'Immigration officer'
On the bottom of the brochure it said with bold reassurance: 'You have the right to free movement at all times.'
Redeem Tomorrow
Writing about technology, culture and a future worth living in by Danilo Campos.
Latest posts
You should watch Silo
Silo is a show you need to see: a story about power, animated by a powerful cast, with music and production design that will knock you out.
LLMs won't save labor when you use them like this
There are obvious uses and benefits to a technology that can extrude workable patterns of information, especially code. But uncritical use of that code is going to create a real mess.
'Layoff'
It was this way across the company, Alejandra found, her phone lighting up with backchannel gossip as she walked. Big round of layoffs that also vaporized whole layers of middle management, and plenty of executives as well.
A future beyond AI
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” Similarly, a good investor or corporate strategist should be imagining the changing demands of an LLM-saturated world.
Despair: The imagination terminator
None of that imagination can be built on the quicksand nihilism of despair. Despair is a dead end. Despair is the siren song of futility, relieving of us of the burden to dream and work for a future that's actually worth living in.
Sorry, I still want to build technology
I think it's worth staying curious, imagining how new technologies can be a springboard for your creativity, and for those your creativity can serve.
The rich have a drug and they'll never get enough of it
This isn't a sob story. It worked out fine. One time I made that much money in two months.
'General Intelligence'
This was the hardest part for outsiders to grasp, even though to him it was the most obvious. He explained, with an indulgent smile, "RATHE works at a speed that is many multiples of our own minds. Orders of magnitude faster, in fact."
No hate, no hype: Apple's vision for Spatial Computing
So if we can't create actual 3D holograms in physical space, we have one fall-back position to accomplish a similar experience. We can instead interpose an illusion over the eyes that simulates the existence of 3D images in the physical space around us.
'The Announcement'
I'm sorry, that's vulgar, but I want to be really clear that this part of the message is narrowly targeted. It is not for 99.99% of you. I'm going to get to you, but first I need to address the pigfuckers who are going to get me killed.
Solace from the machine
Mine was not a happy, peaceful or emotionally supportive childhood. But technology placed a floor on the worst of it. When I confront, with adult eyes, the acute emptiness I carried every day between the ages of 10 and 15, I'm shocked I got through any of it.
The average AI criticism has gotten lazy, and that's dangerous
Most of the AI criticism you'll hear on any given digital street corner is lazy as hell. We have to up our game if we want a future worth living in.
ChatGPT has forever changed my career
In each case, missing pieces of context might have derailed my sense of progress and confidence, prematurely ending my coding session. Instead, ChatGPT gave me enough useful guidance that I could overcome my roadblocks and deliver on my next requirement.
If you can use open source, you can build hardware
I'm telling you: we're at a special moment here. The labor savings of open source, the composability, the fun: all of it has come to hardware. You can build things that solve real problems for yourself.
The privilege of knowledge work in climate crisis
As a knowledge worker, I have protections against the growing climate crisis not every worker shares. The second major weather disaster in six months brings this home to me.
Cyberspace: The case for Augmented Reality
Apple put us all on notice this week that we're on the threshold of proper AR. The era of ostrich malarkey is at an end.
Leviathan Wakes: the case for Apple's Vision Pro
After years of quiet work beneath the surface, Apple's AR project is upon us, barely at the border of the technologically possible. It's our best chance yet to explore a future beyond fixed displays.
Fandom: The grand unified business case for developer experience
A developer tools business has a funnel like anyone else. At the top of the funnel are people with problems. At the bottom of the funnel are people who depend on your tool to solve those problems, and hopefully love you for it.
Building a business in 2023 (mine)
Over two decades, I've had some success building systems that made me money on the internet. I've never had a better time doing it than I have in the last few months.
Twitter, the real-time consensus engine
Why did so many disparate groups all agree it was worth so much time and energy? for the last decade, Twitter has occupied a unique role: it is an engine for synthesizing and proliferating consensus, in real-time, across every conceivable topic of political and cultural concern. In this, it was a unique form of popular power, with each voice having potential standing in a given beef.
The science fiction of Apple Computer
Apple's turnaround was situated during a dramatic moment in hardware evolution, where things were simultaneously shrinking and increasing in power. What was casually termed innovation was Apple's relentless application of emerging technologies to genuine consumer needs and frustrations.
The modern web and Redeem Tomorrow's new site
All I have to do is make a fresh commit to my site’s GitHub repo, and Netlify will update my site with the new content. Whatever automated tasks I want to do during this phase, I can. I feel like I have all the power of what we’d call “full-stack” applications, for my blogging purposes, but with none of the costs or maintenance downsides.
