Posts tagged “technology”

After leaving Netlify, I've been exploring AI/ML/LLM opportunities. Here's my explainer: "AI" is marketing, ML learns from examples, and LLMs are essentially massive word-completion engines. But at scale, something remarkable emerges that looks like understanding, and that changes everything about what software can do.

In the late 1970s, Quasar Industries fooled the public with a fake household robot that was actually just a guy in the crowd with a wire up his sleeve. More interesting: the resulting debate on ARPANET became the internet's first free speech controversy.

Yes, front-end development is absurdly complicated right now. But developers aren't adding complexity for fun - user expectations have exploded while timelines haven't. Today's frameworks are doing what jQuery did: showing browsers what developers need. It'll consolidate eventually. The mess is just evolution, and evolution is worth it.

The tech industry is broken: 3% unemployment for programmers, 20% for construction workers, and we're still hand-crafting websites like artisans. We need knowledge factories, training less-skilled workers to assemble standardized software products. Stop fetishizing craft. Build assembly lines. Fix the economy.

We're terrible at predicting phase changes. We can iterate but not invent, which is why sci-fi spaceships have telephone wires. Like Babbage, we're already living in the future we can't quite see. Ubiquitous powerful computation will make today's smartphones look as primitive as hand-calculated logarithm tables.

Avatar is a game-changer. Just as Toy Story ended hand-drawn animation, Avatar makes 2D filmmaking look dated. The 3D isn't a gimmick but integral to every frame. The plot is simple, the acting excellent, and the whole thing is so gloriously beautiful it nearly moved me to tears.

I explain how switching technology upended transportation, economics, borders, labour, and eventually space travel, detailing the chaos, accidents, and innovations along the way, from floating ocean hotels to flying saucers, ending with humanity's expansion across the solar system.

I teleported for the first time and the media found out within an hour. We hid in a Beverly Hills hotel while VC fielded billion-dollar offers and hired mercenaries to protect us. Now we're in Nevada, figuring out exactly what I can do and how rich it's going to make us.

I support net neutrality. Letting ISPs charge content providers for faster delivery creates perverse incentives: they'll deliberately degrade default service to extract payment. This stifles competition, entrenches incumbents, and could put the US at a further disadvantage in broadband access. The internet is infrastructure, like roads, not a postal service.

Holding off on Chrome speculation until I can actually try it. Watch this space.

I've been thinking hard about where social networks are headed. No single network will "win" -- people have multiple social circles, so they'll always maintain multiple networks. The real unsolved problems are partitioning: selective data portability, unified messaging, identity verification, and filtering connections by actual relevance. Interoperability is the next big thing.

Marc Andreessen spent 90 minutes with Obama and wrote something you need to read. Obama is post-boomer, post-culture-war, and thinking about the world as it actually is today. Marc thinks he's one of the smartest people in political life. So do I. Read it.

I predicted a box combining DVD, video iPod dock, and wireless internet, and exactly that was just announced at CES. Called it.

Twitter, email, IM: American colleagues, Trinidadian friends in Turkey, my brother in London, a Ukrainian who might be in Paris, British friends at work. All while having lunch in San Francisco. I'm pretty plugged in.

Apple intentionally kept the iPhone camera mediocre to leave room for the iCamera: a photo-focused device with a big screen, intuitive touch interface, and seamless syncing. Cameras need a usability revolution, and Apple is positioned to deliver it.

Twitter crossed a threshold for me today, from "website I use" to "service I can't live without." Add me if you want 140-character windows into my daily life. You'll get Twitter eventually. Just like blogging.

Seeing Orion over Valencia Street got me thinking about how San Francisco's geography shapes its culture. A dense, isolated city on the edge of a vast ocean and empty continent fills you with an urge to connect and build. Maybe that's why the internet happened here.

Tried a Wii at a friend's paella party. I've never been a console gamer, but this thing is different. Playing tennis that actually feels like tennis is basically low-fi virtual reality. Nintendo have made me interested in console gaming for the first time in decades. Non-gamers will want one.

I love that weightless feeling in a decelerating elevator. Also: the Antikythera mechanism blows my mind. The ancient Greeks were thousands of years ahead of their time, yet their civilization collapsed while China's persisted. What happened? Someone explain European history to me.

