Technology
10 posts
Quantum Computing Explained Without the Usual Hype
Few technologies attract as much breathless coverage, and as much genuine confusion, as quantum computing. It is variously described as the machine that will b…
The Data Centers Quietly Straining the World's Power Grids
Every time someone asks an AI a question, streams a film, or stores a photo in the cloud, the work happens somewhere physical: in a data center, a warehouse-si…
How On-Device AI Is Quietly Reinventing Your Gadgets in 2026
For the past few years, artificial intelligence has lived mostly in the cloud. You typed a question, it traveled to a distant data center, and an answer came b…
Bit Rot: The Quiet Catastrophe Threatening Everything We've Digitised
There is a comforting assumption underneath the whole project of digitisation: that once we convert something into bits, we have saved it for good. Paper burns…
The Oldest Dice Ever Found and What They Reveal About Human Civilization
The oldest objects archaeologists are willing to call dice were excavated in the 1970s from a Bronze Age burial at Shahr-i Sokhta, in what is now southeastern…
Vector Embeddings Are Not Meaning — What Semantic Search Actually Does to a Digital Library
For most of the field's history, a library catalog was honest about its limitations. You typed words, and it found records containing those words. When it fail…
The Cataloguer's Problem Is Not Going Away — It Is Going Deeper
There is a conversation happening in digital library circles that frequently gets framed as a question about tools: should we use large language models to auto…
The Persistent Identifier Problem Is Not Solved and COMET Is Trying to Explain Why
A persistent identifier is, at its most basic, a promise. It is a string of characters assigned to a digital object with the institutional commitment that the…
What Born-Digital Archives Are Losing Before Anyone Notices
There is a category of loss that archivists have spent two decades naming and still have not solved: the loss that accumulates not through flood, fire, or inst…
When Behaviour Replaces Identity in Online Gambling Systems
KYC was never meant to define the full architecture of player experience. It entered the system as a regulatory necessity — a checkpoint designed to confirm id…