Technology, Programming, Startups, Trendspotting by Michael Mahemoff
In no particular order, here are the top trends and product directions I’ll be watching out for in 2025. Web automation and AI browsers Is this the year AI agents break out? I won’t go that far, but the piping is underway and the web will be a key part of it. Using ChatGPT today still feels like talking to someone who wakes up to answer a question, then goes into hibernation until you ask it…
Podcasts ascend in cultural influence Four-year cycles - whether elections, Olympics, or World Cup - have long been a revealing way to observe changes in technology. (Fun fact: four years represents a more than a tripling in tech capability, if you take Moore’s Law as a generality, i.e. log(4)/log(1.5) ~= 3.4 ). In this election cycle, podcasts were a hot topic, with some dubbing it “The Podcast…
Here is a new usage pattern I came up with recently. An Obsidian vault with folders like this, one per project: blog/ # jekyll blog hosted on github-pages game/ # web game project Now what’s significant about the folders is they are each separate Git projects. So the structure in more detail looks like this: blog/ +--.git/ +--_drafts/ +--posts/ +--README.md +--(etc) game/ # web game project…
As I prepare this year’s review and predictions posts, here’s a grading of my tech predictions from a year ago. Search begins its long decline (Grade: A) I think this prediction was mostly accurate. Firstly, there is now broad awareness that the entire web is filled with junk, with the phenomenon conveniently given its own label. Below is Google Trend results for “Dead Internet Theory” (yes I get…
Search begins its long decline AI chat is, quite simply, a superior experience to search in many cases. You get an answer right away instead of trawling through a dozen spammy search results, each time threading the needle through ads, newsletter prompts, and cookie warnings. In 2024, the gap will widen as LLMs keep improving while search quality deteriorates in the wake of an abundance of…
Happy New Year, dear readers. These were the tech stories that interested me most in 2023, along with my commentary. Society scrambled to deal with the unexpected arrival of alien intelligence For all their sophistication, large language models are still poorly understood, with researchers having to rely on trial-and-error and human assessments to make any sorts of meaningful predictions about…
I recently needed to write a blog post. Being a developer, this naturally amounted to spendinig half a day tinkering with the blog infrastructure. In lieu of the post I never wrote, here is a little overview of the blog infrastructure, which is a Jekyll instance, published to Github pages, running on Github Codespaces. As a quick background, I migrated the blog from WordPress a few years ago as I…
I’ve been getting back into Chromebooks recently. They’ve always been fabulously lightweight, low on admin headaches, and fast per dollar spent, but there are extra benefits nowadays. Chromebooks: Power-packed with Google Play and Linux Now that they have Google Play built in, they work fabulously offline for all the platforms who never got the offline web memo. Particularly joyous is mile-high…
If only man pages were as good as the first Google result, I idly tweeted while trying to coerce curl into post a form [1]. The ensuing conversation led me to think about exactly what is missing in man pages. When I say “the first Google result”, I’m not talking about StackOverflow in this case. We can all agree Stack has mystic levels of ability to answer the question your man page can’t, or not…
Here’s just a few random thoughts on Black Mirror Bandersnatch , which came out yesterday. I’d have posted these as a few lazy tweets, but didn’t want to post spoilers there. Haven’t watched it yet? Congratulations, you have a life. But go watch it anyway. Binge the first four seasons beforehand if you haven’t seen them yet. Also worth it. Thoughts with some very mild spoilers ahead: "Choose Your…