The DVD industry's CSS encryption failed because they had to give users the tools to decrypt it. Airline security has the same flaw: publishing the rules tells attackers exactly what to work around. Security theater with a known ruleset is just a temporary inconvenience for a determined adversary.

Power's out in central London. Hundreds of us sit here, useless without our machines. Browsing on borrowed wifi, twiddling thumbs, wondering if this counts as a valid reason to leave early.

It works.

Back in London, jet-lagged, with a dead computer. Turned out to be the power supply — fixed in 30 minutes by the local shop for an inflated price I'd happily pay again. An hour of my own jet-lagged poking around achieved nothing.

I explore what it means to be a geek: someone with an intense intellectual obsession, once a social outcast but increasingly cool since the dot-com era proved geeks could outearn athletes. The internet has helped us find each other. Simple rule: you're a geek if you say you are.

"Happy slapping" -- assaulting strangers on video phone -- turns out to be self-correcting. Actual assault is risky, so kids just slap each other and fake it. Net result: idiots hitting themselves to look cool. Darwin's got this one covered.

Being a web developer in 2005 fills me with smug satisfaction, wonder, and pure joy. The web is becoming mundane and everyday -- and that's a triumph. The exciting times are just beginning, and I have a proposal about how the next phase will unfold. Big dreams, but so was the Internet.

Tried buying physical CDs for the first time in ages. Total disaster: wrong section, missing albums, no recommendations, one lonely listening station. How did people ever shop for music this way? I am deeply grateful to live in the age of the internet.

Low energy day, nothing worth blogging about. At least I tidied up and fixed my computer's annoying random shutdowns.

My phone was off for a week due to O2 being utterly useless. Sorry for the missed texts.

My life only rates 12A, I work in ringtones instead of AI, and my biggest thrill is assembling a bedside table. Volunteers needed to fix at least one of these problems.

We build roads by widening paths until we finally bulldoze everything and start fresh. We build software by layering complexity onto demos until we have a mach 1 titanium rocket ship navigating a dirt track. At some point, we need to build a new road.

Back online after 2 days without internet, thanks to my housemates' planning getting our ADSL sorted early. Still need to set up my computer properly, but I'm back!

Giving up broadband to cure information overload is like ditching cars for horses. The answer is to go forward, using RSS and email filters to cut the noise. This guy is an idiot.

Apple knocked it out of the park at Macworld. The Mac Mini is a genius gateway drug for PC users, and the iPod shuffle is basically bling-bling for the chav market. Both will sell like crazy. I'm buying a Mini come June.

I always assumed my geekiness came from my chemical engineer dad, but looking closer, he's the people person. Mom switched from P.E. to teaching chemistry, never met a gadget she didn't upgrade twice, and yesterday sat giggling over her new Palm Pilot. The geekiness is absolutely from her.

Remote-controlled internet hunting is idiotic. Hunting was always a thin justification for killing things, but at least it involved actually being there. Clicking a mouse to shoot a deer from your couch strips away every last pretense. If you can't afford the trip to Texas to kill things, maybe don't kill things.

3,000 spam emails in a single day to one address. I've had enough.

I expected I, Robot to butcher Asimov, but I was wrong. The film stays surprisingly faithful to his core concepts, especially the incompleteness of the Three Laws and the zeroth law. A few Hollywood liberties, sure, but the spirit is intact. I take back my skepticism.

A grab-bag of links: Rock Paper Saddam, sexist investment bankers, the BBC photo competition, surprisingly homo-friendly B&Bs, infinite cats, Britney's hilarious mission statement, and turning your iPod into a wireless jukebox.

A scattered collection of links: Reagan trivia, Transformers motion capture, censored album art, Murphy's Laws, the new Superman, a blog-themed song parody, TiVo for radio, and more Reagan-adjacent oddities than you can shake a stick at.

A roundup of random links: nuclear war statistics, another Microsoft obituary, Troy's cinematic merits despite historical liberties, the inevitable Chucky sequel, an 11-year-old fashion activist who can't spell, my worryingly high mobile phone addiction score, and some deeply silly internet ephemera.

