Blog

252 posts from 1996 to present • Page 2 of 11

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2023

QR Codes and Trust Chains

2 min read

Trust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......

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School Board: Masters in Governance

2 min read

About a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official o...

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Human Adaptability

2 min read

Human adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of i...

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Infinite Depth Tech Interview Questions

5 min read

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 m...

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2022

Apple Sep 2022 Announcement / Reactions

6 min read

Amazing: 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, s...

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The Metaverse is a Bad Idea

5 min read

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 optic...

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Why We Built Howdy

4 min read

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!...

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A "Ring" Theory of Social Media & Closeness

4 min read

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 populatio...

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2021

Ten Gig Is Here.

11 min read

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! I spent the earlier part of the we...

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Thoughts on Life and Education

16 min read

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...

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Spring 2021 Apple Announcement Reactions

8 min read

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....

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Learning and Proficiency

4 min read

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...

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Learning & Proficiency

4 min read

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...

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Staying Secure In 2021

5 min read

How 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....

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Starflation

5 min read

One 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...

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2020

Startup Concept: StayGreat™

3 min read

This 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....

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Apple Silicon: Where We’re at & What’s Next

4 min read

So 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 op...

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TELI: Bridging Silicon Valley & DC

2 min read

On 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...

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