This interview was one of the best overviews and deep dives on the current state of AI / machine learning I’ve heard yet. Daniel was at Apple in the early work on machine learning in iOS, and Nat Friedman was CEO of GitHub during their development of the excellent Copilot product.
Nat on the previously-predicted tendency toward centralization in AI:
The centralization/decentralization thing is fascinating because I also bought the narrative that AI was going to be this rare case where this technology breakthrough was not going to diffuse through the industry and would be locked...
David Carboni makes a great point in this piece: successful powerhouse businesses, paragons of scaling up (your Netflixes, Googles, Ubers, et al), could never build the disruptive, fast-moving products that made them successful from their positions today:
Admired and respected as towering giants of our digital world, our hero companies emanate an almost mythical quality. The scale, power and inspiration they command are the stuff of legend. Glib statements about “business” distort their stories into gaudy two-dimensional caricatures whilst organisations seeking Digital Transformation aspire to emulate what they see in this theatre. Paradoxically our...
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a “fire sale.” This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps along the way in both company identity and fundraising, and some of the shenanigans that can happen as stakeholders start to head for the exits.
Not knowing much about Descartes’ actual business, either the original vision of the product or its actual delivery over the years, I don’t have...
New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.
Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of...
Identity management on the internet has been broken for years. We all have 800 distinct logins to different services, registered to different emails with different passwords. Plus your personal data exists in a morass of data silos, each housing a different slice of your personal information, each under a different ToS, subject to differing privacy regulations, and ultimately not owned by you. You sign up for a user account on a service in order for it to identify you uniquely, providing functionality tailored to you. Service providers getting custody of your personal data is a side-effect that’s become an accepted...
Byrne Hobart wrote this piece in the inaugural edition of a16z’s new publication, Future. On bubbles and their downstream effects:
Bubbles can be directly beneficial, or at least lead to positive spillover effects: The telecom bubble in the ’90s created cheap fiber, and when the world was ready for YouTube, that fiber made it more viable. Even the housing bubble had some upside: It created more housing inventory, and since the new houses were quite standardized, that made...
I just got a new Mac Mini with the M1 Apple silicon.
The experience so far is stunning performance compared to my previous 16” MacBook Pro. I was using an i9 with 16GB RAM, and this Mini blows it out of the water on responsiveness (and every other category).
A little reading on user experiences with the M1 had me interested in upgrading to any machine with the latest SoC. One of my main drivers was the noise and heat generated by the MBP, which is just in constant turbo mode with...
Morgan Mahlock wrote recently about the promise of Stripe Press, Stripe’s book publishing outfit:
Within the legacy publishing industry, Stripe’s young publishing press is refreshing - it is Sutherland’s electric cover art on a dusty, tired bookshelf. An Authoritative Look at Book Publishing Startups in the United States by Thad McIlroy states, “Book publishing has never been a technology-adept industry; indeed it is historically technology-averse. This is a challenge for the (minority of) startups targeting existing publishing companies.” Stripe Press is different because it was born from a technology...
Ben Thompson follows up his 2017 piece with an update on the state of bundling strategies from some of the big tech and media companies.
I liked this description of where Disney+ fits into Disney’s overall strategy with the service:
While Disney’s hand was certainly forced by the COVID pandemic, the company’s overall goal is to maximize revenue per customer via its highly differentiated IP; to that end, just as Disney+ is a way to connect with customers and lure them to Disney World or a Disney Cruise, it is equally effective at serving as a platform for shifting...
Corporate research was a big deal in the mid-20th century. In this piece, Ben Southwood inspects why we no longer have modern equivalents to research centers like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs.
An interesting point here on what might be demotivating large organizations to invest too much in deep research:
Another possible answer is that non-policy developments have steadily made spillovers happen faster and more easily. Technology means faster communication and much more access to information. An interconnected and richer world doing more research means more competitors. And while all of these are clearly good, they reduce the technology...