A quick linklog: addictive Flash game, a self-harm gene worth understanding before editing out, naked rollercoaster records, free speech as comics, London's hackable wireless CCTV, and cocaine overtaking ecstasy as the drug of choice.

The "alarm" character in modern computing descends directly from a literal bell on old line printers. Today it still bypasses everything and makes your computer beep. Thirty years of technological evolution, ignored completely. I find that wonderful.

I told the BBC in March that internet video would replace broadcast TV. Two months later, they launch an internet media player doing exactly that. Coincidence? I think not. Also: replacement teeth are coming, and I found something on the internet that made me feel weird.

A massive backlog of links covering Rice's testimony fact-checks, movie trailers, gay rights, crime math, the Sheikh Yassin moral tangle, London's skyline, and a one-legged DDR player. Something for everyone.

Picked up Douglas Adams' posthumous collection and rediscovered what a brilliant, well-read mind he had, especially on technology and UI design. His rule: if it needs a manual, it's too hard to use. I agree completely. Also, it's got me thinking harder about Seldo.Com 3.0.

The BBC announces plans to sell off its technology division, putting 1,400 jobs at risk. On the same day, a power cut takes them offline. Who's responsible for BBC power? The very division they're selling. You couldn't make it up.

A brain dump of half-formed thoughts: UI is the only problem that matters, the internet isn't evil, Wal-Mart is, apples and oranges are totally comparable, and someone please remind me to download the Postal Service.

Fingers crossed for this thing to work.

The information revolution mirrors the industrial revolution: cheap data is just raw material. The real innovation will be in mass-producing quality information. Social interaction matters not as an end in itself, but because it improves information quality. Build the barrel-making machine, not the barrel.

Google appears to be hitting fundamental scaling limits, producing bizarre results and workarounds instead of a painful full recode. We've grown dependent on its godlike ability to find anything. What happens to how we use the web if Google simply doesn't scale?

Speaking at a BBC seminar tomorrow about how the Internet is overtaking TV. They want me there because I've stopped watching television entirely, just downloading shows instead. There's a free lunch, but apparently an NDA too. I'll share what I can afterward.

Only 6,000 Segways exist in the world, and they're all being recalled because dead batteries send you sprawling. Slow sales might be an understatement.

Clay Shirky is worth reading, especially on why cheap Internet telephony is inevitable.

Slow day at work, so I cleared my massive blog backlog. Highlights: artificial diamonds disrupting De Beers, doctor secret slang, Russia building a Mars nuclear plant, giant gerbils devastating China, and the world's most unsettling fluffy rabbits. Plus 20-odd other links. Productive afternoon, really.

A grab-bag of links: Bush action figure, scary nuclear-isomer weapons, the Chewbacca defense, a serial killer vs. programmer quiz, and the Blaster worm, which hit me personally. At least the worm's source code had a funny message for Bill Gates.

A big batch of bookmarks: twisted webcomics, sexy blue men, Orlando Bloom gossip, bamboo bicycles, whale guilt, a weather-based font, TV mind control patents, Eclipse getting PHP support, and apparently I'm a Level 7 Very Feminine gay man. Enjoy the megablog.

London's new Oyster smartcards are finally here, replacing those flimsy paper tickets. Reusable, cancellable if lost, and they work without leaving your wallet. I've been waiting ages for these -- the readers have been sitting there unused for over a year. Inexplicably excited about this. Yes, I'm a geek.

A roundup of fun links: a website with a big red "delete everything" button, the real Hogwarts Express, Homeland Security jewelry, conceptual art mocking commerce, and a pile of Mac vs. Windows debate fodder.

Massive link dump covering: someone falling off a Segway, the UK's new supreme court, old Netscape versions, Burning Man VR, Matrix Reloaded hotness, barcode self-valuation (I'm worth £6.06), P2P legality, carfree cities, blog hype, X2, Iraq war stage-management, and lists of lists.

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 68% Hardcore Junkie (61% - 80%)While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What's that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don't get a repetitive wrist injury... The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Stvlive.com! ...saved only by the fact that I have more friends in real life than online.

