Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
How fast is a horse? I was kinda baffled when I got the answer. For the average horse, one grazing in nature or on a ranch, they can go between 20 to 30 miles per hour. Doesn't that feel slow? What about race horses? I don't have a horse to clock it myself, so I'm relying on petmd.com. The website tells me that the English Thoroughbred can run for up to 44 miles per hour. It's fast alright. But I was going just as fast on my short commute to the office, and it didn't feel like I was racing at all.
When I moved to a new apartment with my family, the cable company we were used to wasn't available. We had to settle for Dish Network. I wasn't too happy about making that switch, but something on their website caught my attention. For an additional $5 a month, I could have access to DVR. I switched immediately.
When I started 2025, I set myself a simple challenge: write consistently and see if I could reclaim some of the audience this blog once had. In 2024, I had published just 4 posts and had only a handful of RSS subscribers. It felt like shouting into the void.
Have you ever joined a large organization? One with a quarter million employees? Their process is fascinating. You receive hundreds of emails to set up different software. You get a machine mailed to you. Your badge comes from FedEx. The onboarding process is long and tedious. When you finally get an account set up, they direct you to Jira, where several other steps need to be completed before you can start working.
What does it mean when we say that investors are subsidizing the price of a service? We often hear that ChatGPT is not profitable, despite some users paying $20 a month, or others up to $200 a month. The business is still losing money despite everything we're paying. To stay afloat, OpenAI and other AI companies have to use money from their investors to cover operations until they find a way to generate sustainable income.
I was watching a movie when I got a random notification from Google Maps on my phone. I never get notifications from this app unless I'm doing turn-by-turn navigation. This one was titled "Timeline," and Google was requesting if I wanted to turn on backups for this feature. This section of Google Maps that I had never visited drew a timeline of every place I've ever visited: home, work, grocery store, etc. All this without me explicitly asking it to track these things. Now I see where I go to lunch every day, I see where I walk, drive, shop, and everything in between. It got me thinking: All the tools for mass surveillance are in place. And they are not going away.
A few years back, I worked at an AI startup as the first hired engineer. All of us could fit in a four-space cubicle, sharing an office with multiple startups. As you can imagine, when you're trying to get a startup off the ground, you have to put in the hours. Every day I would drive to the beautiful city of Venice Beach, California, cram into our little space, and type as much code as I could fit in a day. Then I would pack the laptop back into my bag and drive right back home.
I had a 383-day streak on Duolingo. Three hundred and eighty-three days of that green owl peeking through my notifications, reminding me that my streak was in danger. I wrote about how I never actually learned Spanish from Duo, but I kept coming back. Not for the language, but for the streak. The number itself became the point.
When OpenAI released the first version of Sora, I was excited. For years, I'd had this short story sitting on my hard drive, something I'd written long ago and always dreamed of bringing to life as a short film. The only problem was I didn't have the expertise to shoot a movie, and my Blender 3D skills are rusty for lack of use. But Sora promised something different. I could upload my sketches, input my script, and generate the film in my mind. The creative barrier had finally been lifted.
This is a bit of a rant. Maybe my eyes are not as good as they used to be. When I read an article that has pictures on them, I like to zoom in to see the details. You might think this makes no sense, I just have to pinch the screen to zoom in. You would be right, but some websites intentionally prevent you from zooming in.