Jerry Brito writes about the growth of independent writing on Substack, prompted by a Mike Solana tweet:
From a technical perspective, Substack does not belong on Solana’s list next to Bitcoin and Signal. Signal is a company, but they have almost no information about their users—no names, no messages. Bitcoin is not a company, but instead a permissionless decentralized network, and “it” can’t decide who can use it or for what. Substack, on the other hand, is a centralized service that permissions who’s allowed on and...
This is the second episode of the “Torch of Progress” series that the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program is putting on, hosted by Jason Crawford. Tyler Cowen is unbelievably prolific in projects he’s got going on, so it’s great to see him making the time for things like this.
Read more here from last year on the progress studies movement.
On Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford is now diving into the history of agriculture, with an interesting change to his process about writing on the history of technological discovery.
In this series, he’s approaching it with “the garage door up” — writing in the open shorter-form posts as he studies things like the stages of agriculture, where enclosures come from, and other concepts.
My goals are: to bring to the surface more of my half-formed thoughts, by forcing myself to write about them; to...
Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.
Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.
Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.
I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who...
Continuing my dive into the history of computers, I ran across this extended, detailed article covering the development and boom of the minicomputer industry.
Discovering Readwise a few months ago caused me to resurrect my long-dormant Instapaper account. Instapaper was my go-to “read later” service, but I also used it as a general bookmark archive. After a while I’d fallen into only using it for the latter, which then made me go back to Pinboard since the single function of bookmark tagging is its specialty. I’m still using Pinboard heavily to archive interesting things, but I’ve found a new use for Instapaper with Readwise’s integration.
Readwise’s main feature is to sync all of the highlighted passages from your...
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is one of the must-read newsletters out there. I’ve been a subscriber and avid reader for 4 years now, and I think I’ve read every post he’s published since then. Lately I’m finding I get behind on keeping up with his pace of output on the members-only Daily Update feed. So it was exciting to see the launch of this new channel where he’s creating a podcast version of the Daily Update for subscribers.
For the past week I’ve been listening to the posts rather than reading, which has made it much easier to content...
The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to connect the machines together:
PARC was installing its own Xerox Alto, the first personal computer, and EARS, the first laser printer. It needed a system that would allow additional PCs and printers to be added without having to reconfigure or shut down the network. It was...
A great annotated Twitter thread from Steven Sinofsky, who was leading the launch of Windows 7 coincident with when the iPad was announced.
19/ The iPad and iPhone were soundly existential threats to Microsoft’s core platform business. Without a platform Microsoft controlled that developers sought out, the soul of the company was “missing.”
20/ The PC had been overrun by browsers, a change 10 years in the making. PC OEMs were deeply concerned about a rise of Android and loved the Android model (no PC maker would ultimately be a major Android OEM, however). Even Windows Server was eclipsed...
A fun story from Jimmy Maher about the 1991 partnership with IBM that moved Apple from the Motorola 88000 chips to PowerPC. It was a savvy deal that kept the Macintosh (and Apple) alive and kicking long enough to bridge into their transition back to Steve Jobs’s leadership, and the eventual transition of the Mac lineup to Intel in 2006.
While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly...
The Kindle launched in 2007, making ebooks accessible as a format not only because of a compelling device, but also a marketplace for content. Suddenly most books were available instantly for $10 a piece. No more trips to the store, expensive hardcovers and paperbacks, and importantly, no more paper taking up shelf space. As much as I love the Kindle, I have a growing list of gripes about the experience. Like with John Gruber’s recent post on the iPad, criticism comes from a place of love for the platform, and a disappointment with how...
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on our strategic objectives — where we are today, where we want to be in a few years, and the tactics in between to navigate us to a long-term maximum (and hopefully avoid compelling, but ultimately sacrificial local maxima). One of the most efficient ways to set up a business for successful long-term goals is to shrewdly align the go-to-market in ways that go around your competitors entirely, versus having to compete head-to-head.
