You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great — Dr Daniel J. Levintin

High complexity is the hallmark of modern working culture. Our work has been complicated by the increasing amount of information and contexts. Techniques have been created as a remedy, but they all have a fatal flaw.

What’s Wrong With “Productivity Techniques”?

Pomodoro, for example, is nothing more than a time management technique. Task boards, GTD, and To-Do lists manage tasks but are too overwhelming to be…

TikTok is all the rage. Probably you know at least one person who is active on the platform, but can it be as innocuous as it seems? I believe TikTok is an exemplar of another distinct form of content creation in the future. This is not an article that analyzes how it became viral or how it beat its competitors, but a reminder of something that we have to sacrifice when we engage in this app.

Structure: This article consists of four sections, each of which is always prepended with a divider. First I will give a key introduction to…

The advent of AI is gradual, though for the masses it seems to occur in discontinuous leaps. In the 90s a human chess champion lost a game to Watson, a chess program from IBM, and perhaps the next thing you know is another match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol hitting the headline. The increasingly staggering complexity that modern AI systems exhibit should concern us, as everyone, willy-nilly, will be affected by this irrevocable trend.

Structures

This article aims to inform people about artificial intelligence in general. It requires little domain specific knowledge to understand.

The content is structured as follows. First…

Logicians and mathematicians inspect the state of matter, the train of thought on paper, for speech is too fleeting to grasp. The brain is only capable of remembering a measly list of items. We see that paper is an extension of the brain.

Both speech and information are fleeting. The same way writing freezes speech, data can freeze information. The underlying bits may not make sense to any sane human, but they are, at a higher level, a meaningful manifestation of their source. A Google search is an expression of someone’s needs or desire, a social media post carries the…

1 Your Password Can Be Cracked

The leak of celebrities’ photos gives us a shudder, as we should be in full charge of the data of our own. Tools available on shady forums and github alone could be used to back up your iPhone, or for attackers to get into your iCloud account. Following a suspicious IP address, the police captured someone who had hacked into more than 300 iCloud accounts, but till now no charge has been pressed. Using a hard to guess password is not going to prevent certain tools to crack this, but this could stall the attacker to the point that he…

As I was talking with some friend from high school, he chuckled or even scoffed at my recent whereabout. I told him I’d been up to Internet privacy. He really seemed to contemplate for a moment, before tentatively retorted, “Well, I’m not a criminal. I’m an open book, really, just nothing to hide”. I was dismayed. I thought at least someone with the same upbringing could get me, and could resonate with me. Boy, was I wrong.

Privacy is an innate right to human, as stated in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights back in 1948. Maybe they couldn’t foresee…