Replicate's Cog project is a watershed moment for AI
A future where Pattern Synthesis is a dominant technical paradigm is one where the models themselves are malleable, first-class development targets, ready for experimentation and weekend tinkering. Cog makes this possible.
Succession is a civics lesson
HBO's Succession, now in its fourth and final season, brings a truck-mounted spotlight to the mechanics of inequality. It's a fast-paced education in how late-capitalist power actually functions: the interactions between wealth, corporations, civic institutions and everyday people.
A major difference between LLMs and cryptocurrencies
This is the complexity of the moment with pattern synthesis engines (“AI”, LLMs, etc). Regardless of how our personal feelings interact with the space, it is already creating outcomes for people.
What if Bill Gates is right about AI?
So as an exercise, let’s grant his premise for a moment. Let’s treat him as an expert witness. What would it mean if he was right? What can we learn about the shape of AI’s path based on the analogies of previous epochs?
Retrospective on a dying technology cycle, part 4: What comes next?
Contents Why disruption is inevitable “Artificial” “intelligence” Remote work The next iteration of the web Excess computing capacity Reality, but with shit in front of your eyes Lasting discipline, sober betting, and a green revolution I quit my job a few weeks ago. Working with the crew at Glitch.com was a highlight of my career. Making technology and digital expression more accessible is one of…
The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz, wants to talk about social stratification
Contents Frozen mobility …but am I also the oppressor? A thesis for a better world A speculative fiction author has four jobs: Imagination . Find us a fresh lens. Show us a place we’ve never been, or a perspective on the mundane that we’ve never seen. Inject tangible energy into our imagination systems. Timely insight . Help us understand our world in this moment. Help us see the systems that…
Retrospective on a dying technology cycle, part 3: Venture Capital and an economy on life support
Contents Cheap scale The bargain of Venture Capital Going whackadoodle There’s a situation here This stuff was not unique to GitHub Crypto craze What comes next After leaving my job to build apps in 2009, life took on some hard math. I only had so much money saved up. While I was making around $1,000 monthly from the App Store, the gap between my income and expenses was leaving me in the red. So…
Retrospective on a dying technology cycle, part 2: Open Source and the Cloud
Contents What is Open Source, anyway? It’s in the cloud Next [Previously: Mobile] Though it rescued me from insolvency, I grew to hate my job at Aurora Feint. Two months into the gig, Apple Sherlocked us, sending the company into a series of endless pivots that lasted four to six weeks each. The engineers were crunching, working evenings and weekends, only to throw away their work and start again,…
Retrospective on a dying technology cycle, part 1: Mobile
Contents Animating forces New platforms and a digital land rush The promise of a vast green field The gig economy and the automated supervisor The attention economy Mobile ossification Next I missed the introduction of the original iPad. Instead of watching Steve Jobs unveil his bulky slab of aluminum and glass, I was picking my way through the streets of downtown Burlingame. I’d spent what was…
Developer success is about paying the rent
I look at developer experience as a nested set of microeconomic problems. A well-optimized DX makes the most of the individual and team labor needed to: Learn developer tools, from APIs to design patterns to integration strategies Apply these tools to the developer’s specific domain and goals Debug outcomes to arrive at a reasonably robust, predictable, correct implementation Successfully ship…
Dev Diaries: storytelling builds a core of community experts
Contents Software storytelling Broader community lessons for all projects Stellaris is a strategy game where players can build the stellar empire of their dreams. By navigating a series of interlocking economic, scientific and political systems, players create a unique storyline of exploration and contact with dozens of species. On a spectrum of simplicity versus complexity, this is at the far…
I owe my career to Second Life's developer experience
I want to talk about the broad lessons of Second Life, as a developer experience. I want to talk about how it’s possible to create an environment that is so creatively fertile, someone could stumble backwards into learning code, changing their first life forever.
