Writing · Écriture
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VThe cognitive city has no ground truthA PRISMA review synthesizes seventy studies on agentic AI for climate-resilient cities. It proposes a unified digital twin framework. But the framework has no ground truth — it assumes mapped parcels, documented ownership, and continuous sensing that do not exist where cities are actually growing fastest. I have spent a decade building the precondition these papers take as given.
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IVDigital sovereignty starts at the cadastreThe Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi declared that digital public infrastructure is as vital as electricity. But sovereignty over data centres and AI compute means little if ninety percent of rural land remains undocumented. The cadastral system — the registry that answers who owns what ground — is the first layer of digital sovereignty, because every other registry derives its...
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IIIPreserving a family across centuries, in JSONWhen ninety percent of rural land in Sub-Saharan Africa remains undocumented and oral traditions fracture with each generation that migrates, the question of how to preserve a family's memory becomes inseparable from the question of what medium can be trusted to endure. A flat JSON file and an interactive HTML page, hosted on infrastructure designed for permanence, is one answer....
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IIOn the patience required to build long-term technologyWhen Sidewalk Labs abandoned its Toronto waterfront project in 2020, it demonstrated what the General Purpose Technology literature has long argued: that platforms which reshape urban life require decades of institutional patience that venture-backed timelines cannot provide. The semiconductor took forty years to become infrastructure. Urban technology demands the same arc.
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ICe que les registres fonciers enseignent sur la confiance dans les logicielsLa Banque mondiale estime que 90 % des terres rurales en Afrique subsaharienne ne sont pas documentées. Construire un système cadastral dans ce contexte, c'est découvrir que le pipeline de validation spatiale — détection de collisions, calculs géodésiques, journalisation d'audit — importe moins que les accords institutionnels qu'il encode. Les problèmes techniques les plus difficiles sont des problèmes sociaux déguisés....