Hannes Eder Öhrström

Quantum Primitives : An Ontology in 12 ½ Chapters

Mapping out the primitives of a field is a useful way to understand its landscape. In the case of quantum technology, this approach proves especially challenging—but equally rewarding.

Elementary : From Hadron Bootstrapping to the Implicate Order

If there's nothing fundamental about 'elementary' particles, if nature never bottoms out, then what remains to hold on to?

Weaponized Randomness : Monte Carlo from the Manhattan Project to The Three-Body Problem

They call it “weaponized randomness.” I had no idea what it really was until I stumbled across it in three consecutive books.

How Not To (and Just Possibly How To) Study Japanese

Coming at a language as an outsider isn’t always a disadvantage. What first feels like an insurmountable barrier can become a vantage point.

Microsoft’s Majorana Move Isn’t About Qubits. It's Bigger Than That.

Quantum. Nobody said it was supposed to be straightforward.

Tradecraft : the Stuff They Don't Teach You at School

Spies, coders, journalists—they all rely on intuition, improvisation, and experience. It’s tradecraft.

Teach, Don’t Tell : Lessons in Mastery, From Tennis to Welding

What’s true on the court is true in the workshop: effective teaching relies on clarity, precision, and the ability to transcend words.

Sweet Nothing : The Gospel According to Frank Bascombe

Richard Ford wraps up the Bascombe saga and leaves the reader with a sense of miracle. 

Saying is Believing : Authenticity, ‘Hypnosen,’ and the Startup Myth

Hypnosen is great fun, but it paints a picture of the startup circus I don’t fully agree with. Not all entrepreneurs are full of shit, and pitching isn’t just a spectator sport.

Nothing is Real : Amanda Gefter is Thinking About Life, the Universe and Everything

Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is a coming of age story—not only for an exceptional science writer, but for the entire cosmos itself.

Seeing the Light : Fei-fei Li and the Dawn of AI

Fei-fei Li has had a front-row seat to the cutting-edge development of AI over the past couple of decades. Her biography is captivating.

Commonplacing

Carmen Berzatto does it. Sherlock Holmes did it too. How about you, do you commonplace?

Building the Good City

My dad's PhD dissertation chronicle's the life long struggle of an entrepreneur hell bent on making a dent in the universe. It's a memoir masquerading as a thesis. It's very inspriring and I'm happy I finally got around to reading it.

A Conversation With Sara García Alonso

Sara García Alonso is a research scientist at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, and a class of ’22 reserve in the European Astronaut Corps.

A Conversation With Guido Tonelli

Guido Tonelli is an author and an experimental physicist. His team at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Stockholm Swinging

A city is swinging when the people living in it feel that they're making it what it is.

Love, Math & Witchcraft: How Roasting Psychoanalysis Came Back to Bite Richard Feynman

The further we zoom in on Mother Nature, the clearer it becomes that, at its most fundamental level, science resembles ‘witch-doctoring’ more than anything else.

Non-Commutative Reading Order

It's fascinating how books aren't mere repositories of information. That the order in which you encounter them actually dictates how your understanding evolves.

Quantum Bootcamp

Sweden has been lagging badly behind when it comes to quantum tech. Most of the funding has been provided by private players and there's been no national strategy. That's starting to change now.

How Not To (and Just Possibly How To) Build Peace in the Middle East

They say there's a special type of peacefulness preceding storms. That felt true of the atmosphere in Israel and Palestine during the spring and summer of 2000.

Killer Application: The Surprising Correlation Between Engineering Education and Terrorism

It's not that terrorists are desperate for tech-talent, it's that engineering education breeds the type of mindset that's conducive to extremism.

A Personal Journey Towards Extended Intelligence, or: Getting Intimate With Chet

I've come to allow "Chet" entry to my most private quarters.

Talking Shop

Talking shop is fine, but integrating the wider world into your shop-talk is even better.

Quarks, Gluons & Jabberwocks : On Aptonyms and Nonce Words

It's a very human tendency to conflate representations with reality. We are, after all, symbol-processing machines.

Sad Swede, Happy Swede

Swedish novelists feel bad about life. Meanwhile the rest of the population seem to be doing quite alright.

The Curse of Completism

Completism comes in many shapes and forms. It doesn’t necessarily have to manifest in a physical collection, but can also translate into a more generalised ambition to ‘take it all the way’.

Imperfectly Understanding Quantum Discord

When forced to simplify, some experts explain discord as a measurement of a certain system’s “quantumness”

Most of All, You Need a Junkyard

It would be smart if we could incentivise up-and-coming players to compete on ideas and execution, rather than on who's got the bigger machine.

