The Usefulness of a Thing

I haven't written here for a while, not for the lack of will or giving at least a genuine if feeble effort. I've become stuck posting anything by the trap of it "being worth sharing". Which is exactly the opposite of the reason for this blog!

This is space exists solely to allow my personal shower thoughts and half baked brain worms to be written on the napkin of the virtual world, strung up on twine in the cafe window for any meandering passerby to glimpse, muse over, critique or laugh at as they trip through the derelict off ramps & dirt tracks of the information super highway. Thank you for any time you spend within the enclave of this blog, just know that by making it this far, yours is the interest and support I cherish!

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Vacuous Social Data Sharing

It's the not so secret, dirty secret of our modern lives. We live in a golden age of free services that make our lives interconnected on levels that our ancestors couldn't even fathom. Instantaneous realtime interactive updates and vision of someone on the other side of the planet. For free!! We really do live the utopian lifestyle, or do we? We are being monetized. The really insidious thing is, we like it. We crave it. Likes, follows, subscribers, retweets, pins, shares, the list goes on. We're subsumed in a culture of instant gratification and constant engagement. These "free services" have hijacked the way we think and live, all while making copious amounts of money from the personal data we all but throw at them. Whilst there is an innate understanding in all of us about the nature of how insidious and conniving these services are. We still gobble up every morsel of social media's bright lights and flashy features, mostly without a single thought of wh...

How to Think

Moving an arm and thinking about moving an arm are two vastly different things. Even thinking about thinking about moving an arm is a natural thing to do even if reading it is very odd. Now the hard part, how to you design thinking ? The deliberate process of simulating scenarios to either logical or illogical ends would seem like a great fit for computers that can do millions of calculations a second. The slow an deliberate winding down a thought path seems to be the missing link to truely intelligent machines. We are very good at making machines. Even more so machines that actually produce things and have purpose. Since the earliest primitive forms of man, our tools are defined by their use. Or more aptly by the end result they achieve. So what is the end result of smart machines? To drive our cars, build our structures, do the heavy lifting and manage our lives? To do all that the ability to compute and apply action is needed but not actual thought. Most business tools and modern ap...

My Shout - App Idea

With everyone working from home a lot more these days, especially in the face of a global pandemic with self isolation in effect in most place still, it becomes tricky to make good on that old "buy you a coffee" promise to your friends &/or coworkers. My Shout is the idea for a service to send things to people by alias only. The service would leverage home delivery services such as Menu Log, Favour, etc. but aimed at sending things to other people rather than ordering for yourself, though that would be an obvious function of the service. The address and location details of the person are only known to the service and hidden from others, it would be a breeze to then be able to gift things to your friends, coworkers, or even favourite creator, etc. that is halfway across the country or even the world without knowing their address. Once a "gift" has been sent the recipient gets a notification and can schedule when to get the gift, or even exchange to an equal valu...

Inkie Beard

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