Germane to this topic is this piece I’d bookmarked at some point from
Google Maps just had its 15th birthday. This post from one of the original team on Maps back in 2005, Elizabeth Reid, reflects on a history of the product from its first iteration.
On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was first launched for desktop as a new solution to help people “get from point A to point B.” Today, Google Maps is used by more than 1 billion people all over the world every month.
It was the early days of Web 2.0, and Google’s launch of the Maps API was one of the keys...
As I’ve been reading more into the history of technology1, specifically computers and the Internet, I’ll go on side trails through Wikipedia or the wider ‘net back to many of the source papers that were the seeds of certain innovations.
I’ve read about the IBM 700 series of mainframes, Vannevar Bush’s seminal piece on a “memex” device (precursor idea to hypertext), and Claude Shannon’s original work on information theory.
The latest gold mine I’ve found is on YouTube. I created...
Benedict Evans does a talk each year assessing the state of the tech industry, macro trends, and where we are the technology adoption lifecycle for big, trendy technologies like VR and AI.
This year’s deck from the Nasdaq event in Davos covers some interesting ground. He has sober takes on things like regulation, the “break up big tech” movement, privacy, and also how we analyze particular companies that cross borders from bits to atoms like WeWork, Uber, and others.
In this video interview from the event, he answers the question about “what is a tech company?” in an interesting way:
J.C.R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper on what would eventually become the personal computer.
Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human...
Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:
The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.
I’m currently reading the fantastic book The Dream Machine, a history of the creation of personal computers, and a biography of this man, JCR Licklider. This is a talk from an ACM conference in 1986 where he discusses his work on interactive computing. A wonderful little bit of history here.
“Tech domination”, monopolies, regulation — lots of concepts, fears, and proposed remedies are all getting confused these days in tech. Benedict Evans had this piece of sober analysis to peel apart the differences between companies being rich, dominant in their product space, or dominant in the wider industry.
The tech industry loves to talk about ‘moats’ around a business - some mechanic of the product or market that forms a fundamental structural barrier to competition, so that just having a better product isn‘t enough to break in. But there are several ways that a moat can stop working. Sometimes the...
An interesting detailed analysis on SpaceX’s Starlink project, which intends to put tens of thousands of microsatellites in orbit to provide a blanket of global internet connectivity.
Starlink’s world-spanning internet will bring high quality internet access to every corner of the globe. For the first time, internet availability will depend not on how close a particular country or city comes to a strategic fiber route, but on whether it can view the sky. Entrepreneurs the world over will have unfettered access to the global internet irrespective of their own variously incompetent and/or corrupt government telco monopolies. Starlink’s monopoly-breaking capacity...
I don’t follow international markets closely enough to keep up with this, but interesting to see this take on Hong Kong’s relative stagnation in recent years, especially as compared to other nearby mainland China cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou:
Despite the transformation the global economy has undergone, Hong Kong’s business landscape remains largely unchanged – the preserve of a small body of property developers and conglomerates, most of them tycoon-owned, who rose to prominence long before the handover. Indeed, one of the most striking things of the city’s history for nearly three decades has been its failure to produce...
Interesting thoughts in Dan Wang’s annual letter. On China, trade, and tech.
These are not trivial achievements. But neither are they earth-shattering successes. Consider first the internet companies. I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from...
With the recent Twitter team announcement of bluesky, a research effort looking at creating a protocol standard out of Twitter, this piece is a timely look at a topic on a lot of minds in tech on the risks of the mega platforms, and what to do about it.
There are some great details here explaining the differences between the two. The idea of newer communications platforms morphing into networks of disparate systems with shared protocol standards certainly gets my decentralization nerves tingling:
A protocol-based system, however, moves much of the decision making away from the center...
AWS’s re:Invent conference just wrapped last week. Since we’re so deep into AWS technologies, I keep an eye out each year on the trends visible in Amazon’s product launches. They move at breathtaking speed to fill out their offering suite and keep their current momentum as the leader in the cloud space. They’re really nailing the bundling & scale economics that the likes of Microsoft and Oracle were so successful at in years past. When going upmarket, having a product for every problem outweighs the need for having the highest quality in any individual product line. Enterprises...
