Explorations on the future of personal computing.
Last week I went on my first trip to Sedona. While I’ve spent some time in the red centre of Australia, there is something particular and charming about this ecosystem: towering columns of layered rock, a surprising abundance of life bursting out of the desert floor, and of course the vortexes . I was there for a team gathering, our third since founding Telepath. My co-founders Stephen, Josh and I…
What happens if you take the idea that AI is going to revolutionize computing seriously? You might argue we’re already doing this as an industry: we’ve spent untold billions on frontier models; hype is at fever-pitch; and it seems every app on your computer now has a chat sidebar, soon to be home to an uber-capable AGI. But I fear we are still missing answers to some basic questions, like: what…
Let’s start with a fictional case study. This one’s inspired by user research I’ve been doing into human interactions with language models. Cynthia is planning for her first big solo trip after college: a visit to Australia. It’s been on her bucket list since she was a kid, but she knows very little about where to go, what to do, or how to get around. She starts a conversation with a chat…
The first web browser was read/write, a fact brought to my attention by my colleague Stephen Hood: Berners-Lee’s original Web browser running on NeXT computers showed his vision and had many of the features of current Web browsers. In addition, it included the ability to modify pages from directly inside the browser – the first Web editing capability. ( home.cern ) The original promise of the web…
Or, “Down with the hierarchy-archy” . Let’s talk about the filesystem. Somewhere deep in MIT, around 1965, a group of researchers were putting the finishing touches on their new computer operating system, Multics . One of the breakthrough features? A “hierarchical, location-addressable” filesystem. Instead of dealing with an unstructured list of data on your computer, you could collect data in…
If you haven’t used an app in a long time it should start collecting dust as a suggestion to delete it pic.twitter.com/7VyUBmp0a3 — Neil Sardesai (@neilsardesai) April 3, 2021 We often think things like “dust” or “decay” as downsides of the physical world. One big benefit of cloud computing is that nothing decays – your data is stored forever, ethereally, somewhere out there . But decay,…