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In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather than a chaotic cacophony of nighttime noises, it was as if each animal was singing within a defined acoustic bandwidth, like living instruments in a larger sylvan ensemble. 

Unsure of whether this structured musicality was real or the invention of an exhausted mind, Krause analyzed his soundscape recordings on a spectrogram when he returned home. Sure enough, the insects occupied one frequency niche, the frogs another, and the mammals a completely separate one. Each group had claimed a unique part of the larger sonic spectrum, a fact that not

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If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book a trip to Coachella to sort your text messages.

Nonsense. Setting aside that Her (a still from the film is shown above) was about how technology manipulates us into a one-sided relationship, you’d have to be pudding-brained to believe that chatbots are the best way to use computers. The real opportunity is close, but it isn’t chatbots.

Instead, it’s computers built atop the visual interfaces we know, but which we can interact with more fluidly, through whatever combination of voice and touch is most natural. Crucially, this won’t just

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While AI is accelerating cloud adoption, organizations’ reasons for migrating their systems and applications to the cloud remain relatively consistent: a desire to lower capital expenditures, increase agility in a fast-paced business environment, and improve availability of business-critical resources.

Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report underscores organizations’ consistent desire to make the most of cloud: Asked about their cloud initiatives for the year, 71% of respondents reported that they were working to optimize their existing use of cloud—making this the top cloud initiative for the eighth consecutive year. Organizations are also still working to shift more of the business to cloud: The next-most-popular initiatives were migrating more workloads to cloud (cited by 58%) and progressing on a cloud-first strategy (48%).

But while moving to the cloud will always deliver significant benefits, the demands of business are fast evolving, requiring organizations from all industries

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Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually type the pronunciation of a character and then pick it out of a selection that pops up, autocomplete-style—it’s hard to think of anything more quotidian. The software that allows this exists beneath the awareness of pretty much everyone who uses it. It’s just there.

The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age
Thomas S. MullaneyMIT PRESS, 2024

What’s largely been forgotten—and what most people outside Asia never even knew in the first place—is that a large cast of eccentrics and linguists, engineers and polymaths, spent

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