A post from Balaji Srinivasan from a couple years back on Twitter Moments. He had some interesting points on the likely traffic and comps to other news outlets. Twitter is still huge in the timely news space. I liked this point on the opportunity here (especially for Twitter, which has done little with the platform for 5+ years):
Whenever we see a technology with empirical traction whose importance is neglected or even derided, it’s a useful signal of an investment or entrepreneurship opportunity. Good examples that I’ve been personally involved with include Soylent and Bitcoin, where skepticism, mockery, and...
“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper meaning — a reincarnation of Thoreau’s idea from Walden. This podcast interview is about an essay Rao wrote last year that argues against this idea, a contrarian viewpoint considering the “right” or “intelligent” thing to do is considered to be disconnecting from the vapid, toxic environments of Twitter and Facebook. He makes a compelling case about a continuum of information-light vs. information-dense sources of data, and...
Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Nats’ run:
He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Strasburg for nine runs in less than five innings. The D-Backs knew what was coming. The Nationals broke down the tape and discovered Strasburg was tipping his pitches by the way he reached into his glove to grip the baseball near his waist, just before he raised his hands to the set position.
I just got the latest version of the iPad Pro, opting for the 11” model instead of the previous generation 12.9” one that I’ve been using for 2 years. Some brief thoughts so far on a week’s worth of usage:
The iPad
So far the smaller form factor takes a little bit of getting used to, but the weight and size is a huge improvement in portability. When this iPad is the only thing in my bag, it almost feels empty it’s so light. I also love the ability to one-hand the device without feeling like I’m about to...
Why does it take so long for new technologies with seemingly-obvious positive benefits to get adopted? This example on the speed with which the polio vaccine was adopted and administered are incredible, but an outlier:
The polio vaccine is an outlier in the history of new technology because of the speed at which it was adopted. It is perhaps the lone exception to the rule that new technology has to suffer years of ignorance before people take it seriously. I don’t know of anything else like it.
You might think it was quickly adopted because it saved lives. But...
Since I’ve been following the progress studies movement and Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress blog, it was cool to see video of his talk on the history of steel from a San Francisco meetup a few weeks ago.
I’ve been looking for a smooth way to dictate notes and thoughts while hands-free from my phone, particularly while running or driving.
When I run I typically wear one AirPod and have my phone inaccessible in a waistband pouch on my back. Since I’m usually listening to audiobooks while running, I don’t have an easy way to log thoughts or perform the audio equivalent of highlighting things.
I never use Siri at all but for a couple of easy, reliable Shortcuts for dictation. I thought this was a perfect candidate to explore the “Hey Siri” activation support with custom commands...
Through a Twitter thread I ran across this running catalog of resources on the history of the tech industry — books, articles, movies, and more. A definitive list of content. There are some great recommendations here that I’d never heard of, especially in the books and podcasts sections.
I’ve got a copy of The Dream Machine that I’m planning on digging into next, a history of personal computing and biography of JCR Licklider.
I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the lives of the individual innovators who made it happen. I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers. My research explores why they became innovators, and the institutions they created to promote innovation even further.
This connects nicely with the recent “progress studies” movement.
This is another great one from last year on Jason Crawford’s Roots of Progress project, in which he dives into advancements in human progress. In this post he covers a brief background on cement, one of the oldest of mankind’s technological discoveries:
Stone would be ideal. It is tough enough for the job, and rocks are plentiful in nature. But like everything else in nature, we find them in an inconvenient form. Rocks don’t come in the shape of houses, let alone temples. We could maybe pile or stack them up, if...
This is an interesting startup out of Tel-Aviv called ECOncrete that’s creating a new concrete recipe and technology that’s safer for coastal wildlife and actually strengthens over time in the water.
