Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Microsoft on the investment of a cool $1B in OpenAI: The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies’ shared principles on ethics and trust. This will create the…
Fisherman, Lackawanna State Park – July 2019 "I once saw a pelican out here."
Zac Bowden: It's fair to say that in 2019, Microsoft is "all-in" on the Android platform thanks to its efforts like the Microsoft Launcher, Edge, and Office, all first-class experiences on Android smartphones around the world. I'm glad Bowden wrote this post. I've been wanting to. Longtime readers of my blog will know that I liked Windows Phone…
Hudson Valley Balloon Festival, Rhinebeck, New York – July 2019 A beautiful day in New York to watch these things float away.
Eliza, sunset – September 2018 I remember this as a gorgeous early fall evening with Eliza and friends.
👉 Brent Simmons: Here’s the thing: blogging is like any other human activity — some people stop and other people start. It’s natural.
Jonathan Snook, on his learning curve when joining a new organization that uses React: When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure I was wrapping…
If you go to any scenic area in the United States you'll see countless warning, prohibited, and no trespassing signs. In some areas it nearly ruins the experience of seeing some of these amazing places. In Iceland, however, you don't see many at all. Icelanders are extremely welcoming to tourists and its landscape is relatively unmarred by these…
So Facebook, among others, announced a new cryptocurrency and blockchain called Libra. You've likely already seen the headlines. But perhaps you're wondering what it means, what makes Libra any different than, say, Bitcoin, or perhaps you have other questions. I did too. So I've rounded up a few links that helped me gain some perspective on this announcement….
Om: I find using a 24mm wide angle lens, a 90 mm medium telephoto, or a 280 mm tele lens akin to using saffron in my rice or black salt in my lentils – flavors that are beautiful in their restraint. I like reading his perspective on this. Less is definitely more. And constraints breed creativity. It is…
Jean MacDonald: The Discover timeline has evolved and will continue to evolve with the community. The guidelines will evolve too. We want to have additional curators from the community. We need to build some tools to make that possible. It would be particularly nice to have curators who can encourage discussions and connections in languages other than English….
Brent Simmons: Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT. We were all…
waffle: Whether I’ll like the outcome or not, the cards are stacked for Apple to weigh in heavily on all these things (including possibly by inaction, to focus much more on iOS) come Monday. If optimism left me easily, I would be typing this on a capable PC laptop instead (although possibly swearing equally at a UWP Windows…
👉 Alex Hoffmann: This week’s WWDC is going to be a make-or-break situation for me. It’s going to determine whether I will continue to consider Apple’s tablets worthwhile or if I’m going to move to a Microsoft Surface Pro once they release one with USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. I'm telling you. This is an important one on many fronts. /via…
Random WWDC 2019 thoughts: The iPadOS updates look like a good start to a new OS just for iPad. Esp. connecting storage. Looking forward to 3 years from now. Imagine how much more capable than iOS it will be. The Mac Pro isn't for me but I'm very glad it exists. The performance really is mind-blowing. The new…
I touched on this topic in 2017 in How do you get work?. But let me just pull one sentence from that post: The clear way to get work is to share work. The same thing goes for getting "noticed" if that is something you want or need. You have to put things out into the world, and…
Riva-Melissa Tez, who recently joined Intel, on making things: Lastly, one of my concerns of our generation is that we’re talking too much and not building enough, partially spurred on by the immediate reward mechanisms of social media. We seem to think we can all invest in or inspire hypothetical others into building the futures that we want….
Khoi Vihn, in an interview on Own Your Content: It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.” Writing in general and the blog in particular has amplified everything that I’ve done in my career, effectively broadcasting my career in…
Zac Bowden, writing for Windows Central: Windows Update received some pretty significant upgrades with the May 2019 Update, and it's good news for users. Microsoft is backing off its heavy-handedness when it comes to forcing updates onto users. Starting this month, users will no longer be forced to install new feature updates unless they explicitly click on an…
Neat feature from Micro.blog. Here is Manton Reece, from his personal blog, on the new feature: You can now follow blogs in the Micro.blog timeline, even if the blogger hasn’t yet registered on Micro.blog. Manton describes this feature as another type of "username". I understand why he's framing it that way but I'm unsure if it is the…
Recorded March 11, 2018. A photo I took while hiking this same day. A little over a year ago I went for a short hike in the snow just after returning from a trip to Kentucky and just before starting my job at Jujama. Side note: I record tons of these audio bits that I never get around…
Gjáin, Stangarvegur, Iceland – September, 2018 Earth's history is written within it.
Taughannock Falls, Trumansburg, New York – May 2019 Had a nice weekend up north in an Airbnb with friends along the western shoreline of Cayuga Lake. The falls were running well with the spring rains.
The Creek, by Rolf Nylinder is my favorite video on YouTube so far this year. The techniques and tools are all invisible lending way to only the story. I try to explain this to those whose videos I respect but that could be improved. So typically on YouTube it is about the gear. The drone shot looks like…