technology | The Smart Set

I have a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence. I’m leaving the tech industry.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:37:55 +0000

After six months of searching-and-not-searching for management-level jobs in tech, I am done. I have done what society demanded of me. I have pursued what I thought needed to be pursued. I valiantly pushed on toward a goal that should have been mine but never was. I have given my time, my energy, and my […]

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The Lost Art of Showing Up

Thu, 11 May 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Humans are social animals, and our brains are wired accordingly. When a brain is socially isolated, it will crave social interaction in the same way that a hungry person’s brain will crave food. And yet, we live life in defiance of these facts. While our brains want to be fed social-connection broccoli, we feed them Skittles […]

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What Yeats Has To Do With It

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Normal People’s Sally Rooney dismissed him. His beloved tower has been damaged from flooding and it is disintegrating from a lack of repairs. Three more contemporary Irishmen have won the Nobel Prize since he claimed his. His late-in-life eugenicist remarks about the benefits of a “rich” Irish heritage mar opinions of his verse, tarnishing his image as a poet, and a senator. His most potent […]

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Last Bus to Sky Harbor

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 13:00:08 +0000

Our conversation started with the weather as most do. The bus driver commented on the rain. It was drizzling and gloomy and very un-Phoenix-like he assured me. I asked him about the aquifer level. It was at grim levels I had heard. He confirmed what I had heard but focused on the rain. It was […]

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To Mars and Beyond

Mon, 11 May 2020 11:30:16 +0000

As we bemoan the standing shelter-at-place orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, consider: What if you were constrained to your home for months? For years? And without the delivery of food, clothing, or other necessities? What would you need to stockpile to survive and how would you fit it all into the limited space available? […]

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Meet Your Monsters

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 11:33:52 +0000

Up until COVID-19 changed everything, I’d been pretty strict in regards to screen time for my sons. They earned video game time (up to two hours on weekends) for doing well in school, exercising, cleaning up dog poop, taking out the compost and other chores; we occasionally allowed them to watch sports and movies with […]

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On Automatic

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 12:30:44 +0000

Joe Toscano’s book Automating Humanity is illustrated with visions of two worlds: one a cold, corporate wasteland, where the ubiquitous iconography of companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple looms large over their slavish users; and the other a warm wonderland, where technology and nature have come together in miraculous ways, allowing for off-planet farming and living architecture. […]

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New Planets, Old Frontiers

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:30:33 +0000

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the […]

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Setting Stonehenge

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 12:30:21 +0000

“The medium is the message.” —Marshall McLuhan 1. Nimoy (5:50 a.m.) It’s a cloudy August morning just after sunrise, and my family and I are speeding about a hundred miles west of London in our rental car, bisecting the Salisbury Plain on the A303. Giant figures the color and heft of elephants appear on a treeless […]

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In Vitro Impossible

Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:30:00 +0000

Oron Catts’s most recent exhibition, Biomess, features a unique work of art. It’s a deconstructed incubator, inside of which live hybridoma cells — cells from distinct organisms that have been fused together by Catts and his longtime collaborator Ionat Zurr. The cells come from two different mice and, once fused, can only exist within the […]

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