It has been a challenging week and not one conducive to reflection or giving me time to think about what I want to write about here. But as this is an exercise in getting me to write regularly, as much as it is a space for me to think about tech and how it relates to our lives, particularly here in the Caribbean.
If you havenât been following or donât get to see news from the French West Indies, weâve been having a week of unrest and violent protests on the Island after a number of peaceful protests seem to stir up a general malaise in the population, which seems to have been hijacked by a small group of well-organised individuals that set about looting, pillaging and burning shops, cars and just about anything that could be burnt.
I donât know. I must have gotten up in a bad mood or something. This is to announce the colour of this issue đ. These are a few thoughts and are certainly not fully thought out, but I thought Iâd put them out there for discussion anyway. đ¤ˇââď¸
Thereâs something seriously wrong with Big Tech at the moment. From the proclamations of Mark Zuckerberg (the laughably pathetic Julius Caesar cosplayer) that he no longer should care what he says and does to something like half of the worldâs population through his privacy-ignoring âsocialâ media project to Eric Schmidtâs declaration that climate change is bad, but a parlour-game guess-the-next-word text generator will solve it, to Sam Altmanâs insistence that his particular brand of LLM is going to âsolve all physicsâ, not that he knows anything about physics of course, and who couldnât ignore Elon Muskâs Ketamine-fueled descent into fascism and continual abject stupidity.
Good morning. I hope youâre doing well. Iâm writing this at the end of a busy week that hasnât left me much time to think about a specific subject, so this will probably be both short and a little unstructured.
After a lull in activity, it seems the Atlantic is firing up for a busy end-of-season. To remind you, Hurricane season is from June to November, with a peak in early September and a spike in October.
If you live in the Caribbean or have interests in the region, youâll know that weâre now past the peak intensity of hurricane season on average. The statistical peak is the 10th of September, and weâre now two weeks past this (on the day this is sent as a newsletter), and the remarkable thing is that, so far, we havenât experienced much heavy activity with the lead-up to the peak being particularly quiet in the Atlantic.
Finally, after a few days of rain, rain, rain, weâre back to no weather alerts for a little respite. The ground is saturated, and any more rain just runs off or causes localised landslides, but so far, nothing too worrying.
Last week, I mentioned that I had been selected for a second time as an ARIN Fellow, although this time, I wonât be travelling; I am attending as a virtual Fellow.