I’m Arun Venkatesan, and this is the arun.is newsletter, where I share my current obsessions, inspiration from around the web, behind-the-scenes content, and more.

This week’s issue covers a few things:

• What's new
• The missing piece in voice
• Recommendations

What's new

My DIY modular charging station

We had a mess of chargers across the house and this charging station is my solution. I learned a little about making physical products along the way.

The missing piece in voice

I remember the first time I used an iPhone. It felt magical to move around digital objects with my fingers. It just worked unlike touch screens that came before.

Multi-touch (and associated gestures) was the breakthrough user interface innovation that set the stage for the mobile revolution. Though, the iPhone still required syncing via a wire to a personal computer and mostly had smaller versions of desktop apps.

We didn’t see its true potential until a later innovation — ubiquitous broadband wireless internet. I remember that moment well as I made a FaceTime call from the top of Yosemite falls, surrounded by snow and wilderness.

In the following years, the smartphone hatched new use cases we couldn’t have predicted like ride-hailing, food delivery, and microtransaction-based games.

I can see we are on the precipice of something similar in the world of voice interfaces.

Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant were the iPhone moment for voice. They brought us a new UI paradigm — allowing us to use voice. Yet, they feel limited, with their wake words and small set of supported functions.

Improved voice to text alongside the cognitive power of large language models means that voice interfaces can now understand what we want instead of taking rote orders, but there is one more thing missing — safety.

I’m not talking about existential risks like AI taking over the world or wiping out humanity. I mean issues of privacy, security, loss of control, and misuse. When these voice interfaces can safely use our phones like a trusted assistant, we’ll see ways of computing that we never predicted.

Recommendations

Replacing Guilt

I learned of this book from my friend Ben Mann when he appeared on Lenny’s Rachitsky’s podcast. I almost immediately listened to the audio version and am now working through the text version. The book is all about seeing the world as it is and taking effective action towards whatever we are fighting for.

Ditherpunk

While playing around with the idea of cameras as toys, I returned to one of my favorite iPhone camera apps, BitCam. I then fell down down a rabbit hole about dithering that ended me in this excellent, long blog post about the technique which creates the illusion of a wide color palette.

Daniel Linssen's Typing Challenge

This game is a refreshing remix of a few different genres. You must type letters to navigate around a field, collecting gold letters and avoiding enemies. Delightfully elegant and maddeningly difficult.

That's it for this issue.

As always, this is my personal email, so feel free to respond directly.

Stay curious,
Arun Venkatesan