Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
My favorite piece of technology in science fiction isn't lightsabers, flying spaceships, or even robots. It's AI. But not just any AI. My favorite is the one in the TV show The Expanse. If you watch The Expanse, the most advanced technology is, of course, the Epstein drive (an unfortunate name in this day and age). In their universe, humanity can travel to distant planets, the Belt, and Mars. Mars has the most high-tech military, which is incredibly cool. But the AI is still what impresses me most. If you watched the show, you're probably wondering what the hell I'm talking about right now. Because there is no mention of AI ever. The AI is barely visible. In fact, it's not visible at all. Most of the time, there aren't even voices. Instead, their computer interfaces respond directly to voice and gesture commands without returning any sass.
At an old job, we used WordPress for the companion blog for our web services. This website was getting hacked every couple of weeks. We had a process in place to open all the WordPress pages, generate the cache, then remove write permissions on the files.
After the acquisition by a much larger company, security became a top priority. Our company occupied three tall buildings, each at least 13 stories high. Key card readers were installed next to every entrance, every elevator car, and even at the parking lot entrance, which itself was eight stories tall.
Ten years ago, I was in a dark season. My first startup had cratered. Confidence, gone. I would walk for hours to clear my head, often through parts of the city we typically hurry past. One Tuesday, I saw a man sitting outside a boarded-up storefront. He was weathered, his eyes holding a quiet dignity. But I was fixated on a problem to solve. He only had one shoe. The right foot was wrapped in a frayed plastic bag.
After watching a Veritasium video, I feel a surge of intellectual confidence. I feel smarter. Whether it's a video on lasers or quantum physics, it seems like I have a better grasp on the subject. I finally get it. Derek and his crew just have a way of simplifying complex ideas, unraveling their mysteries, and lifting your confidence as each term is explained.
There's a strange contradiction happening in tech right now. Companies are forcing employees to integrate AI into their workflows, celebrating productivity gains and AI-assisted everything. Yet when job candidates use AI during interviews, they're treated like they've committed career suicide.
From time to time, I'll hop on someone else's computer to browse the web and I feel an intense revulsion. Every page you visit is littered with ads. The top has ads, both left and right sidebars have ads, there are ads between paragraphs, there are ads at the bottom. And if you mentally ignore them, clicking at random places on the page will trigger a popup. How can you even read anything with all these distractions trying to grab your attention?
There was a question on Hacker News where a user asked how he could ensure his writing would endure for a hundred years. At first, I treated it as a technology problem. Storage, formats, domains, backups. If the goal is durability, then the best technology we've invented so far is still paper. Print it. Put it on a shelf. Problem solved.
There was a time when building a good UI was really hard. My default Microsoft Word window had at least five toolbars. My web browser opened to Yahoo, where finding anything felt impossible. Internet Explorer sprouted toolbars I never remembered installing. We crammed features into every nook and cranny of the screen.
My mother handed me her phone a couple days ago. "Do you think this is true?" she asked, her finger hovering over a video about new curfew laws coming to California, featuring Denzel Washington's take on the matter. I'm so proud that she's learned to ask this question now instead of immediately sharing. But as she waited for my response, I noticed she had already watched the entire video.
