News from the Woods

“Filip, so how do you actually use AI?”

I get this question so often that I started keeping a list. It sat in my notes for a long time, and the summer holidays were the perfect excuse to turn it into a special. Here it is.

The starting point

I’ve always been the kind of person who has to be doing X things at once. Sometimes it’s an advantage, sometimes it isn’t, but that would be a different special. My main job is growing Good Sailors, on top of that I run inno...

In May I wrote about the people we didn’t believe ten years ago - and who turned out to be right. Now those same people have published a plan for surviving the arrival of superintelligence. It involves China building its datacenters in Canada, America building hers in Mongolia, and humanity handing over the keys to the machines in 2040.

Two months ago I wrote here about the AI Futures Project team - the people who said strange things back in 2015, whom we laughed at, and who turned out to be terrifyingly right. I promised myself I’d keep...

Thirty concrete tricks for finding the places the crowds never reach - and for breaking the habit of collecting countries like stamps.

I have one ugly habit. When I arrive somewhere everyone is photographing, I get an irresistible urge to walk in exactly the opposite direction. It’s not a pose. It’s more that over the years I’ve figured out one simple thing - the best of any place almost never stands in a queue.

Travel has turned into a strange discipline over the past decade. We collect places like stamps. Ten cities in sev...

Business & Technology 👨‍💻

* Meta needs data centers to develop the AI it doesn’t have. So for now it’s building them as “tent cities”.

* There’s a jacket out there that makes water. One day we’ll go on a trek and won’t have to haul water with us!

* ChatGPT is losing its lead fairly fast. Will the upcoming “super-app” save it?

* Midjourney, known mainly for its AI images, is now trying to move into healthcare. It’s developing a full-body ultrasound scanner meant to create a 3D image of the body within a minute. Wi...

Thanks to AI, the world is moving faster than ever. Anyone who stops learning is going to have a harder and harder time. Even though I try to “level up” a few hours every week, it still feels like too little. Time to kill the streaming platforms and stop watching content that gives me nothing in return. I’ve cancelled all my subscriptions except Apple TV, where at least there seems to be some basic effort to produce content with actual value. So instead of an evening series on Netflix, I’m trying lectures, podcasts, interviews…

What do you thi...

This week I read two texts that sent me out for a walk afterwards. I do that fairly often anyway, but this time I went even though the sun was blazing outside and all my Greek neighbors were asleep, saving their energy for the evening. The first piece is from the AI Futures Project team, which works on predicting when humans will stop programming. The second is by journalist Dylan Matthews, who – eleven years on – is apologizing to people he once dismissed as cranks. I’ll summarize them here, somewhat mercilessly. Anyone already afraid of the future is probably better...

Hey everyone, this is Filip and welcome to another episode of News from the Forest! Episode 136, and it’s a packed one. We’ll talk about how AI is reshaping schools — from typewriters at Cornell to a school with zero teachers in Chicago. How Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue. We’ll discover a brand-new island near Antarctica and find out how the war in Ukraine is devastating nature on a massive scale. And at the end, you’ll try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. Let’s go.

What do you tell your kid when you know the tec...

The internet runs on European inventions. MySQL powers Facebook, Linux runs 96% of supercomputers, Bluetooth connects your headphones, and MP3 changed the music industry – all created in Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Yet when people hear “tech innovation,” most picture Silicon Valley, not Stockholm or Tallinn.

This view overlooks a remarkable reality: Europe has created over 600 unicorns (startups valued above one billion dollars) and is behind technologies that form the foundation of modern IT, while continuing to produce some of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

The narrative “Europe only regulates but doesn’t innovate” is misplaced. Yes, European ventu...

From Roblox’s CEO calling child predators an “opportunity” to Meta’s internal research showing Instagram harms teen girls, a pattern emerges across every major platform: companies know their products damage children and choose profits anyway. This report examines the evidence across Roblox, Meta, TikTok, and AI companies, revealing why self-regulation has failed and what parents need to understand about the forces shaping their children’s digital lives.

The timing is critical. In November 2025, Roblox CEO David Baszucki’s disastrous interview exposed the mindset driving Silicon Valley’s approach to child safety. But Baszucki isn’t an outlier—he’s rep...

