flâneur

Reflections on 2025 - Samuel Albanie

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Although I am ostensibly tying my shoelaces, I am primarily renegotiating my oxygen debt. My running partner (who is irritatingly aerobic) tilts his head in the direction of Gradient Canopy. The structure cuts a sci-fi silhouette against the night, a cathedral to linear algebra glowing softly in the Mountain View dark. It is a crisp, beautiful evening, marred only by the audible hydraulics of my digestive tract. I am beginning to regret the fifth bottle of Tahoe Artesian Sparkling Water I liberated from the MicroKitchen. We resume our run. It is late 2025. The zeitgeist has shifted. In the Permanent Queue for Dishoom (King’s Cross Chapter), “The Wall” is out (again), “Gigawatts” are in (again) and the “DeepSeek Moment” has been usurped by hushed discussions of “Claudiness”. The time has come to reflect on the last twelve months. And so, adhering strictly to the literary tradition of forcing a complex reality into a three-part listicle, I present my reflections: the Compute Theory of Ev

“If an alien intelligence is going to emerge from anywhere...” Although I am ostensibly tying my shoelaces, I am primarily renegotiating my oxygen debt. My running partner (who is irritatingly aerobic) tilts his head in the direction of Gradient Canopy. The structure cuts a sci-fi silhouette against the night, a cathedral to linear algebra glowing softly in the Mountain View dark. It is a crisp, beautiful evening, marred only by the audible hydraulics of my digestive tract. I am beginning to regret the fifth bottle of Tahoe Artesian Sparkling Water I liberated from the MicroKitchen. We…

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