Interconnected

I watched the trailer for the new Harry Potter TV series on HBO. My overwhelming feeling is that it is so absurdly redundant to make this. Not even reimagined but to cosplay the movies so slavishly… the sets look the same, that same teacher with the same hat and the same Scottish accent… To make the series is a bonfire of human creative effort, think of what could have been done instead. I love it, I’m in awe at the endeavour. Did you ever watch Teletubbies? There was always a video interlude.…

I published my perfect iPhone weather app, and my guess is that you won’t want it. Premise: Why doesn’t my weather app tell me the weather yesterday? I can never plan based on numerical temperature, etc. Am I going to be walking outdoors today? Should I take a jacket? Numbers are so abstract. Too much thought required. HOWEVER: I can mostly remember what I wore yesterday. So all I want to see, from my app, is: oh yeah today is like yesterday but a little warmer. Then I can adjust easily. I…

I updated my Galactic Compass app for iPhone with augmented reality mode. Background: Galactic Compass is a floating green arrow that always points the way to the middle of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years away. Here’s the announcement blog post from 2024. It went kinda viral at the time. It was in the “top free apps” charts at the App Store briefly. In the Travel category. (I keep a list of press mentions over on Acts Not Facts.) Why so popular? Probably because it was early “vibe coding” – I…

1. My favourite translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Wikipedia) - 1,000 year old Persian poetry - is by Robert Graves from 1967. Graves, it turns out, unknowingly based his translations on hoax sources. Which might not have gone down so badly, except that he used the his publication and the miraculous “discovery” of the sources to very publicly and with disproportionate viciousness put the boot into Edward FitzGerald, the established translator at the time. Graves’ translation was…

The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it. The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment. AGI = artificial general intelligence, an AI that exceeds human capability. Alignment = “do what I mean not what I say,” e.g. the instruction “make as many paperclips as possible” (Wikipedia) should result in an efficient factory and does not…

Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update? It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy. (That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.) Why? Three reasons… No more stopped clocks. These clocks are way better at recovering from intermittent network faults like the Wi-Fi dropping or the back-end server changing – including one nasty, rare bug that would affect people for a week at a time then go…

My perfect podcast app would be a long phone call in which I listen to the show and can also talk back to remember things. (Someone build this for me.) It would immeasurably improve my running. Long story short, I added slow runs into the training mix, and had to switch from high tempo music to podcasts because I kept going too fast. BUT genuinely interesting podcasts are a problem because I keep wanting to stop running to take notes. So I end up listening to shows that only scrape past the…

I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember. It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.) This seems absurd. I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey. Like: Frozen 2 in which the entire…

I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI? Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI. But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything. And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy session with your fridge? I mean, at that point what even is a product? i.e. how would you have a single…

I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing. Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year. It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers). I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing around, and how it’s neat to learn new techniques that you can combine together. I talked about…

1. It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck. My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensation. It’s the Peltier effect (the plate is really hot on the back) and the first time I’ve seen a thermoelectric cooler in the wild. Here’s a thermoelectric handheld fan on Alibaba. Three quid each if you’re buying over a…

I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux. Because there’s a lot going on. The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed But the schematic flesh is commercial! The logo on the forehead! Yet she has glossy hair and a spa outfit And is drinking a glass of white wine?? Let’s not get into the red glow through the holes in the face The ad copy is tight af, no messing around:…

Wet lab. “Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away. Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F because the boiling on the surface of your hand makes an insulating quilt. It’s a fun game.…

When we end up voluntary ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like. The underlying tech is currently in research phase. What I mean is that humanoid robots are coming (as previously discussed). And while robots are a mechanical challenge and a software challenge, some people are asking: what if you took that software part and pointed…

Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever. Confession time: I don’t. I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or sending emails for me. But really because of two fears: Data security. I’m cautious of something that can non-deterministically execute and get tricked into emailing confidential info or accidentally delete old photos without…

We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing. It’s our twist on vibe coding firmware, built for instantly loading new device functionality coded by end users. It’s aimed at device developers, like us. We use Resident in all our work. (We = Inanimate.) Resident gives you a code sandbox on ESP32 devices and a driver API to provide hardware control and events. So an end user can push an app over Wi-Fi…

