‘Ready Player One’ described a dystopia. Why did we forget that before beginning to build a world of headsets and solitude? — The Metaverse is not a bad idea not because it can’t be built. It’s totally doable, though challenging with dozens of very complex and exciting risks that require solving for: human perception, haptics, foveated rendering, extremely lightweight optics and compute, low-latency network interconnects, and edge processing of a massively sharded…

I’m one of the tiny team that built Howdy, a new voice-first chat application that sends speech & an auto-punctuated transcript to close friends and family. We launched our iOS app in Q1 of 2022 and we’re working on the Android app! Speaking & Reading Humans are really good at talking. Most people…

I had the pleasure of working at Facebook many years ago. It was a very exciting time, where smart engineers from around the world got a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder on problems that impacted a large and growing fraction of the human population. A lot of the excitement was due…

BLRB is shutting down. All accounts, content, and pages will be deleted in the coming days. We really appreciate your trying out BLRB! This was an experiment that we launched in the Fall of 2020 to see if people wanted to publish ad-hoc transcribed voice to the web. As far…

Today Sonic.net installed a 10 gigabit synchronous, unmetered XGS-PON fiber optic link to my home in Redwood City California. The connection will cost me $40/month. My only gripe is that I can’t get static IPs, too! …

What would an education system look like that maximized the potential of all students? — The 20th century model of life can be roughly encapsulated as being in three acts: in the first act, one is educated up to the limit of one’s mental capacity. Then, once full of knowledge, you are sent out into the world to work for as many years as you…

I know the schtick is to “start with the small stuff and then build” but the purple iPhone and reskinning of the Podcast app were pretty underwhelming. There’s so much more Apple could be doing in the podcast production and consumption space. Boo. AirTags: long-expected, they look delightful. A little…

Blessing May your children be filthy, Dirt on their feet, Brambles in hair May they be tired Bags under eyes From reading late under blankets May your house be messy Filled with screams and roars Of laughter and life May your days be filled with light violence Of wrestling and…

This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it has been some 20 years since my primary job was computer programming. It’s quite possible that I would struggle — or even fail — at a number of the technical interviews that I passed in the past. This is not…