They create different shapes and textures to match the surface patterns of local rocks and corals, so that marine plants, algaes, and other animals are more attracted to it.
We’ve been exploring options for adding a CMS to our Jekyll-powered website for Fulcrum over the last couple of weeks, looking for ways to add more content editor-friendly capabilities without having to overhaul everything under the hood, or move to a full hosted CMS like Wordpress. The product and design teams responsible for the technical development of the website all prefer the simplicity and flexibility of static site generators, but understand the relative opacity of learning git, command lines, and the vagaries of something like Jekyll for team members just writing content.
I recently learned that you can pair your AirPods with the Apple TV, which I’ve been using for the last couple of weeks. With two kids sleeping nearby plus noise from the nearby kitchen, it’s impossible to get the volume loud enough to make out dialog in most shows. Because of this we always have the captions on for everything. But this new discovery solves this problem, plus it makes it easy to get up and walk away for a minute without having to pause anything.
Another fun one from the Primitive Technology channel. I previously linked to his videos a few months back. This time he builds a stacked brick wall around a new thatched hut out of clay bricks. The patience and craftsmanship required to build the things he does is truly admirable.
I think we’d all be mentally healthier if we spent more time disconnecting and creating things. If only I had the Queensland jungle in my backyard!
For a long time I’ve used the full 1Password desktop app and its browser plugin that installs alongside for support inside of Chrome. But recently I set up the 1Password X browser extension they first released a couple of years ago, and I’m converted. Since access to accounts is most useful in a web browser context, implementing it as an extension makes sense. I don’t know much about the tech backend or advantages of building a Chrome extension versus a “thick-client” browser plugin, but it seems like it’s certainly a benefit to conform...
A few months ago I joined the advisory board of the Suncoast Developers Guild, a code school and developer community here in St. Pete. Our company has been involved with this group since back when they first launched the Iron Yard campus back in 2014.
We’ve had a successful experience connecting with the local community through this channel, supporting students looking to shift careers into work on software and recruiting them into our team. Currently 5 people from our dev and product teams came out of those cohorts of front-end...
I saw this Nightline interview clip with Steve Jobs from a recent Steven Sinofsky post.
In this clip is his famous “bicycle for the mind” quote about the personal computer.
This is a 21st century bicycle that amplifies a certain intellectual ability that man has. And I think that after this process has come to maturity, the effects that it’s going to have on society are going to far outstrip even those of the petrochemical revolution has had.
I had my main blog/website on Tumblr back when it first launched in 2007, which I used for a number of years before migrating it over to this current self-managed iteration on GitHub back around 20111. At the time I loved Tumblr’s middleground between the long-form-friendly full Wordpress blog and the short-form nature of Twitter. Tumblr’s “tumblelog” concept easily supported either mode depending on what you...
I ran across this piece about a month ago, but avoided it after sensing spoilers for the book I was in the middle of at the time.
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
Wearables have become such a big market these days that there’s a wide variety of options to pick from if you want to monitor activity metrics. From the basic Fitbit step counters to more ruggedized outdoor watches to full-blown smartwatches, there’s a device for everyone.
I’ve been a devoted user of Garmin’s activity tracking watches for years now, starting out with the Forerunner 220. A couple of years ago I upgraded to the fēnix 5 model, one of their highest-end watches.
Roots of Progress has an interesting deep dive on why it took so long for a (relatively) simple invention of the bicycle, even in a time when the principles of a bicycle’s components were well understood for a long time. There’s an interesting inventory of potential hypotheses about why it took until the late 1800s.
Early iterations of human-powered transport looked like inventors trying to replicate the carriage, with devices that looked like “horseless carriages”, someone providing power, another person steering. The first breakthrough toward something that looked like a modern bicycle (at least in form factor) was from German...
Yesterday was Neuralink’s unveiling of what they’ve been working on. Their team of engineers, neurosurgeons, and computer science experts are working on a “neural lace” brain-computer interface.
