Un cabinet de curiosités pour les esprits qui vagabondent.
[ Manifesto ]
A cabinet of curiosities for wandering minds.
Somewhere between the technology that fascinates us and the things that seem to have nothing to do with it — yet somehow have everything to do with it — this site will be a place to collect ideas, curiosities, and discoveries that deserve to exist somewhere.
From artificial intelligence to improbable observations of everyday life. From tools that reshape the way we think to stories that defy categorization.
A cabinet of curiosities, then. Organized around a single rule: if something is worth thinking about, it is worth talking about.
"Disorder, when it is insightful, is a form of higher order."
[ What's in the Cabinet ]
Tech observations — the things that don't fit in a changelog.
Improbable ideas — the things that don't fit anywhere else.
Specimens that resist classification — filed under curiosity.
Nothing polished. Everything considered.
[ Vol. I — Issue 01 : Four Specimens ]
Four specimens from the cabinet. Tech and otherwise. All filed under the same rule: worth thinking about, or not.
AI tools promise to give us back our time. But the time they return comes with a new obligation: to use it productively.
We traded the fatigue of doing for the fatigue of deciding what to do with the time we saved. The problem wasn't doing — it was the structure. AI removes the structure and keeps the pressure.
Somewhere between the calendar and the output, the self became a project again.
>> worth thinking about
Pigeons remember. Three years ago you dropped a crumb in the same spot and they haven't forgotten. The grudge is specific, the memory structural.
They navigate by magnetic fields and they remember your face. Two cognitive modes that should not coexist in something that eats crumbs off a sidewalk, and yet here we are.
The city is full of creatures doing complex cognition without narrative — and doing it fine, better maybe than our version, which keeps collapsing under the weight of the stories we tell about it.
>> worth thinking about
We solved the documentation problem by stopping writing it. The screenshot became the answer to everything: "here, this is how it works." The image captures a moment — the moment it was taken. Already out of date the instant the UI changes, which is daily.
The documentation crisis in software is not a documentation problem. It's a knowledge problem. We forgot what we were supposed to know.
Here's an unlikely thesis: the answer is not AI writing documentation. It's AI that makes documentation easier to write. Smaller units. Tighter constraints. A system that rewards readable prose more than clever abstraction. The code was always the documentation. We just made it hard to read.
>> worth thinking about
Night markets have no return policy. The seller doesn't know if you will ever come back. You don't know if they will be there tomorrow. The encounter is irreproducible and that is the entire point.
Commerce optimized the encounter out of existence. You pick a thing up and leave. There's no moment — you pre-decided in the search results. The transaction is frictionless and meaningless.
The night market has the opposite problem: the encounter is so particular, so accidental, that buying the thing is almost secondary to having been there. You don't remember what you bought. You remember who was there and that it won't happen again.
Product design could learn something. So could attention.
>> worth thinking about
The cabinet is permanently open. New specimens arrive irregularly — when something earns a place.
"The world is full of obvious things which nobody ever observes."
— Sherlock Holmes