August Sneaked Out Like A Corrupt Politician

No posts for the entire month of August. Classes have restarted in UP Diliman and we were just able to make a workable LL.M. program just as the semester was about to open. It was like latching on the wing on a jumbo jet just as it was taxiing to the runway.

Spent almost two weeks in Singapore, attending the ASEAN Law Academy. A lot of content packed into those days. There was no time to see the city - every day, it was up and down Orchard Road between the hotel where I stayed and the hotel where they held the seminars. I think it was worth it and would recommend it to my colleagues. Best takeaway though - a validation of the simulation-based approach. I’ve written a couple of training scenarios. Now I need to expand it into a framework that can be used regardless of subject matter - modularizing and gamifying the whole thing. This looks like a good place to start.

The Rundown July 29, 2019

• Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life - Judges already feel that as it is, Photoshop makes presentation of digital photos…problematic. How are we supposed to cope with AI-generated deep fakes?

• Another argument for the Rawls-ian veil. - chance, not smartness is why people are rich.

• Steve Rogers, PR disaster. Watching The Boys. Forget the Homelander. Captain America will not translate well into Twitter.

• 3D Hologram Helmet - “Because the helmet is portable, you can walk around the city ​​while projecting super futuristic images in front of you.“ (Original page in Japanese)

• Decoding the tech bros.

Back from Spain

Greetings from Manila, where I am back and still dealing with jet lag after a couple of weeks in Malaga and then Bilbao, attending conferences, eating tapas, and acculturating to beer and wine at 2 in the afternoon, all while trying  to keep my work streams coherent through a six-hour time difference.

UP was well represented in the 5th Scientific  Congress between Spanish and Philippine legal scholars. Faculty members and students presented. The Dean and Professor Balane made opening remarks.  I was there to document, and take note of arrangements because we will be hosting this thing in Manila next year.

Despite all the work, the trip was enjoyable. Interesting architecture and great food. I missed my rice, though. I like that the Basque country has an attitude - towards Spain, towards its place in history.

The Rundown - June 7, 2019

• Norweigians can’t get rid of a Russian spy whale . 

• Lessons learned from four decades of restructuring sovereign debt.

• Season 8 of Game of Thrones was so bad, HBO shareholders could (probably) sue.

• Xbox body wash. Wait. Is this to simulate or correct that hardcore gamer smell?

• The Tokyo mechanical keyboard meetup volume 6.

End of the Schoolyear (2019-2020)

It’s a wrap for school year 2019-2020. For my finals this year, I prototyped a legal matching service. It was a good exercise in thinking about the interaction of technology and the law. And it gave me a good excuse to geek out on Adobe XD.

Not a lot of writing done this year, but administrative tasks (computerizing systems for the College, launching the LLM program) are going well.

The Rundown - May 4, 2019

• Productivity porn - Stephen Wolfram’s personal productivity infrastructure.

• Get yourself a nemesis. I think beefing online is a waste of time. But I want to scout for an academic publishing rival.

• Some insight to what the DILG-Huawei CCTV network may be capable of - How China turned a city into a prison.

• US SEC’s Framework for “Investment Contract” Analysis of Digital Assets

• Umasked - What our passwords can tell about us.

The Rundown - April 1, 2019

• Status as a service:

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn't be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn't worth much if there's no skill and effort required to mine it. It's not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can't be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

• How a broken patent system helped scam investors.

• "The Tragedy of the Commons" is just a racist screed with zero empirical basis.

• The hottest chat app among teens is Google Docs.

• The rediscovered art of letter locking - security thru topology:

The Rundown - March 13, 2019

• Microsoft font gives away forgery in bankruptcy case - One more reason to not use Calibri.

• This Is Every Generically Cool Restaurant’s Playlist.

• All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization.

• Huawei is probably the only player who can manufacture and deploy 5G at scale - but can we trust it?

• Video shows the staggering scale and extent of wealth inequality: 

The Rundown - February 23, 2019

• Forget cryptographically-secure connections. All the cool kids use dead-drops.

• How pick-up artists morphed into the the alt-right.

• People are starting to get pissed at Facebook, finally:

• Artificial intelligence for sniffing out biased judges.

• Think of an island full of bunnies. That is Peacebunny Island.

Computer Archaeology

Man, 2019 just broke in and took over everything. New school year is open and I’m teaching fewer classes, but I am just slammed by side projects for the College. So here are just a few points:

• I have to rebuild the UP College of Law website into something more modern, and slot in content for the new LLM Program.

• Did I mention that UP will have an LLM Program? That is going to happen this year.

• Other computery-stuff in the College - the OLA Case Management System, modernizing the old DOS-based transcript system.

• We have a DOS-based system for the grades of some alumni. The database is still humming along, source code and documentation long gone. Staff learn to operate it based on oral history and incantations. It’s fine - but we are running out of hardware environments that can still run it.

• So even if we back it up, if we can’t run the execution environment to access it, that data is as good as gone forever. It was built with a proprietary system and the company that made the tools to build it is long gone. This is not computer programming. This is computer archaeology.

• I have built or revised a website for every employer I’ve had since leaving my web programming job. Why did I bother getting out of my programming job (where I built websites), go to law school, pass the bar, only to build more websites?

• Because this is what it takes to bring the practice, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. Today it’s just a website with pretty pictures. Then we put in a reference database. Then maybe some machine learning on all those texts.