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Flat Lines and Dark Forests
🤖 AI is smart—but not that smart. AI can mimic human intelligence in amazing ways, but it doesn’t truly understand the world. A striking example: an AI optimized a flight path using a flat map—completely ignoring the Earth’s curvature. The result? A flawed solution that highlights a key limitation: AI works within simplified models, not…
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A Wistful Dance on Côn Đảo
This is the journey to Côn Đảo Island, where tragic history and natural beauty intertwine. Upon arrival, the traveler is struck by the island’s lush landscapes and profound melancholy stemming from its history as a prison for political prisoners. The narrative delves into the horrors of the prison system, particularly the infamous ‘tiger cages,’ and…
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My Journey to the Majestic Mountain of the Black Lady
Vietnam presents a paradox of simplicity and grandeur, blending minimalistic living with lavish temples and monuments. At Bà Đen Mountain, a spiritual pilgrimage site, visitors experience breathtaking views and rich history stemming from myths and legends. The Black Lady Pagoda and the Cao Đài Great Divine Temple highlight the mountain’s significance, making it a precious…
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The Fondness of Past Travels
There is a fondness to coming back to a dearly beautiful place, on a lovely beach she basically had, now as back then, all to herself, to stepping again in a nice little tailor shop where she had bought summer dresses or checking the flea market to look for wonderfully embroidered silk slippers. Her heart…
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The French Quarter of Dalat: There is Vintage in Ruin
They say it’s disrepair that the beautiful colonial villas from the French Quarter in Dalat have fallen into, for lack of interest, investment or both, but I reckon it’s also despair. Maybe it’s disrepair as payback for decades of oppression and exploitation, the once-upon-a-time show of grandeur from the long gone oppressors. Could be it’s…
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Sleeping Among Dragon-spat Jade Islands
A place called the bay of the descending dragon, where fewer than 1.600 people live mostly on floating villages in shallow waters, plying tens of species of fish and other hundreds types of mollusks and cultivating marine plants and algae while also navigating among almost 2.000 islands and islets qualifies in my book. Legend has…
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French Delights on la Rive Gauche
Paris was to me that lazy July afternoon I spent in le Quartier Latin, under the unusually scorching sun that had set over the Rive Gauche of the French capital: the stroll I took from Notre Dame to Shakespeare and Company, sipping the iced cream coffee I happily bought in a traditional Vietnamese cafeteria, in…
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Greener than the greenest green in Cat Cat
Vietnam is full of green, even in towns and villages, on beaches and in hotel rooms and bathrooms, because tropical rains can fall at any given moment within the season and I suspect people don´t ever have to water any plants, not even the ones they seem to have planted or kept in pots around…
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My Best Friend
*** SPOILER alert: this is not the kind of BFF description where you’d read it’s the person that knows you best, understands you perfectly, and sometimes don´t even have to talk to in order to convey any message whatsoever, since they know exactly what you´re thinking. I am not saying such people are impossible, just…
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Stranded on Cù Lao Chàm
And then it started to pour – nothing that different to basically any day in the monsoon season on this realm. Only it never stopped until the next evening, and it came with thunderstorm and lightning, with the occasional power cut and with darkened skies. The day before, the clear skies, the crystal water, the…
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How Long Since Last Cried
It was just crying, and as I couldn´t stop or somehow foresee when the next wave would overtake me, and possess me, and I was thinking: how long since I last cried. I couldn´t remember when had been the last time I had cried. I couldn´t place the moment in the last couple of years.…
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On Time Travel
They say some senses are more prone to bringing you back to a specific past time, such as the sense of smell: a flagrance of a loved one, the smell of a bakery, a scent from a theatre, an odour from the mountains are very powerful example tools to sense time travel. How about when…
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Education Goes the Longest of Ways
When I say education, I mean we got so used to having our opinions and defending them, and listening to people who think alike, that we forgot to explain and show why we think that, how we’ve come to that position or state of mind. Furthermore, this line of thought would imply educating other people,…
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Come What May
During a year where we didn’t as much miss instant connections, I did miss physicality of almost instant travelling. This century has brought fast travel and having breakfast in Madrid and then lunch in Montréal to end up having dinner in Sidney, yet this last year forbade that and left us with the second best…
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This Question of Colours
Then I thought that logically speaking, racism – or any other -ism – is not defined by words as semantic categories (parts of speech), but by their use and the significance it is given to them. So, in order to get rid of this nonsensical headache, maybe we should try to not put the cart…
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Teaching English in Times of Pandemic
Teaching English online is possible, and can be done in even better than average conditions. But this sets a new paradigm, which may come to a serious debate, beyond teaching English. It remains to be seen whether education can be moved to the online sphere – partially or completely. And I believe this is much…
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