tesla's customer privacy notice says. "In order for camera recordings for fleet learning to be shared with Tesla, your consent for Data Sharing is required and can be controlled through the vehicle's touchscreen at any time.  As the driver/owner opting in really means they opt in anyone who happens to be in the field of view of one of these cameras. So shoul

There are many emotions around electric vehicles (EVs), historically started and mostly fueled by Tesla in North America and now also in Europe the EU Commission's ban of new registrations of internal combustion engine (ICE) - based cars since 2035. What is troubling though is the fully "linear" projection of the legacy car ownership model. I strongly believe most people will not own personal cars in 2035 anymore. Especially people living in modern cities. Public transport, micro mobility (electric scooters) and app-based car sharing should take care of this. If it does not, it means we have failed as societies. Cars are generally very heavy for personal budgets, for the environment and for the quality of life in general. In cities they occupy vast amount of public spaces. Mostly sitting on streets or in parking lots. Personal cars do nothing for most of their lifetime. Yet they are a huge ballast for owners. You need to insure them, service, have a place to park, only to