My turf on the internet

You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.

— Morpheus, The Matrix

Posts

E-ballot for Toastmasters speech contests

I spent the last few months building and field-testing a digital ballot system for Toastmasters speech contests, and I’m ready to talk about it in public. The problem Paper judging doesn’t scale. A judge fills out a ranking, a ballot counter collects it — breaking the judge’s anonymity in the process — and the counting team retreats to a private room to tally by hand. At small events this is a minor inconvenience. At the joint Area contest I organized this year, expecting a maximum of 66 contestants spread across twelve back-to-back contests hosted in a single 10-hour venue window, manual tallying becomes the bottleneck of the event.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 3 min read | Toastmasters

Working for robots

I self-host some of my git repositories to keep sovereignty and independence from large Internet corporations. Public facing repositories are for everybody, and today that means for robots. Robots are the main consumers of my work. With the AI-hype, I wanted to have a look at what are those AI companies collecting from my work. It is worse than everything, it is idiotically everything. They can’t recognize, that they are parsing git repositories and use the appropriate way of downloading them.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 9 min read | Thoughts

What motivated the recent publishing spree?

I admire people that write blog posts. Taking the time to put something out there. I want to be like them and share too. This website receives occasional attention, when I really want to say something. Many times, I really want and still fail to do it. It piles on the backlog. This time I had a challenge: 8 posts within a month! About twice a week: challenging but feasible. But as reality would have it, even with some planning I still cram everything to the last moment. There something creative and motivating about pressure and deadlines.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
| 3 min read | Personal
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Talks

AI in Europe - regulated to irrelevance

Europe is regulating itself into irrelevance in the digital space. Lead by good intentions to protect consumers safety and privacy as well as promoting fair play between companies, it created a playground nobody wants to play in. Motivated by the frustrating burden of regulation I went to explore what alternatives we could enjoy, and how we as a society have regulated incoming technologies.

By — Dr. Óscar Nájera
— Mercure Hotel MOA Berlin | AI Regulation
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Projects

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