A grab-bag of links: gas mask ties, GPS art, NationStates policy geekery, childhood misconceptions, genuinely gruesome body modification (you've been warned), esoteric programming languages, Stuart Hughes's war blog, NARA's exhibit hall, XP powertoys, and a Peter Jackson revelation. Plus my current geeky toolbox.

A grab-bag of links: the Atkins controversy (spoiler: Americans just eat too much), a political compass test that confirmed my lib-dem leanings, Fred Durst's questionable Britney claims, my finished AI essay, and a new OLED camera that oddly connects back to my very first blog post.

The BBC article on mobile blogging is worth reading for its links to free tools like Manywhere Moblogger, WAPBlog, and KABLOG that let you post from your phone, though they require some server-side setup. There's also a proprietary carrier-focused option called foneblog.

Catching up on a backlog of links: cloning circuses, botox deodorant, dumb food laws, Putin-elf controversies, Harry Potter's questionable morals, AOL's staggering losses, and Bush funding a sun on Earth. Plus games, books, and a testicle shortage. You're welcome.

Reluctant blogging today yields a link dump: Monopoly Tycoon, a 20-minute HIV test, magnetic pole flipping, web standards research for my ambitious Web2 project, KaZaA popup fixes, UI shame, Mozilla vs IE, and a possible Edinburgh master's. Also: antibiotics. Yuck.

Sitting inches from a window at 1:30am, watching ducks hunt worms in the rain. Meanwhile: laser cannons, Phoenix browser's chaos-inducing "open all tabs" feature, Microsoft acting like IBM post-antitrust, Nokia's garish phones, a Beckham kidnap plot, and a skateboard for your AIBO. Links ahoy.

Awarding BBC News Online for their hilariously dramatic mouse and keyboard photo. What happens when you hire too many arts students. Also, yeah, internet addiction at work is real. I spent 6 of my 10 weeks at IBM this summer surfing the web.

Mind uploading to silicon by 2040? I am ALL IN. Can't wait to ditch this body. Also: groan at that link. Short post today to balance out yesterday's epic. Karma.

Fog screens are now a real thing, just like on SeaQuest.

Two links worth your time: an alarm clock that can literally kill you, and a chance to take out Barney and the Teletubbies in surprisingly slick flash animation.

Space elevators could make low earth orbit a four-hour ride and geosynchronous orbit reachable in a week, all at a fraction of current rocket costs. This is genuinely exciting stuff.

Dijkstra, one of computing's Newtons, died August 6th largely unreported. Also: people are implanting devices to stop overeating while millions starve in Africa. Eat less. Don't need a gadget for that.

It's been 2000 years since the last set of commandments, so here's an updated list for the 21st century: get a computer, get internet access, check your email, verify your sources, don't spread rumors, and for the love of all that is holy, read the manual before bothering your techie.

Surprising news: the major labels are offering legal downloads at reasonable prices. Meanwhile they're also poisoning file-sharing networks with fake songs. Plus a roundup of cool links: credit-card cameras, a Unix Rosetta Stone, mind-blowing nanotech storage and more.

I describe the five stages of computing expertise, from wide-eyed wonder at your first machine to intentionally pouring Coke into the disk drive. How accurate is it?

My bookmarks pile up until I can't take it anymore. This week: the Israel-Palestine conflict needs to just stop, I built an XML/PHP app, some webcomic recommendations, the Simputer, the evil CBDTPA, spike-based spam justice, and Scott McCloud being delightful.

My blog just turned one year old. 137 posts, one every 2.6 days, mostly geeky links and incidental nonsense. Not much has changed and nothing will. Here are some links: a cool girl's site, how to strip KaZaA's adware, eDonkey, Blair's 9/11 speech, robot orderlies, and Arctic Eskimos reconnecting with lost traditions.

Warwick's got more campus webcams, covering Cholo and the cooler. Creepy, big-brotherish misuse of technology at its finest. I love it.

A timeline of the future from someone who was 85% accurate last time is worth reading. Highlights include "25% of TV celebrities synthetic" by 2010, which made me laugh. I thought they already were.