Imagine this: You’re sitting in an office, studying numbers that nobody cares about, and gradually discovering that the entire world is going to hell. Everyone around you is making millions, celebrating, buying their third house. And you think the whole system is one massive fraud that’s about to collapse.

But you have to decide: Either stay quiet and go with the flow, or bet everything on being right. And then for two years, everyone tells you you’re an idiot. By the way, if you haven’t seen “The Big Short,” I recommend it.

This was M...

I ordered a robot to take care of us at home. Does it still sound like science fiction? It can collect laundry, do the washing, empty the dishwasher, tend the garden, fetch beer from the fridge... Pre-orders for its humanoid robot Neo have started – you can get one for $500 a month (with delivery in the US sometime next year), which is a very attractive price tag. Will it be a revolution? Or is it just hype?

So far, it looks like most of the robot’s activities are controlled remotely from a monitoring center. This will certainly be t...

I spent a long time thinking about how to share with you what a future wearable device might look like—a pendant, glasses, connected to your phone and other personal gadgets—powered by artificial intelligence and granted access to most of your personal information. Something similar to what OpenAI is working on right now. What would it be like to have a personal assistant with access to all the data you own—and more, collected through wearable electronics?

Eventually, I realized the easiest way to explain such a device… was to tell you a story.

Welcome...

Do you know what cigarette companies in the 1950s, Las Vegas casinos, and your favorite mobile game or social network have in common? They all use the same psychological tricks to keep you hooked. The only difference? You’d hardly sell cigarettes to kids today, while we happily put digital dopamine dealers into their pockets—with a smile.

Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, put it bluntly:

“We knew exactly what we were doing. We were exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

And as it turns out, he wasn’t alone.

How Digita...

AI continues to dramatically shake up the entire world. It's one of the few technologies that's developing directly for everyday users. Unlike the internet or apps, it didn't emerge from government, military, or corporate environments, but we're adopting it extremely quickly in our daily lives. Thanks to AI, other fields are starting to wake up too. AI experts around the world are being bought up like the best football players (Meta reportedly now offers some people signing bonuses of up to $100 million. Dollars, of course.) and if we manage to make progress with fusion reactors and quantum computers, that'll...

Business & Technology 👨‍💻

* They claimed to have a tool that could program brilliantly, but then it turned out that instead of smart AI, they employed hundreds of Indians who quickly fulfilled user requests.

* Popular robotics development platform Hugging Face introduced two of its new robots.

* AI could be able to predict diseases and health conditions just from your voice.

* IBM plans to have a substantially more usable quantum computer by 2029. Wow.

* Tech celebrities used to be Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. Today it's the CEO of Nvidia...

Travel 🧳

* Airs...

Jony Ive, one of the world's greatest design legends, the man behind the iPod, iPhone, iMac, and AirPods, "met with Sam Altman in a San Francisco café" (CEO of OpenAI) and they agreed to create the device of the future together. There's speculation about a smart pendant that will record what's happening around you, will always be with you, and will be your assistant. It actually makes a lot of sense - imagine having artificial intelligence with you 24/7 that hears everything happening around you, can remember it all, has access to your computer (which it can control for you), y...

When I read the latest news from the world of artificial intelligence, I am increasingly convinced that we are approaching the end of websites. People are no longer interested in the process of searching for information; they want the direct result that something like ChatGPT provides. Google has experienced a decline in the number of users using search on Apple platforms for the first time in history. Meanwhile, OpenAI is excited about potentially buying Chrome (in case Google is broken up), is piloting its own social network, and when I look around, I hardly see anyone searching for information...

It's all about artificial intelligence, data centers full of AI graphics chips, but what if all of this is already outdated and the future belongs to biological computers? Sounds like science fiction, right? But then you stumble upon an Australian startup developing something called Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI) - a computing platform where laboratory-grown living neurons connect with a silicon chip. Their latest commercial product, CL1, is described as "the first biological computer on the market."

Business & Technology 👨‍💻

* Startup IXI received investment from Amazon to develop "autofocus glasses." Anyone who struggles with both distance and near vis...

It's starting to get a bit cliché to begin every newsletter with artificial intelligence, but there's no way around it, I apologize. Let's skip what's new in the last 2 weeks, or we'd never get past the introduction. What's resonating most on the internet is the AI 2027 prediction, which "nicely," quite realistically and credibly depicts what Earth will look like in 2035. It will be an interesting planet where humans no longer live. The prediction comes partly from Daniel Kokotaljo, who left OpenAI last year because he stopped believing the organization cared about building safe and responsible artificial intelligence. So did h...

