Headworx

Last week I spent almost entirely in Arizona - attending the one of a kind COSM technology conference . It has been the only non-lighting related event for me in 2025. Very valuable, as it has a mixture of politics, philosophy, economy, and - of course - technology. Once Discovery Institute posts the conference videos, I will link and comment on some of them. I the meantime a number of assorted observations. I flew to Los Angeles on Lufthansa Airbus A380. There is a small sections of economy seats on the upper deck. The best seats ever. This plane is so unbelievably quiet. Like a Zeppelin blimp, only much faster. It is a pity they are being withdrawn. The in-flight internet sucked. Completely. I responded to the email with the purchase receipt and they acknowledged the problem, issuing a refund. Probably the simplest refund procedure ever. Then after some business meetings in LA, on the next day a short United flight from LAX to PHX. This one - on the other hand - was equipped with Sta...

I have very mixed feelings about the importance of good user experience (UX) in technology products. Very often ironizing on UX gurus' posts who think UX is super fundamental. Scott Jenson for example have cried rivers over control panels in microwave ovens. True, some of them are quite baroque, and myself - when it comes to microwave ovens - I do prefer just two mechanical dials: power and time. Same for air fryers: temperature and time. But really it does not take a super high IQ to use a microwave oven. A bit higher one is probably necessary to set up an alarm clock in a hotel: 99% of time they show wrong time and then it is unclear which time is the current time and which is the alarm time and if the alarm is on or off. Long gone are the times of travel clocks with the alarm hand and the pop-up "armed" button : nobody needed instructions to operate them. Nowadays even the iOS 26 alarm clock is misleading - if you have an alarm entry that is off and you click it and th...

Apple AirTags are really a great idea. They build on the popularity of iPhones. Periodically broadcasting tiny Bluetooth Low Energy beacons they last for a year or more on a coin cell. And any iPhone acts as a message relaying / geotagging repeater station. Physically being tiny buttons, they can be attached to almost anything - car keys, luggage, any item than can potentially be lost. What is even more exciting (but still not as ubiquitous as it could be), a Find My beacon is a very simple piece of software running on any Bluetooth chip. It can run together with other functions. One great example is the Insta360 GO 3S action camera. The one I actually lost on my way down from Mt Aorai . It was raining on the way down and the clay path quickly became quite slippery. I slid down on my butt a good couple of times (it has some quite steep sections). Upon reaching the shelter at 1400m I realized the zipper in my backpack's pocket was open and the contents (including the GO3S) was miss...

There is a very insightful podcast episode - the interview of Andrej Karpathy by Dwarkesh Patel . At 00:53:39 they mention for about 1 second the 2021 paper by Erik Hoel:  The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization . It is all just a hypothesis, but I must say I've fallen in love with this hypothesis. Not much proof exists yet, but Hoel is really on to something. Dreams are all undiscovered yet. Impossible to get into. Brain activity scans of course can do nothing, as it is like trying to figure out the logic of the software by scanning activity of the microprocessor transistors. Impossible. But surprisingly the recent advancements in AI may get us to better understand how brain works as we try to rebuild an intelligent system in silicon deep neural networks (DNNs). Erik puts forward the overfitted brain hypothesis (OBH): Notably, one of the most ubiquitous challenges DNNs face is a trade-off between generalization and memorization, wherein as they learn to ...