Been slack about updating, but here are five bookmarked gems: cheap domains, rediscovering Brian Aldiss's Helliconia series, a geek cookbook, my new Handspring Visor, and a Latin dictionary. Also: Windows XP is every bit as awful as I suspected, and I lost a month of email. Please resend.

Procrastinating on work with a roundup of tech links: the Rio Riot's 20GB looks great, CWB is evil, dolphins beat porpoises, China got bugged jets, gravastars may replace black holes, and I won my first eBay auction. Also, trees kill.

A fantastic index of random generators, a cool new pixel arrangement giving monitors 4x the resolution, and why I'm skipping the year-in-review stuff. My 2002 resolutions will be revealed December 31, 2002, when I can make them realistic.

A real Magic 8-Ball in a Lego Mindstorms shaking cradle with a webcam is filling the etch-a-sketch void nicely. Also, spooning is way less interesting than Sex and the City made it sound.

A batch of bookmarks worth sharing: Afghan history, port forwarding tips, keyboard shortcut myths, free mailing lists, world flags, Winamp volume leveling, friend quizzes, genuinely gross content, exploding dogs, queer superhero comics, gay characters in mainstream comics, a Java IDE, UK maps, animal symbolism, and fantasy art galleries.

I explore two opposing views on disclosing security vulnerabilities. Full disclosure with exploit code may spike attacks but drives patching. Secrecy spreads attacks over time with less patching. Both extremes seem wrong: publicize vulnerabilities, yes, but step-by-step attack guides go too far.

Finally got ADSL and it's glorious. 576K downstream and I couldn't be happier. Also learned BT's pricing is actually mandated by Oftel, not greed. NTL still useless though.

Finished Stephen Baxter's *Space* - stunning scope, but he crams enough material for a library into 500 pages. Entire alien civilizations rise and fall in under ten pages. Almost comical, but still worth reading.

Curl is a new web language co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee that replaces the HTML/JavaScript mess with one clean, powerful solution. It needs a plugin now, but so did Flash once. If IE bundles it, this could be huge.

Flat panel CRTs from IBM match LCD prices without the manufacturing headaches. Interesting, though I'm still holding out for flexible screens.

Accidental nanotubes, undetected nuclear smuggling, Bush wants more reactors, and we're basically screwed on energy either way. On the bright side, my font choices reveal I'm boring, and someone's planning an interplanetary Internet.

Sat in on a great Intel lecture about chip architecture. Now wondering if the Itanium/AMD split could balkanize computing the way Mac vs. Windows did, but with incompatible hardware too. Could be a nightmare for porting, and interesting times for Linux either way.

Found an amusing Telegraph piece about Telford being wiped out by an asteroid. The article is ostensibly serious, but the list of things that would be "tragically lost" from this middling English town is priceless. Also: genetically modified babies with three biological parents are apparently a thing now.

Back in London for the weekend. Amusing links: Microsoft tech support vs. Psychic Friends (psychics win on price and friendliness), IBM's self-healing networks, transparent PC cases, Maryland blocking Microsoft Passport, a terabyte stored in glass, and a keyless keyboard. Also, Black and White's gesture interface is getting well-deserved attention.

Recovering now, but Warwick's IT department has cut off my in-room internet. Posts will be sparse, so check Slashdot and Wired yourself. Also: it's sunny and warm in England. Remarkable.

Forty years to figure out that light travels faster in air than glass. Next-gen fiber optics will be hollow tubes filled with air. Sometimes the obvious answers take the longest.

Roundup of interesting links: media consolidation is scary but maybe not that bad, robot-eels are scarier, the dot-com crash is overhyped just like the boom was, actual layoffs are minimal and tech jobs remain plentiful. Invest now while stocks are undervalued. Also, websites desperately need phone-bill micropayments.

Got a data entry job after two weeks broke on vacation. MSIE is a security disaster, Netscape is garbage, Mozilla shows promise but crawls. The MSIE patch doesn't even fix it, meaning HTML emails can execute arbitrary code. I miss when email viruses were just hoaxes.

Flying cars are getting closer to reality. The SkyCar looks amazing but needs a 70-meter landing circle, so driveway parking isn't happening anytime soon. Still, it looks like the Mach 5!