I wanted to know whether the number of Esperanto speakers is growing or shrinking and found a Linguistic StackExchange post by Alexander Galkin helpful. In a part of his answer, he wrote: Another metric is the number of people who participate in Universala Kongreso — the annual world conference of…

I never could use Remarkable’s built-in screen sharing, even when I had a Connect subscription. Then I found goMarkableStream by Olivier Wulveryck, which enables viewing a tablet’s screen on a browser tab. Using Zoom or Webex, I share my Google Chrome browser window that mirrors my remarkable’s screen. Launch All the…

TLDR: No! But authoritarians use AI to build controllable destructive or policing machines. The “intelligence” in Artificial Intelligence is misleading. Intelligence is inferring information, converting it to knowledge, and applying the knowledge to adaptive behaviors¹. Computer algorithms, with human supervision, can collect data and form knowledge (e.g., statistical learning). However…

Extensibility is a system/software design principle that lets users add new features to the software. Adding new features to existing software with plugins (a.k.a, extensions, add-ons, or apps, or whatever you name it!) increases applications’ usability. In this post, I list extensible applications that I use almost daily, which will…

Positivism Positivism claims that knowledge is achievable by observing and measuring natural phenomena. Humans and machines can extract truth (or knowledge) by collecting data with their sensors then analyzing it. Humans and machines discover the truth by logical interpretations and finding patterns in data. We can add knowledge to the world’s…

Facts are lawful if certain of them can be predicted from certain others. We need store only the fraction needed to predict the rest. This is exactly what science is: the process of replacing unordered masses of brute fact with tidy statements of orderly relations from which these facts can be inferred. In a knowledge-rich world, progress does not lie in the direction of reading and writing information faster or storing more of it. Progress lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world so that far less information needs to be read, written, or stored.

“All states, whether benevolent or repressive, control the distribution of valuable benefits and the imposition of onerous costs. The distribution of these benefits and costs is generally under the control of public officials who possess discretionary power. Private individuals and firms who want favorable treatment may be willing to pay to obtain it.” Rose-Ackerman, S. (1999). Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences, and Reform. Cambridge University Press.