Show Me Your Canon And I'll Tell You Who You Are

What we're left with in a post-canonical world, is lists. Lists reflect their creator's point of view in ways that make for great conversation starters.

Hello Tomorrow 2024 : the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

There's a lot to like about Hello Tomorrow. What attracts me the most has to do with its tonality.

Trusted Execution Environment

The other day I got a whiff of what it must have been like to have been part of the golden age of ARPA and NASA.

Don't Innovate, Imitate!

We're all copycats. Trying too hard to be unique will most likely just cause stagnation.

When the Robot Overlords Come to Take Your Job, This is What It'll Sound Like

When doomers predict that AI will steal our jobs, we picture remote and futuristic scenarios. The real threat is mundane and it's happening now, right before our noses.

Abortive Action : the Power of Walking Away

Steve Jobs famously said that "real artists ship", but Ulf Lundell was perhaps even more profound in stating that "a cancelled concert is also a concert."

Finally Proof: the Limits to AI Are Not What We Thought They Were

In a funny kind of way, a study like this seems to produce knowledge which extends our ignorance.

The Case Against "Deep Work"

The notion of deep work provides a great excuse for not getting shit done.

The Enemy Within

The nazis couldn't resist the urge to separate themselves from non-arian elements, just as the post-war US establishment couldn't resist the temptation to go witch-hunting communists. What causes this type of psycho-political auto immune disorder?

The 'A' in AI

Artificial or Augmented, which team do you root for?

Ignorant, Incompetent, Functionally Stupid, or Just Plain Dumb?

Being ignorant means you're in the dark. Ignorance can be charming; it's what makes children and dogs cute.

A Beautiful Temptation

What constitutes the canonical English language novel? A deceptively simple idea turns into a cognitive quagmire.

Getting Over Steve

The gospel of Jesus Christ was an exclusively male affair, but there are at least three female takes on Steve.

Things I Didn’t Know About Quantum Entanglement

I've gained a valuable insight into how humanity's collective understanding of this enigmatic field has evolved over time. I feel that goes a long way.

Things I Didn't Know About Clinical Innovation

Over the last few months, I've often felt like a street-fighting urchin who's put in a karate class;  instinctively rebellious against any meddling with what's already battle-tested. But again and again, I've had to accept that going back to first principles and carefully build up a new  conceptual framework, has been worth the effort.

The World's Not Enough : Steve Jobs Held Hostage By Own Exquisite Taste

It’s sad to think that we need disaster to strike in our lives, in order to sober up and see what’s worth a damn. Sad, but at the same time also somehow hopeful.

Minding the Gap : the Case Against Anthropology in Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs aren't looking to understand the world such as it 'really is'. They just need to get a good enough grasp of a given context.

This Could Change Everything : Superconductivity Heating Up

If we could figure out how to achieve superconductivity at higher temperatures, it would be such a huge deal that the impact is hard to even imagine. This might just be on the brink of happening now…

Sundar Pichai in da House : Google’s CEO on AI, the Digital Divide and the Future of Robotics

His soft spoken reflectiveness feels about as far away from your typical tech-bro as is possible to imagine.

Just Because You Wrote It Doesn’t Mean You Own It

The value Microsoft captures by selling access to Copilot, is made on the back of thousands of unpaid volunteer coder’s contributions to open source projects.

The Startup Experience

You don't need a great idea to get started, cash is a nice-to-have, and team is *everything*.

Smarter isn’t Better : the Surprising Truth About High Output Teams

What's the factor that allows some teams to achieve the seemingly impossible? It turns out you can’t just put the best people from different fields in a room and wait for synergy to happen.

Love What You Launch

Just because it's minimal doesn't mean it's easy.

Death of the Salesman

Being effective at sales has very little to do with how sales people are supposed to behave.

Follow Your Fans

A company will forever bear the DNA of its first avid customers.

Beyond What They Want

How to build products that doesn’t just give people what they think they want.

Imagine the Unthinkable

An insight to me might be gobbledygook to you. That’s because its value comes from how I arrived at it.

What I Think About When I Think About Design

There are basically two modes of problem solving that are in wide spread use. We need a complementary attack angle.

Product Spells D-E-V-I-C-E + S-E-R-V-I-C-E

Segmentation is marketing's most discussed and least understood concept.

Where Is This Road Taking Us?

Queues are the Viet Cong of software engineering; the asymmetrical threat you can’t predict.

