Here are some of the latest…

October 5, 2025 | Lo-Fi Music and the Art of Imperfection — When Technical Limitations Become Creative Liberation | The Analog Minds in a Digital World Series, Part II | I've been testing small speakers lately. Nothing fancy—just little desktop units that cost less than a decent dinner. As I cycled through different genres, something unexpected happened. Classical felt lifeless, missing all its dynamic range. Rock came across harsh and tinny. Jazz lost its warmth and depth. But lo-fi? Lo-fi sounded... perfect. Those deliberate imperfections—the vinyl crackle, the muffled highs, the compressed dynamics—suddenly made sense on equipment that couldn't reproduce perfection anyway. The aesthetic limitations of the music matched the technical limitations of the speakers. It was like discovering that some songs were accidentally designed for constraints I never knew existed. This moment sparked a bigger realization about how we navigate our hybrid analog-digital world: sometimes our most profound innovations emerge not from perfection, but from embracing limitations as features..
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September 8, 2025 | We Have All the Information, So Why Do We Know Less? |Introducing a New Series: Analog Minds in a Digital World: Reflections from Our Hybrid Analog-Digital Society | I was thinking about my old set of encyclopedias the other day. You know, those heavy volumes that sat on shelves like silent guardians of knowledge, waiting for someone curious enough to crack them open. When I needed to write a school report on, say, the Roman Empire, I'd pull out Volume R and start reading. But here's the thing: I never just read about Rome. I'd get distracted by Romania, stumble across something about Renaissance art, flip backward to find out more about the Reformation. By the time I found what I was originally looking for, I'd accidentally learned about three other civilizations, two art movements, and the invention of the printing press. The journey was messy, inefficient, and absolutely essential. And if I was in a library... well then just imagine the possibilities.
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August 31, 2025 | The First Smartphone Was a Transistor Radio — How a Tiny Device Rewired Youth Culture and Predicted Our Digital Future | Why the Transistor Radio Was Actually the First Smartphone (And What That Teaches Us About Digital Transformation) | I've been collecting vintage radios lately—just started, really—drawn to their analog souls in ways I'm still trying to understand. Each one I find reminds me of a small, battered transistor radio from my youth. It belonged to my father, and before that, probably my grandfather. The leather case was cracked, the antenna wobbled, and the dial drifted if you breathed on it wrong. But when I was sixteen, sprawled across my bedroom floor in that small town near Florence with homework scattered around me, this little machine was my portal to everything that mattered.
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August 18, 2025 | The Narrative Attack Paradox: When Cybersecurity Lost the Ability to Detect Its Own Deception and the Humanity We Risk When Truth Becomes Optional | Reflections from Black Hat USA 2025 on Deception, Disinformation, and the Marketing That Chose Fiction Over Facts | Sean Martin, CISSP just published his analysis of Black Hat USA 2025, documenting what he calls the cybersecurity vendor "echo chamber." Reviewing over 60 vendor announcements, Sean found identical phrases echoing repeatedly: "AI-powered," "integrated," "reduce analyst burden." The sameness forces buyers to sift through near-identical claims to find genuine differentiation. This reveals more than a marketing problem—it suggests that different technologies are being fed into the same promotional blender, possibly a generative AI one, producing standardized output regardless of what went in. When an entire industry converges on identical language to describe supposedly different technologies, meaningful technical discourse breaks down.
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August 9, 2025 | The Agentic AI Myth in Cybersecurity and the Humanity We Risk When We Stop Deciding for Ourselves Reflections from Black Hat USA 2025 on the Latest Tech Salvation Narrative | Walking the floors of Black Hat USA 2025 for what must be the 10th or 11th time as accredited media—honestly, I've stopped counting—I found myself witnessing a familiar theater. The same performance we've seen play out repeatedly in cybersecurity: the emergence of a new technological messiah promising to solve all our problems. This year's savior? Agentic AI.
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July 20, 2025 | The Hybrid Species — When Technology Becomes Human, and Humans Become Technology |We once built tools to serve us. Now we build them to complete us. If today’s machines can already mimic understanding — convincing us they comprehend more than they do — what happens when the line between biology and technology dissolves completely? When carbon and silicon, organic and artificial, don’t just co-exist, but merge? We like to think of evolution as something that happens slowly, hidden in the spiral of DNA, whispered across generations. But what if the next mutation doesn’t come from biology at all? What if it comes from what we build?
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June 29, 2025 | Robbie, From Fiction to Familiar — Robots, AI, and the Illusion of Consciousness | I recently revisited one of my oldest companions. Not a person, not a memory, but a story. Robbie, the first of Isaac Asimov’s famous robot tales. It’s strange how familiar words can feel different over time. Reading Asimov was a window into possibilities, but they remained possibilities. Today, the story feels different. I listened to it this time—the way I often experience books now—through headphones, narrated by a synthetic voice on a sleek device Asimov might have imagined, but certainly never held. And yet, it wasn’t the method of delivery that made the story resonate more deeply; it was the world we live in now.
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June 6, 2025 | What Hump? Thirty Years of Cybersecurity and the Fine Art of Pretending It’s Not a Human Problem | A Post-Infosecurity Europe Reflection on the Strange but Predictable Ways We’ve Spent Thirty Years Pretending Cybersecurity Isn’t About People. We’ve built incredible tools. We’ve formed global communities of defenders. We’ve turned “hacker” from rebel to professional job title — with a 401(k), branded hoodies, and a sponsorship deal. But we’ve also built an industry that — much like poor Igor — refuses to admit something’s wrong. The hump is right there. You can see it. Everyone can see it. And yet… we smile and say: “What hump?”
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May 22, 2025 | From Cassette Tapes and Phrasebooks to AI Real-Time Translations — Machines Can Now Speak for Us, But We’re Losing the Art of Understanding Each Other | There’s this thing I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid. No, it wasn’t flying cars. Or robot butlers (although I wouldn’t mind one to fold the laundry). It was this: having a real conversation with someone — anyone — in their own language, and actually understanding each other. And now… here we are. Google just rolled out live AI-powered translation in Google Meet, starting with Spanish. I watched the demo video, and for a moment, I felt like I was 16 again, staring at the future with wide eyes and messy hair. It worked. It was seamless. Flawless. Magical. And then — drumroll, please — it sucked! Like… really, existentially, beautifully sucked. Let me explain.
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