Elon Musk announced the launch of a company to work on this problem back in 2016. Seeing this amount of progress, it’s clear now that the science fiction story of a cybernetic implant looks like a possible near future reality. The idea itself conjures images of Neuromancer’s console cowboys and Effinger’s “moddies”, neural augmentations that...
I always enjoy conversations with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. This interview (conducted by Slack founder Steward Butterfield) reviews their experiences as founders back in the pre-bubble era and compares and contrasts that thematically with the tech landscape today.
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called “Look Around”. Even though it’s exciting to see them invest in mapping, it seems like a bridge too far to ever catch the quality of Google Maps. Om Malik compares the relative positions between the two to that of Bing to Google in search. Apple is approaching Maps as an application first, when really maps are about data:
Why do I think Google Maps will continue to trump...
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is part of the tech company canon. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years unread, but I’ve known the general nature of the problem it illuminates for years. We’ve even experienced some of its highlighted phenomena first hand in our own product development efforts in bringing Geodexy, allinspections, and Fulcrum to market.
This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:
Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection...
I just ran across this YouTube channel called Primitive Technology, created by an Australian from the North Queensland bush country who attempts to recreate building things with Stone Age technology. He makes his own charcoal, fires clay hardware, makes tools, and supplies himself with mud, clay, wood, and everything else right out of the local environment.
Each one is silent with the work speaking for itself. Turn on captions to see embedded explainers talking about what he’s doing. An easy YouTube rabbit hole.
I loved this piece, a history of the spreadsheet from Steven Levy originally written in 1984.
It’s a great retrospective that demonstrates how much impact spreadsheets had on business, even though we now consider them a fact of life and a given foundation of working with numbers on computers:
Ezra Gottheil, 34 is the senior product-design planner at Lotus. He shows up for work in casual clothes, and his small office is cluttered with piles of manuals and software. When I visited Gottheil he gave me a quick introduction to electronic speadsheeting. Computer programs...
Like many in the Twitterverse, I love the platform. It provides my main interface to following what’s happening, along with staying connected to interests both personal and professional.
Jumping off something James wrote yesterday, I’ve felt similar about Twitter’s utility the last year or so. It feels like I’m experiencing some sort of content creep — probably a function of an increasing number of accounts I follow and the neighboring universe of likes and retweets from that expanding footprint, which generates a massive amount of noise in the algorithmic feed.
Since I do so many of my runs at night (even as late as 10-10:30pm), I’ve always been mindful of being visible for safety. Until we moved last month, I used to drive down to the Coffee Pot Bayou area and run on what’s called the North Bay Trail, since runs in my old neighborhood were boring. That whole route was on a dedicated trail set back from the street, so visibility was less of an issue. Now that I’m doing most runs in the neighborhood, even though the sidewalks are good, there are plenty of...
This latest piece from Steven Sinofsky considers product strategy on 2 axes:
What problem is being solved and
How it is solved
The spectrum he paints here runs from the most conservative (old things in old ways, “incrementing”) to the most forward-leaning (new things in new ways, “inventing”). No approach in this matrix is “the answer” in all cases, each has its merits based on timing, product type, stage, customer set, sales approach, or business model. Also a product team growing over a course of...
One of my favorite tech figures, a16z’s Steven Sinofsky, gives a history of “Clippy”, the helpful anthropomorphic office supply from Microsoft Office. As the product leader of the Office group in the 90s, he gives some interesting background to how Clippy came to be. I found most fascinating the time machine look back at what personal computing was like back then — how different it was to develop a software product in a world of boxed software.
Wolfe’s work, particularly his Book of the New Sun “tetralogy”, is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on his life leading up to becoming one of the most influential American writers. I recommend it to everyone I know interested in sci-fi. Even reading this made me want to dig up The Shadow of the Torturer and start reading it for a...
Disney recently announced details on their upcoming “Disney+” direct-to-consumer streaming service at their Investors Day — big news for everyone in the tech and media scene since Disney is one of very few content companies with enough leverage purely from differentiated content to make a strong competing tech play against Netflix, Amazon, and others.
