Writing about design, philosophy, and technology.
Some of the best advice I ever received came years ago from a coworker named Joe. Joe always had a few side-projects going on—weird and wonderful mashups of electronics, software, and fabrication of just about every kind: welding, woodwork, 3D printing, you name it. His projects were the kinds of things you might catch at your local Maker Faire, or—if you’re that kind of person—Burning Man. What I…
It’s been quiet around here. Too quiet. I haven’t published much in the past three months. I haven’t read much during that time either. Instead, I’ve spent most of that time building. As the entire software industry grapples with what the hell it means to have machines that can now crank out code faster and at higher quality than most humans, I’ve been doing what I always do when the pundits…
A list, in no particular order, of things I think more people should try or know about. Mindfulness in plain english Hiking north of the Arctic Circle along Sweden’s Kungsleden How to start and feed a sourdough starter Baking something special for someone you love What it’s like to be a bat Pair reading The Zen poetry of Taigu Ryōkan Spending a week in a silent meditation retreat Alan Watts’ Life…
The grand prophecy of agentic programming goes something like this: in the not-so-distant future, we puny humans—limited as we are by our tiny working memory and limited cognitive abilities—will no longer build software “by hand.” Programmers will no longer write code as we once did in days of yore, keystroke by painstaking keystroke. Instead, we will orchestrate the work of software development,…
In Among the Agents , Dean Ball writes: I joke sometimes that using AI, and especially using coding agents, is a bit like playing the piano. The piano is the easiest instrument to begin playing (anyone can produce a satisfying tone with no training or skill on a piano, which is not true of, say, a flute or a violin), yet the hardest to master in the long run. AI presents the greatest opportunity…
For decades after Racter first composed The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed (and likely for decades before that), the creation of machines that compose poetry has served as a quixotic pursuit for a small subset of artist-computer scientists enthralled with the challenges of computational linguistics. Today, however, such a pursuit feels quaint. In the past few years, the computational…
It was a year of two halves. On the evening of the last day of May, during what was an unusually warm week for late spring in Northern California, I sat in a frigid ICU on the first floor of our local hospital, holding my wife’s hand, watching her chest rise and fall as the ventilator puffed and huffed its perfect machine rhythm. Open heart surgery was on nobody’s bingo card this year. But there I…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the many metaphors we use as shorthand for describing and understanding large language models (LLMs). Has any technology in the history of humankind amassed such a rich and diverse collection in such a short amount of time? Let’s quickly go through the list: First, the Silicon Valley hype machine often describes LLMs in the rosiest of hues, calling them…
It is reading season. I know because the nights have grown long, and I just finished hoisting a live tree up a flight of stairs, festooning it with lights, and spending far too much time protecting it from repeated attack by our feline housemates. After all that, and putting the kids to sleep, I just want to hole up with a good book. Like a squirrel collecting nuts, I collect book recommendations.…
In Technology and the Lifeworld , philosopher of technology Don Ihde discusses how the invention of the clock radically shifted both humankind’s perception of time, as well as what we determined to be most salient in the measurement of time. With clocks, rather than “read the heavens” to ascertain the time of day, we now read a machine. The clock thus redirected our collective focus from the…