China's Social Credit System: Orwell's 1984 or the State of the Future?
You can hear terrifying things about China's social credit system. People start with 100 points, and if they drop below 35, life is practically over for them—they can't find a job, and their friends aren't supposed to talk to them… But is that really how it is? We set out in search of objective information in the rift between heavy-duty propaganda machines…
482“Success Online Belongs to Those Who Know Who They’re Talking To”
Digital marketing is a significant part of all our lives, whether we notice it and whether we want it or not. We venture deep into its thickets with the most fitting guest, Vassilena Valchanova, to talk about the many faces of success online, the ethics of marketing and whether it is a craft of creativity or simply a set of rules.
483Munch, The Scream, and a Short History of the Selfie
A century before the selfie became the pandemic before the pandemic, one of the most famous artists of our era, Edvard Munch, discovered photography and began producing a series of striking self-portraits. What could that possibly have to do with today's selfie mania? And how did our own face become our favorite image as mobile phones advanced?
484Robots in Power
“There’s no one to vote for”—we say it and hear it so often. Clearly the Western model of democracy, and our own feeble variety of it, is in crisis… Could the moment have come for artificial intelligence to change things? Is it time to start a revolution with the new Bulgarian Robot Workers’ Party?
485Humankind and the Cosmos, 50 Years On
These days we spend long hours staring at screens and rarely look up at the stars, literally and metaphorically. Assoc. Prof. Vasil Umlenski has worked as a professional astronomer for exactly half a century. We meet to talk about the stars, about a love for the sky, and about humanity's future in space, drawing on his long experience.
486Levski's Handwriting Comes Alive Online
Stefan Peev is a philologist who has also been working in typography for two decades. His impressive project, the first freely available digital font based on the handwriting of Vasil Levski, was presented recently. How was the font created? What will it be used for? And what makes the Apostle's letters so distinctive?
487Kris, Google and the Art of Car Maintenance
Kris Mladenov founded his Das Auto Academy to share what he knows with auto mechanics, and in doing so to help develop a sector that in Bulgaria has clearly fallen far behind. Little by little, his academy has “moved” online. Recently it won $1.5 million in backing from Google to become a regional leader in its field.
488Estorium: A Digital Treasury of Stories
A treasury of meaningful stories, told online. That is Estorium! A digital anthropological archive where people stay alive forever, captured in a small piece of their everyday lives. The idea is as inspiring as it is real.
489Snap, Post, Forget: How the Camera Phone Is Eating Our Memories
Today photography is more accessible than we ever imagined it could be. We snap constantly, whatever and wherever we happen to be, post it on social media and… forget. All of this has changed not only our attitude toward photography, but also the way we perceive the places we visit. The world around us. And in the process, it has robbed us of many precious details.
490Words as Inner Islands: The Stories of Viktoria Beshliyska
Viktoria Beshliyska started a travel blog… which suddenly turned into a blog about old Bulgarian words. The words pulled her further into their whirlpool, all the way to Clay, a novel that became a hit on the book market. Join us for a special, word-filled digital encounter…
491NFTs: Paying Millions for… Nothing
$69,346,250… for a file containing 5,000 images. More than $2 million to buy a tweet… Has the world gone mad, or are we witnessing a fundamentally new technology that lets us buy and sell unique assets?
492A Major Honor for Digital Stories
The Digital Stories project has won the grand prize in the Technology and Innovation category of the Web Report awards for good journalism. Organized by Dir.bg, the competition has become one of the leading journalism challenges in Bulgaria in recent years.
493Rumen the Cat: The Internet Egzists to Give Peepl Akses to More Katz
The time has come for Digital Stories to give the floor to influencers. Today's guest rarely gives interviews, and it is safe to say that without our digital present he would never have given a single one. That would be the reader's loss, because his thoughts are sincere, colorful and delivered in a rather peculiar way.
494“They Just Have to Live…”
Photographer Sandro Arabyan shows the first seconds of life of 70 newborns. “I have photographed the end before, but photographing the beginning was a deeply philosophical question for me. And the two actually turned out to be very close…,” the photographer says.
495Blockchain Keeps Us Connected…
Bitcoin has been in the headlines for quite a few years now… but do we know what the technology behind it actually is? What else could blockchain be good for? For example… helping to create a new form of democracy?
496Outrunning the Virus
The pandemic is just beginning. Machine learning specialist Youyang Gu comes across wildly contradictory mathematical forecasts of how the situation will unfold. He decides to build his own algorithm and model using neural networks, and quickly becomes a star, because his model produces far more accurate forecasts than those of scientific units with multibillion-dollar budgets.
497Stars Over Sofia: The Capital Is About to Get Its Planetarium
Two aircraft engineers who graduated in Moscow, an electrical engineer who studied in South Korea, and an operations director who is just 17. They are part of the team at the Photonika design bureau, and they promise to build Sofia's first planetarium by the end of the year, then bring similar facilities to many other Bulgarian towns. Fasten your seatbelts, we're taking off!
498GPT-3: A Cozy Chat with Artificial Intelligence
GPT-3. Behind this rather dry computer acronym hides a highly promising technology that takes quite a decisive step forward in the way we perceive artificial intelligence. It is the most powerful new-generation language model, which appeared less than a year ago and showed that neural networks are now capable of creating meaningful, emotional texts, sometimes sounding downright like art. And they can even write… computer code on their own!
499“Conflicts Arise Because We Don’t Bother to Listen to Each Other”
Hari Haralambiev teaches soft skills to people in IT. We sit down with him to talk about all the stereotypes surrounding programming and the people who do it. About hard and soft skills. About difficult conversations. About leadership and the road to success. About the struggles every team goes through. About the human side of an industry that has become so fashionable and so attractive in recent years: software.
500Web 3.0: What Will the Internet's New Era Bring Us?
We're living in the age of Web 3.0, they say… But isn't there just one web, one internet? In fact, the global network has already gone through two massive transformations that we never stopped to think about while we were caught in their whirlpools. And now, researchers say, a third is coming, bringing yet another sweeping change…