I love technology, innovation, and everything around it. When I was 13 (back in 1994), I started publishing my own magazine called Computer. I think that was the same year when the "big" Computer magazine from CPress started coming out. I bought an issue and found some inaccuracies in one of the articles. I took a piece of paper (yes, I didn't have email or internet yet) and wrote to the editorial office about their mistake. A few days later, I received a letter from the editor-in-chief saying I was right and asking if I wanted to write for them. I...

Two weeks ago, I sold all the stocks and crypto from my portfolio. It had quite a big response on Twitter. Why did I do it? Am I afraid of what Trump might still do? Yes. Am I afraid that Trump could eventually be the cause of bitcoin's end? A little. But the main reason is continuing to search for property abroad and my uncertainty about the future development of tech companies. I've always only invested in companies that I at least somewhat understood. In the coming years, several technologies will intersect that could fundamentally change our entire world...

Why the American flag in the title of the last Bytes & Backpacks of 2024? Because on January 9th, I'm flying to Silicon Valley, so if you sense the aroma of sequoias in the next few issues, that's perfectly fine.

Across the pond, we want to bring our idea of transforming disabilities into superpowers, our smart Welcomo kiosk (not just) for building access, and we'll explore opportunities in energy, where in Europe we manage field technicians and underground gas storage facilities.

Do you know anyone who could help us with any of these areas? I'd greatly appreciate...

Some of you may have noticed that one issue of Bytes & Backpacks did not arrive two weeks ago. I apologise for that, my family and I went to Greece for our fall vacation (Santorini at the end of the season and with no people was very nice!) and somehow things didn't work out. The effort was there, but the sun, views, tzatziki, octopus-

I have one big change with the new issue. I'll try to make the Bytes & Backpacks a little more concise and divide it into categories. Times are fast and even the lazy ones need...

Glasses, that's what this is all about. Smart glasses. There have been several failed attempts over the years - remember Microsoft Hololens or Google Glasses? But today, thanks to developments in technology, we're slowly getting to the point where it's all starting to work. I myself got a pair of smart glasses from Meta this summer (made by Rayban) and I have to say that it's probably the most usable device yet in the augmented reality field. They can even make dioptric ones, as the glasses themselves don't have any technology in them. All you need is a camera...

100 issues published and soon to be 4 years of spending all day every second weekend writing Bytes & Backpacks. What was the beginning? The desire to leave social media, but also the fear of losing touch with my "network".

In these hectic times, I appreciate every time I read the Bytes & Backpacks and every e-mail you send me makes me very happy.

OpenAI has had the largest investment round in its history - not just its own, it is the largest investment round ever. It raised an additional $6.5 billion, bringing the firm's value to $157 billion. The nonprofit...

It's been five years since we acquired a second home by the sea. Although I live in a beautiful place in NP Czech Switzerland in a nice village with a great community, it has always been my dream to occasionally escape to the sea and live there for a while. Not to be confused with vacationing. Simply having a second home.

After five years, I'll try to write down some wisdom and, most importantly, experiences. What surprised me, both pleasantly and unpleasantly.

Cars, we're still dealing with cars. Gasoline? Diesel? Electric? But the much more interesting change in the whole market is happening somewhere else. Waymo's self-driving taxis (owned by Google) have driven over 35 million miles, are operating in several major US cities, and already make over 100,000 trips a week. Completely self-driving, no one sits inside except the customer in the back seat. They have become a major tourist attraction in San Francisco, but more importantly, data shows that they are much safer to ride than humans. They have 84 % fewer serious accidents than human cars. Basically all serious accidents, another (human...

Yes, we’ve changed our name from “News from the woods” to “Bytes & Backpacks”. I Hope that you’ll like it! Also, we have a podcast version!

Disabled athletes get much less media attention, of course, but my admiration for them is perhaps even greater than for able-bodied men and women. Check out a selection of photos from the BBC.

Kids are back at school and parents will be dealing with "screen time" again. Half an hour a day?

An hour? Two? An endless quest to find balance. Banning kids from cell phones is a road to...