The main goals of a technical interview are to assess what the candidate knows, how they explain what they know, and how they reason: how they handle being pushed beyond their limit of firm knowledge and have to rationally speculate. Common failure modes are: clamming up being unwilling to reason or share their thought process, bullshitting confidently and erroneously prognosticating, and not sani...
Continue readingAmazing: Didn’t see the Watch Ultra coming - amazing battery life and durability, astonished that they’ve obsoleted dive computers. Neat improvements to mic and speaker, tho I’m not sure how much the “emergency siren” is gonna help at ~85dB versus, say, yelling?Personal locator beacons now possibly obsolete - but satellite SOS doesn’t compete with the T-Mobile/Starlink deal since it’s extremely lo...
Continue readingThe 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 but contiguous world. The depth of rich and exciting comp...
Continue readingI’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!...
Continue readingI 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 to an earnest belief that in helping people share with each other we would help people feel better connected to eac...
Continue reading> BLRB is shutting down. All accounts, content, and pages will be deleted in the coming days....
Continue readingToday 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! I spent the earlier part of the week wiring my home with 10G capable switches and getting a 10G copper Thunderbolt 3 interface for my notebook — which means that for the first time in...
Continue readingThe Meta announcement is interesting and unexpected....
Continue readingThe 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 can. Finally at the end of your career you retire, have some fun, travel a bit, then die. We can call these stages: Learn, Work, Play and they are...
Continue readingI 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....
Continue readingBlessing...
Continue readingThis 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 a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my profici...
Continue readingThis 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 a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my profici...
Continue readingHow can you make it less likely you’ll be hacked? Only a fool would describe any setup as “hacker proof”, but with every meaningful effort to adopt best practices, you’ll close off holes that will make it easy to attack you....
Continue readingOne of the common online retail experiences is to show a product or service rating with one to five stars. But should we weight each rating equally? What makes a given rating more or less helpful to discerning whether the product is any good or what the critical deficiencies are?...
Continue readingThis is an idea for a startup that should probably exist and then get acquired by AirBNB or the like. I’m not planning on starting this company myself. If you do end up making it or have already done so, please get in touch....
Continue readingJust as an FYI since I wasn’t able to find this information elsewhere…...
Continue readingSo Apple came out with their new M1 based laptops and Mac Mini. The new MacBook Air looks like a nice fit for a college laptop: going completely fanless was a bold choice, though it’s disappointing that they said literally nothing about the camera optics namely something better than the very tired 720p from cam on the last few generations given that this is such a point of excellence and pride for...
Continue readingOn Wednesday evenings for the past few months I have been part of a new class run by the Aspen Institute where a small cohort of experienced tech leaders have been learning about public policy and how to drive change in the federal government. It was announced today....
Continue readingMy name is David Weekly. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for nearly 25 years now, invested in 60+ startups, created mexican.vc returning >11x cash-on-cash, founded three companies and two non-profits. I’ve created corporate R&D teams at both Facebook and Google presenting our team’s work to the CEO, and seen a huge amount of innovation happen everywhere from garages to emerging markets to big, publicl...
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