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All posts by Roman
The AI Revolution is Here – Right At My Doorstep
Moments before I finished typing up my experience of having an artificial intelligence (AI) generate a hundred portraits of me, an e-mail arrived in my inbox: I was allowed early access to a text editor with an integrated AI for writing. I played around with it and soon found, with amazement, that the software was…
An AI Created 112 Portraits of Me – It’s Quite Uncanny
One day last week, I got up early, started brewing some coffee and sat down at my desk to write. And then proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes uploading 20 photos of me from different angles so an Artificial Intelligence (AI) could generate 112 portraits of me. The morning didn’t go as planned, and…
How Hundreds of Strangers Helped Me Write My Bachelor Thesis
I wish I had had the guts to do it. Earlier this year I handed in my Bachelor thesis and got it back with the top grade. What a success for a procrastinator like me! Alas, in my acknowledgements I left out some of the most important contributors to my success: My virtual coworkers at…
Feeling inadequate? Think about how long it took us to invent the wheeled suitcase
Human progress is amazing. We’ve come from living in cages to building space rockets and a global communication network that allows two people on opposite ends of the planet to have a real time, visual conversation thanks to supercomputers that fit into our pockets. Many innovations were inevitable. If, for example, whoever invented the wheel…
I declare Netflix Bankruptcy
There used to be a time where a good TV show was a cultural happening. Whenever it was on, people would gather around the apparatus, eyes glued to the screen. A good series stood out because the medium was dominated by mediocre programmes, so it was obvious what could not be missed. Those days are…
First Brainers vs. Second Brainers – or: how important is memory?
I frequent a corner of the internet where people are occupied with figuring out the best ways to organize their personal knowledge. This includes finding the perfect software to take notes, strategies for making information more useful and also ways to leverage your own memory. But, when it comes to memory, there is some disagreement…
The summer I rediscovered an almost forgotten love
I spent two weeks in the south of Switzerland this summer, the first half of which was in a beautiful rustic house in the midst of mountains, without cell phone reception or WiFi. We would sit outside and play chess, pet the dogs or read. One day we got an apricot soda, took a sip…
Flashcards for your soul
I like to time travel. As I’ve written before, I send letters to my future self. But I get messages from the past too. Every few days an email lands in my inbox: Two years agao, you wrote… My online journaling app Penzu automatically sends me entries from exactly one, two, three or four years…
The real story behind the Y2K bug
Where were you at the beginning of the year 2000? Along with the excitement about entering a new millenium, there came some anxiety about our if computers could handle it – or if there would be system failures with potentially catastrophic consequences. This goes back to the early days of computing. To save precious memory,…