Most others in the traditional media space have no chance of competing on a tech level with the likes of Netflix or YouTube, but Disney has enough of its own unique IP to create their own garden and draw away enough...
Anyone that works in a successful company with a large distributed staff can attest to remote-first being the future for knowledge work organizations. The more we expand our remote team at our company, the better we all get at realizing all of its benefits. It seems like an inevitability to me that there’ll be a tipping point where all new tech companies begin as remote-centric groups. Naval, the founder of AngelList (which is a key...
Email is seeing a resurgence in an age when everyone’s been crying that email is dead. The comeback is not so much as a tool for intra-office communication (though it’s still alive and well in most organizations, Slack has overtaken email in ours), but as a publishing medium.
Newsletters have become a popular means for connecting with readers, helping publishers (and especially independent writers) cut through the noise that pervades social media channels. The constant feed of non-stop, clickbait-ish content makes it hard to cut through that waterfall with deep analysis or thoughtful writing.
This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:
We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
This is an interesting interview with Been Kim from Google Brain on developing systems for seeing how trained machines make decisions. One of the major challenges with neural network-based based deep learning systems is that the decision chain used by the AI is a black box to humans. It’s difficult (or impossible) for even the creators to figure out what factors influenced a decision, and how the AI “weighted” the inputs. What Kim is developing is a “translation” framework for giving operators better insight into the decision chain of AI:
For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.
Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially...
As computing platforms get more complex and critical to daily life, maintaining secure usage gets more challenging.
I’ve written about thisbefore, but it’s a known mantra in the product and IT space that security and usability are inversely proportional. That is, a gain in one is a loss in the other. This has long been visible in enterprise software that is perceived as annoying or frictional in the pursuit of security (password rotation every n days, can’t reuse, complexity requirements). It’s what gives employees a bad taste in their mouth about enterprise systems,...
Fulcrum, our SaaS product for field data collection, is coming up on its 7th birthday this year. We’ve come a long way: from a bootstrapped, barely-functional system at launch in 2011 to a platform with over 1,800 customers, healthy revenue, and a growing team expanding it to ever larger clients around the world. I thought I’d step back and recall its origins from a product management perspective.
We created Fulcrum to address a need we had in our business, and quickly realized its application to dozens of other markets with a slightly different color of the...
For his final weekly column of his long career, Walt Mossberg talks about what he calls “ambient computing”, the penetration of IoT, AR, VR, and computers throughout our lives:
I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought. Your whole...
A couple years ago I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, after moving almost exclusively to ebooks when the Kindle iPhone app launched with the App Store. I read constantly, and always digital books, so I thought I’d write up some thoughts on the Kindle versus its app-based counterparts like the Kindle apps, iBooks, and Google Books, all of which I’ve read a significant amount with. For I long time I resisted the Kindle hardware because I wasn’t interested in a reflective-only reading surface. The Paperwhite’s backlit screen and low cost made it easy for me to justify buying....
Great post from Benedict Evans on the state of voice computing in 2017. On wider answer domains and creating the uncanny valley:
This tends to point to the conclusion that for most companies, for voice to work really well you need a narrow and predictable domain. You need to know what the user might ask and the user needs to know what they can ask.
This has been the annoyance with voice UIs. For me Siri was really the first commonplace voice interface I ever tried for day to day things. The dissonance between “you can say a...
The latest episode of Debug had a great discussion with Don Melton and Jim Ray on Safari’s development, web standards, and the state of web advertising.
The link jumps right to the discussion of ads and the ethics of content blocking in current publishing landscape. Rene Ritchie has some interesting thoughts on the subject and wrote a piece on iMore about it. Ads, Javascript embeds, and trackers are toeing the line on privacy (if not crossing it), but more simply than that, they’re making the Internet slower and more obnoxious to use. Ad networks, however scummy, are keeping...