'Simulations'
“It’s not good,” came the voice of Sidney, our VP of Special Projects, through my earpiece. “Every time he comes out of it, he’s irritable within half an hour, demands to go back.” “He can’t even last 30 minutes?” “He got as far as an hour this morning, but he shattered a vase doing it.” With Denny’s taste, that was at least a 10 million dollar tantrum. I winced, imagining the staff having to sort…
Grasping the true scale of inequality
Contents Inequality is foremost a matter of time Aside: median vs average Median annual income as the unit of time-for-work Time leverage by annual compensation Time leverage by wealth Inhuman leverage There’s a problem with understanding inequality at the modern scale. Our minds struggle to make sense of a “billion” things. Much less tens or hundreds of billions of things. Our minds further…
When your salary requires you not understand the labor movement
Contents Unions aren’t forming because they’re popular; they’re popular because they’ve become urgently needed and they’re forming for the same reason I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for something like 18 years now. I appreciate John Gruber’s insights on Apple, and find him more right than not in analyzing their products, strategy and motivations. Hell, I survived a layoff in 2020 by buying an…
Developer experience: the fine art of making tools and platforms suck less
Contents Developer experience is stewardship and conservation of precious cognitive resources, thereby maximizing accomplishment Example: Rust Optimize your conversion funnel Love it or not, developer experience is buzz that’s here to stay. As the next generation of technology firms is born, while the last generation struggles to stay relevant, one of the best ways to grasp and hold a growth…
ZSA Moonlander: as good as cybernetic interfaces get without going surgical
Contents The adjustment Making it yours Design You can be more comfortable and more effective I had two reasons for buying ZSA’s Moonlander split keyboard: It looks badass My shoulders felt like chopped meat from decades of communing with the computer Two years into serious, regular use, I can’t imagine life without this keyboard. Even typing that sentence makes me want to head back to the…
The invisible skill at the heart of every technologist
There’s a skill that’s core to success at all levels of software development, but it hides like dark matter: inferred, rather than observed, lurking beyond description and discussion. On a gut level, we know it’s necessary to the work, but we don’t often know how to teach it. You’ve either got it or you don’t in the perception of the average workplace. Let’s call this skill investigative…
The Economist, Apr 23, 2033: America to further cannibalise itself with new Labour Reserve Board targets
I have a guy who occasionally hooks me up with exotic data : content from alternative universes, evidence of paths not taken, and even the occasional dispatch from the future. This article will appear in a 2033 issue of The Economist —unless we change our course. America’s newest fiscal bureaucracy isn’t mincing words: they’re falling behind. Setting a 2034 target for 500,000 additional bodies in…
Developer experience: the basics
Contents The experience of getting things done Developer tools: pickaxes in a gold rush Leverage within the developer experience domain Ergonomics and abstractions Documentation, reference and education Community and ecosystem Developer experience: the business cases This doesn’t have to be hard Periodically, tech Twitter swells with a discourse I find to be weirdly unproductive: people arguing…
reMarkable 2: a magical disppointment
Contents ePaper and the valley of mediocrity It’s just too bad ‘Note: Custom templates aren’t supported on reMarkable 1 or 2.’ Ugh, the sync is bad Yet I love it anyway I’m obsessed with artifacts of the future. Always have been. I didn’t save money as a kid. I blew every dollar I earned on electronics and computing devices. It’s a compulsion I’ve only slightly tamed in adulthood. When I…
Life in the time of dragons
Contents A business is a protocol But we haven’t gotten to the runtime yet Runtimes all the way down Here be dragons Protocols rule everything around us. In the digital age, that word has a specific meaning: you might imagine the protocols that govern WiFi, or your web browser. Computer protocols enable interoperation, while facilitating common tasks. They specify how data should be encoded, how…
Wordle: A factional skirmish for the soul of technology
Contents Zack Shakked gushes about the game he cloned.A schism in tech Money fetishist? Computing’s true believers The beef So check out today’s Twitter beef. You know all those emoji squares that have been popping up everywhere? That’s Wordle . It’s a bracingly earnest word puzzle web app deliberately built to a non-commercial ethos. Wordle is a darling of the press because of its artisanal,…
Building a native macOS configurator for Adafruit's Macropad
Contents Problem: configuration and iteration Speaking to the Macropad How do you say ‘red’? Enter JSON A tool to create tools “How’d you do that?” Find an existing, successful artifact Write down your unknowns Learn how to communicate Build a bridge Fuck around, find out Don’t let perfect be the enemy of done What about the configurator? Adafruit’s Macropad is an absolute hardware delight: a…
Epic's ambitious plan for Unreal Engine and content-as-a-service
Re: https://twitter.com/mikeBithell/status/1469657086678245376 Fascinating twitter thread by game professional Mike Bithell about the strategy Unreal is telegraphing with their recent Matrix Awakens tech demo : Epic is attempting to flip the economics of game production towards film production. In games, we build everything, so (and this is over simplification) game assets are a fixed cost. If I…
VR revolution: any day now
Contents Once upon a time Oculus Quest 2: surprisingly okay The software is meh What about Apple? Any day now Oculus Quest 2 is a decent device that costs a bit less than a nice iPad, and far less than a television and console. From a performance perspective, it’s surprisingly decent. I’m no fan of Facebook, but curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed a Quest 2 to find out if we were any closer…
Amazon: bleeding institutional knowledge through attrition
Re: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/ra7tjf/i_lasted_three_minutes_at_amazon/ Here’s a post from someone in the r/antiwork subreddit detailing their difficulty in getting started in a gig at Amazon: One hour was spent trying to make the surround sound work for endless power points. Another hour was spent by HR basically gloating about how proud she is about catching people faking reasons…