1. I love this terrible fake address generator: We have spent 3 years collecting data from every country to generate this enormous database. …it promises. These are not English addresses: "2 Scott Common Jenniferstad S60 2PT" "4 Matilda Via North Emilychester M20 1BT" "Flat 48v Harrison Motorway Lake Gary EH4 5LQ" Good story: Inside Number 0, John Finnemore. 2. Kentucky Superstitions (1920) by Daniel Lindsey Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas: Some household and domestic life superstitions, from…

You know when I’m home on my own I don’t watch much TV like actual TV, but I do watch music videos on YouTube on the TV. Sometimes new music but often ones I know really well. Music videos are such a vibe. And it’s social too? I’ve spent many evenings with friends that just turn into swapping music vids on the big screen. I seem to listen to music only while doing something else, e.g.: while watching music videos, as above while running while playing Grand Theft Auto and actually that was the…

Now we have abundant apps, we’ve hit a ceiling in good ways to track and share them. For example, Simon Willison’s personal tools: "Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs." Willison lists 80+ useful tools and the search box can see 205. That’s a lot! He has hyper-specific tools like one to track daylight savings changes in California, personal software to help build his newsletter from his blog, and a tool to edit using Strunk & White’s principle to omit needless…

The Wind in the Willows right? Kenneth Grahame, 1908. We all know the children’s story inside-out. Mole and Ratty and gruff Badger and conceited Mr Toad with his motorcars and all their adventures. I picked up the book as an adult - I can’t remember why - and it wasn’t what I expected. This week I have been reading it again and it is again astonishing. I mean… let me share some of the prose with you. This is when Mole encounters the river for the first time. Green turf sloped down to either…

I hack on hardware a whole bunch, at Inanimate and at home. AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in my room and in my hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends. So the second thing I do, every single time, is bring up real-time messaging using JSON over websockets so I can connect my new device to a server, and have it emit events and listen for commands. (The first thing I do is bring up the hardware and get basic blinkenlights.) I want my on-device websockets client to have…

It’s pretty clear that apps and services are all going to have to go headless: that is, they will have to provide access and tools for personal AI agents without any of the visual UI that us humans use today. By services I mean things like: getting a new passport; finding and booking a hotel or a flight; managing your bank account; shopping for t-shirts with a minimum cotton weight from brands similar to ones that you’ve bought from before. Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience…

A brief update on mist, my ephemeral Markdown editor with Google Docs-style comments and suggested edits: mist is now open source with an MIT license, and the mist repo is here on GitHub. (Try mist now and here’s my write-up from February.) What I love about Markdown is that it’s document-first. The formatting travels with the doc. I can’t tell you how many note-taking apps I’ve jumped between with my exact same folder of Markdown notes. The same should be true for collaboration features lik...

Mostly I go to sleep very easily. Like 3 minutes from lights out, max. I’m content, I exercise, I burn my tokens each day, I think that all helps. Often I wake early and think. I’m protective over what goes into my 4am thinking time, I enjoy it. You don’t get to choose what you think about at 4am. It’s inevitably going to be work. So I optimise for having interesting work and I’m very lucky there. Mostly I go back to sleep after a bit. Sometimes I don’t get to sleep easily, for example in 20...

Once upon a time I kept on meeting architects who had ended up working with the web. I asked why. Some good answers: Architects think about how people move between spaces (pages) and what that means for user experience - this was at a time when web designers often came from graphic design and drew more on single page layout Architects think about negative space, and how what you put in a space shapes social behaviour – this was at a time when web before the social web Architects have to wor...

1. The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home. Introduced with this video in 2020: "Yeah, it’s a camera that flies." Sadly not yet on the market. Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-in-the-Sky drone surveillance cameras in 1978 and Mega-City One is not an aspirational template for domestic life but hear me out: Because I would love to be able to text my house “oh did I leave the stove on?” from the bus. And “darn can you find my keys?” in the morning. And “uh there’s that b...