Two years ago, a friend of mine asked: "How is it possible, you of all people, not to read science fiction anymore?". It was a reasonable question given that part of my library contains about two hundred science fiction books and I am the author of a science
People may be divided in two broad categories. Those who (more or less) managed to follow their dreams and those who had to work in more mundane activities to sustain living. In the first category, I place a lifelong friend of mine that owns a winery. For him every day
The first robot vacuum cleaner, Electrolux Trilobite, was released around 2001 and cost around $1.500. Now, one may get a basic model in the range $100–$300. My experience is that despite the relatively easy things that it requires to do, almost twenty five years later, a descent model
Following an article titled "Learning from Han Kang; Why it is so embarrassing to be human?", I looked up (as suggested) her speech at the 2024 Nobel Prize nomination. We prefer more and more to read short articles. We do not have time for long stories in our
* Can you please explain why you decided to learn ... Japanese?? * Well, several years ago, when I did the "Learning how to learn"course in Coursera, one of the instructors, Dr. Barbara Oakley took an interview from a guy named Benny Lewis. This guy wrote a book titled "
I sought out a famous and well-loved Japanese literary work that is highly regarded by people around the world. Out of the several options this was my first to read. Norwegian Wood (Norwegian Forest according to the original Japanese tittle - Νορβηγικό Δάσος) is a book that totally fulfilled my
Half an hour ago, I managed to install and locally run my first LLM (Large Language Model). Well, those who know me, already heard of LLMs: ChatGPT was the first one and the LLM almost everybody heard about. Now days we have a proliferation of LLMs: Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral,
Read today a really good article on Medium which reminded me of this phenomenon. Definition by Cory Doctorow who coined the term in November 2022: 1. Create a user centered innovative product that everybody loves. 2. Exploit their users to make things better for business customers so that they can
As you already know from the second post in this site, I will attend the Upper Bound Artificial Intelligence Conference in Edmonton, Canada. Since to get from Athens (Greece) to Montreal (there is no direct flight to Edmonton) is 4,720 miles, the idea is to have a tour in
![A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood [2019]](/content/images/size/w600/2025/04/A_Beautiful_Day_in_the_Neighborhood.jpg)
This film is based in a true story. True stories are not my favorite. What I usually seek is a tale that will act as a distraction from the chaos of the true world surrounding us. This story however is humane, sensitive and beautiful. If you want to see a
David Liu is a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research facility in Massachusetts. On 05/04/25 he received the $3m Breakthrough prize for life sciences. Liu was chosen for inventing two exceptionally precise gene editing tools, namely base editing and prime editing. Base
Seems that all new wizards make mistakes! On 06/04/25 I did a long due test: replied to a newsletter email I've sent. To my surprise, not only I did NOT get the reply I've sent, but the classic "undelivered email" was missing!