Topic
technology
- How terminals work
Software builders already spent quite a bit of time on the terminal. AI coding (especially Claude Code) has made the terminal not only an I/O mechanism for working with a system, but also an IDE and complete interface…
- Can you still be human?
Iain McGilchrist: Who does not now find themselves constantly busy? The young, the middle-aged and the old feel it alike. We are all time-poor; and time is not worth nothing. Time is life. Everything now is freighted…
- Brain-Computer Interfaces
When we think about brain-computer interfaces, why do we always jump to the chip-in-the-head? Or the wire dongle with an antenna behind our ear? The Larry Niven "wirehead)"? Maybe it's just a bandwidth thing. Aren't o…
- Expected and Unexpected
Some technologies are unpredicted, but evolve. Others are predicted don't seem to materialize (or not yet). Then there are those that are expected AND appear. The unexpected tend to be the most disruptive — no one's h…
- We Live Like Royalty and Don't Know It
Charles Mann on the unseen, unappreciated wonders of modern infrastructure: The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric gr…
- Technovelgy
An archive of concepts drawn from works of science fiction. Over 3800 entries. Reminiscent of TV Tropes's listing of fiction ideas and story structures.
- Western Electric Plant
Western Electric Plant. Cicero, IL. Western Electric was the captive equipment arm of the Bell System and produced the majority of the telephones and related equipment used in the U.S. for almost 100 years.
- Bell Telephone System
Map of the Bell Telephone System , 1909.
- The Tech Canon
My thoughts on the books that constitute Silicon Valley’s “canon” of essential, influential works.
- Cape Canaveral
The launch complex at Cape Canaveral.
- Tools The Technium And The Importance Of Agency
On Kevin Kelly’s “Technium” and why human innovation is different than the biological variety.
- Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws The Map For Internet
Politico:
- Scroll Prize
A group of researchers just won the Scroll Prize, a project to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri, burned and buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Using AI and computer vision techniques they were able to dis…
- Whatever Happened To The Industrial Rd Lab
Ben Southwood looks at the waning of the big R&D labs:
- Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman on AI
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 G…
- Netflix Couldn't Build Netflix
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…
- The Challenge of High-Capital Startups
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 al…
- Exapting Technologies
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 p…
- Taking Back Our User Accounts
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…
- Weekend Reading: Bubbles, the Magic of Hobbies, and Legitimacy
🗯 Well-Behaved Bubbles Often Make History 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 l…
- M1 Mac Mini
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 r…
- Stripe's Content Strategy
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 cove…
- 2020 Bundles
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 wi…
- The Rise and Fall of the R&D Lab
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…
- Weekend Reading: Disintermediating Media, Boring Tech, and DIY Lights
📨 Disintermediating the media with… Substack? 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’…
- The Torch of Progress with Tyler Cowen
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 goin…
- Roots of Progress on Agriculture
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 i…
- The UNIX System
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 d…
- The Rise and Fall of Minicomputers
Continuing my dive into the history of computers, I ran across this extended, detailed article covering the development and boom of the minicomputer industry.
- Readwise and Instapaper
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…
- Ben Thompson's Daily Update Podcast
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 be…
- Enter Ethernet
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…
- 10th Anniversary of the iPad: Perspective from the Windows Team
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…
- The Deal of the Century
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 brid…
- Kindle Features and Areas for Improvement
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 trip…
- A Retrospective on the History of Work
Great site from Atlassian that steps through the decades to show you what work life looked like from the 1950s and on.
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complements
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 comp…
- Google Maps at 15
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 firs…
- The Tech History Playlist
As I've been reading more into the history of technology, 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 ce…
- Tech in 2020: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
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 Na…
- Man-Computer Symbiosis
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…
- Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
🥩 The Internet of Beefs 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 betwe…
- Some Reflections on Early History by J.C.R. Licklider
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…
- How to Lose a Monopoly
"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 bet…
- Starlink is a Very Big Deal
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 interne…
- Hong Kong Is Fast Becoming an Also Ran
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 citi…
- Dan Wang's 2019 Letter
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 bizarr…
- Protocols, Not Platforms
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…
- Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency: Five Years Later
An interesting update from Ehtereum's Vitalik Buterin on the current status of a number of crypto challenges.
- AWS re:Invent 2019
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…