Sometimes Slowing Down Will Make You Go Faster

There’s a reason why there’s such a cult around speed in startup culture. Whoever reaches the market first has a huge advantage, so you better get there before your competitors do.

Managing Mozart

Great leadership requires constant fluid shifting between different modes of operation.

Defining Done

Endings are tricky business; how do you know when you’re done?

Steady on Target

It’s all very well to come up with an award winning strategy, the tough bit is to stick to it when the goings get rough.

Use the Force

Knowing your opponent’s most ardent desire is the key to beating them at their own game.

Ghost in the Machine : A Brief History of AI in Therapy

Machine based therapy would be the ultimate proof of generalised artificial intelligence. I'd like to think it's not too much to expect.

Creative Doesn't Mean Nice

Culture can be a company's most valuable asset, but creative a good one is hard.

Brevity is Good For Business

Animals can teach us something about cutting to the chase.

Girly Stuff

The system has always worked hard to hide the fact that women are just as brilliantly ingenious innovators as men are.

Life in the Machine

Close to the Machine : Technophilia and its discontents by Ellen Ullman chronicles the dawn of the Internet from the point of view of a freelance programmer. I loved it intensely.

At the Crossroads of Intellectual Property and Software Engineering

The ins- and outs of open hardware; the power and perils of building your products on top of FOSS-stacks; the dos and don’ts with design patenting, and so much more.

The Subtle Art of Giving a F*ck

A good boss have to offer very direct feedback. For that not to be brutal, you must invest in the relationship beyond what's often thought of as professional.

On Focus

Our brains are built to toggle back and forth between sharp and fuzzy. Proper learning can only happen in the interplay between daydreaming and attention

Making Sense of the World

Two of the best science books I've come across in a good while: Explaining Humans by Camilla Pang, and Skönheten i Kaos by Julia Ravanis. Reading them back to back created an impression of perfect symmetry.

Ise Ise Baby

The approach is one of the most promising candidates among "non-Von Neumann" computer architectures.

Distributed Cognition

When you forget the details of some complicated concept and have to consult an external resource, that's distributed cognition.

What Doing Looks Like

I’d like to be a bit like Mrs. Whiting myself. She knows where she wants to go and she can turn that crystal clear vision into manageable chunks of action.

Preparing For the Next War

Reading Carlota Perez feels like looking at one of those images doctors use to diagnose colour blindness; where before there was just a jumble of dots, patterns emerge.

The Best of Both Worlds : How to Build a Company While Sticking to Open Source

The professor’s privilege and means that researchers can do what they want with whatever they create. Which if you’re in software usually just means you publish your code on GitHub and move on to the next research project.

The Trend Towards Open Core

2018 was the watershed year for the open core model, where you create value through hosted services and closed source add-ons.

The Patron Driven Value Proposition

Great ideas are often met with fierce resistance and then suddenly become the new norm seemingly over-night.

The Power of Persistence

I recently passed my 666th consecutive day of studying Japanese. It made me think of Satan.

Know Your Sh*t

I was once taught a powerful know-what-you’re-doing lesson.

Excellent Engineering Won’t Keep You From Solving the Wrong Problem

Teams like this can follow the tenants of XP and agile to the letter, and still build the wrong product. Teams like this need tools on a whole different level.

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t : Adversarial Patching Brings Serious Trust Issues to Machine Learning

A brief seven years after Gibson’s far fetched futurism, science fiction has become a reality. Does that mean we’re screwed?

The Better Deep Learning Gets, the More Vulnerable It Is to Adversarial Attacks

These are not your ordinary run of the mill cyber security threats. Adversarial attacks don’t rely on exploiting bugs.

Disruption Disrupted : How Big Tech Keeps Innovative Startups at Bay

Everyone who read Clayton Christensen *knows* that startups  will eat incumbents for breakfast. That’s why they call it disruption!

The Sim-To-Real Gap

While watching babies and kittens learn by doing is cute, you don’t want a soon-to-be autonomous car cruising your neighborhood to pick up traffic rules.

Why I Won't Use The Best Software, Even When It's Free

Productivity is hard. The more you realise what the optimal setup would look like, the further you get from starting to implement it.

The Cost of Optimism

I recently read two novels about gay men in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Their reluctance to take the test reminds me of my own feelings with regards to global warming.

Something Big is About to Happen, and Apple Won't Like It One Bit

Apple's renowned "user friendliness" comes at a price, or at least that's what Apple likes us to believe.

