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Life in a Petri dish
On January 20, 2025, shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States a second time from the 2015 Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance. This is another high-level example of how we humans are incapable to act in the face of overwhelming…
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My body, my choice: birth, sex, drugs, death.
Content warning: this post mentions rape and suicide. Also note the atheist premise of the blog. Please leave any comments below or send them to input@ponderer.io. The first and maybe the only uncontested thing anyone can claim ownership of is their body. Absent the viable option to upload your consciousness to some form of a…
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On meaning (Part 2): the hedonistic altruist
We established in Part 1 that nothing really matters. Nothing has an absolute meaning such that somebody could tell you that something is more important than anything else. Any such reasoning will end in nothingness because all our existence does not have a discernible meaning – sorry. However, people do care about things and do…
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On meaning (Part 1): nothing really matters
On Valentine’s Day 1990, the little spacecraft Voyager I, which was exploring the outer rims of our Solar System, turned its camera around to take a picture of Earth as seen from afar. The picture shown above became known as “Pale Blue Dot” because it depicts Earth as what it is: a grain of dust…
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Understanding modern AI intuitively
Mysterious stuff When talking to people about machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI), I often have the impression that those are perceived as either something mythical or at least very abstract for my counterpart. Such feelings can be justified because ML&AI often are not clearly defined in the given context and, more importantly in…
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The survival problems of homo economicus
All humans today are homo sapiens, the wise man – I know, unbelievable. Archaeology tells us that there have been multiple human species in the last two million plus years. Our last cohabitating cousin was homo neanderthalensis – a couple of tens of thousands years back. This is not that long ago in archaeological terms.…
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Live local
I thought I would never say so, and actually feel somewhat bad about it, but I benefited personally from the 2016 Brexit referendum in two ways – materially and intellectually. Materially because house prices stopped their steep pre-referendum growth making buying and staying in the UK easier – ironically for a sworn European! The intellectual…
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The Venn diagram of life
We live in a competitive society. Young people are told about the importance of education and hard work, and how this will enable them to have the career, or even the life they want to have. Such advice is arguably quite vague and certainly does not capture all which is important. I grappled – and…
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You versus society: how to better talk about problems
Here is the recent case. It’s a global pandemic of a potentially deadly virus which can spread through air. Wearing a facemask covering your mouth and nose can suppress transmission protecting you, if you are not sick, or others, if you are. However, you find it uncomfortable breathing with this thing in your face, think…
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Hello World!
“Hello World!” is the title of the sample blog post I got when installing WordPress to the ponderer.io domain. The name of this template is chosen aptly as “Hello World!” also is the name of the program which you almost surely will learn to write when starting a programming language (C, C++, Python, R, etc.).…
Planned post, possible with different title in different order:
- Groups as a double-edged sword
- Semantic learning