Why We Keep Referencing The Past To Feel Good About the Future, or: A Brief History of Skeuomorphism

Why did the disciples of Bauhaus hate Parisian metro stations? And is VR really virtual?

Mode Confusion

Human factors engineering taught us to minimise the risk for mode confusion. That’s highly pertinent when designing interaction with social robots.

Dear Apple, Here Are Three Things I’d Like You to Fix With Contacts

Contact represents a glaring blind spot both in terms of functionality and user experience. That’s ironic since Apple's marketing revolves around connecting people.

First Principle Politics

No amount of innovation will save the world from climate change, unless politicians across the ideological spectrum also do their part.

Introducing Straddle, a Framework For Validating Startup Ideas

A good framework paves a way for the mind, making it easier to grasp a reality which will always remain chaotic in its essence.

The Funny Thing With Smart

When the thermometer was invented, nobody really understood what temperature was. The same is now true of intelligence; we can measure it, but remains a mystery.

Redundancy Reconsidered

We somehow appreciate the inherent comedy in how engineers systematically over-provision, create fallbacks, fail-safes and redundancies at every possible corner.

Interesting Spells I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-E-D

The latest HBO show feels as random as life itself. It really shouldn’t work, and yet something keeps it all together.

The Inconvenient Truth About the State of Swedish Cyber Security

The nation is under constant attack and we’re ill prepared to fight back.

An Occupational Hazard

The Dunning-Kruger effect should be extended.

Two Types of Failure

The documentary General Magic is about "the most important startup that you’ve probably never heard of", but more than that it's a story of failure and loss.

The Dirty Little Secret About Cyber Security : Not Too Complicated, Just Hard Work

When the real truth starts seeping in, it feels like one of those detective stories where you realise in hindsight that the clues were there in plain view for anyone who cared to really look.

Zen and the Art of System Dynamics

When a baby is born, it’s not aware of itself as a separate entity. All there is in the beginning, is quality.

Chemistry vs. Credentials

It's only when two people share values and buy into the same mission, that they can fully trust each other.

The New New Normal

Entering the parastronaut chapter,  the space-space has just gotten even more inspirational!

The Future of Design Education is Soft and Squishy

A sponge maximises surface area to build capacity for absorption. We should try to be more sponge-like.

Missing Piece of the Fusion Puzzle : Novatron and the Return of Open Field Line Confinement

It's not trivial to make fusion work, but a real breakthrough is now in the making, and it’s happening at KTH.

Good Grief, Bad Grief : How Tech is Threatening to Disrupt Mourning

What a prospect to think that one day we won’t be able to tell the difference between a zoom call and talking to the dead.

Engineering Isn’t What it Used to Be

The toolbox of modern engineering contains a motley mix of approaches.

Hi, Lo, Fast & Slow : Deeptech and a Brief History of Prefixes

Whoever picks up the bill for it, deeptech is a class of technologies with high potential impact, that require our patience to reach the market.

Not Deployed Here

In startup parlance, one could say that America is failing to capture enough of the value it creates.

Things I Didn't Know About KTH

Student revolts and stylistic standoffs with the bourgeoisie; who would have thought that the old lady had such a colourful past!

Two Types of Failure, part II : Process Over Product

If all you care about is to perfect your process, a great product will eventually follow.

Things I Didn't Know About the Space Industry

Call it NewSpace or call it what you want. However we label it, it's exciting!

Ignite, Launch, Dock : a Hitchhikers Guide to the Space Industry

Space as a vertical is as a bit of a dark horse. In racing parlance, that's a term for a horse that is unknown to gamblers and thus difficult to establish betting odds for.

Aspects of Fashion That Never Crossed My Mind

Representational aesthetics is all about what stories we're trying to tell about ourselves.

Atomic Swing : A Brief History of the Shifting Swedish Nuclear Policy

Public discourse is swinging back into favouring nuclear power, but this time there's a visionary mismatch between politicians and scientists.

Making Belief : A Brief History of World Expos

World expos might have played out their roles today, but historically they've had three important functions to fill.

The Science of Science

There's an emerging scientific discipline dedicated to the study of science itself.

What We Need Libraries For

I like to think of future libraries as places where we go to be inspired and surprised.

What A Quarter Century Worth of Winners Says About the Booker Prize

Trying to get even the most ephemeral grasp of anything as complex as English language literature, might  seem like a fools errand.

The Battle of the Elms and the End of Swedish Technocracy

The word ‘politics’ has no real meaning in a technocracy. All that counts is skilful execution of ideas, which in and of themselves were fundamentally self-evident.