I. I once knew a wonderful man. He was kind, gentle, and beloved by many. He was so wise that when he graduated from college, Mahatma Gandhi himself handed him his diploma. He was a scholar and a gentleman, blessed with the unique gift of deeply knowing Sanskrit and Hindi. He spent much of his life translating scrolls filled with the wisdom of the ancients into modern language — in pursuit of preserving history.

II. When Mongol troops raided the House of Wisdom and dumped so many manuscripts into the Tigris that “the river ran black with ink”, Muslim chroniclers equated the loss of knowledge to a civilizational catastrophe. Many of the books in the Grand Library of Baghdad were torn apart by pillagers so their leather covers could be made into sandals — compounding the pain of an already destructive act.

III. In 1969, three astronauts planted an American flag on the moon. This event was captured on film and beamed to millions of household television sets, as people across the world shared the experience of witnessing a profound leap for mankind. Our connection to the cosmos had been reshaped — and we still talk about it decades later.

IV. Early internet phenomenons like Charlie the Unicorn, Potter Puppet Pals, and Peanut Butter Jelly Time provided endless entertainment. My older brother introduced me to All Your Base Are Belong to Us, and I showed him lolcats. A few months later, I met a kid I considered sheltered because he’d never heard of Newgrounds — so I showed him everything it had to offer, and we relived the humor together. That rhythm of discovery and sharing lasted for years, as the internet grew at a pace that felt almost unthinkable compared to my early childhood. Continue Reading →

Colleen and I were binge-watching Gossip Girl last winter, and there are a few scenes where a stressed and irate Blair Waldorf wanders over to Central Park to feed the ducks. I told Colleen, "that sounds soothing — we should do that when the weather gets better". And then, as I’m wont to do, I promptly forgot. But Colleen takes note of moments like that, and a few months later she reminded me: we should actually go feed some ducks.

That’s how I found myself in Central Park last weekend, feeding ducks. It was the first beautiful day of spring in New York — the kind of day New Yorkers wait for, when everyone pours out to enjoy sunlight finally breaking through after a long dark winter. We had a picnic, strolled through the park, wandered amidst thousands of New Yorkers — and of course, we fed the ducks.

My wife (who I should preface is an extremely kind, caring, and loving person) and I got into a small debate over what kind of bread to feed the ducks. I insisted on buying them a nice loaf, and she felt it was unnecessary — the ducks would happily take our scraps. I argued that buying a good loaf cost us very little but could potentially make their day. Heck, it could even possibly be the best meal they ever have. She replied that there’s no way to know if they’d even notice the difference — to them, it might just be one carb versus another.

Three Philosphers Interject

I bought the dang bread, and she didn’t mind. I spent the whole afternoon thinking about that moment, and why it meant so much to me. In the end, I came back to three philosophers and their philosophies. Continue Reading →

This blog post is documentation for a very specific problem I run into about once a year. That’s rare enough to forget how I solved it, but frequent enough to waste 15 minutes rediscovering the answer. And let’s be honest: it’s not the big problems that drive you mad — it’s the little ones that feel like their own Sisyphean hell.

The Problem

Some websites ¹ require you to log in using a magic link — a one-time link emailed to you that signs you in when clicked. It’s usually seamless. But on iOS, it can quietly become a headache. ² Continue Reading →

The iPhone 15 Pro launched with a marquee feature, the Action Button. The Action Button set out to replace the mute switch, which had existed since the first iPhone was released back in 2007. The Action Button is a software-powered button, replacing what previously was a hardware switch that would toggle your phone’s silent mode on or off.

The appeal of the Action Button was that now you could decide what the side button should do for you. If you wanted it to be a mute switch, no problem, the Action Button can still be one. But if you want to use it to toggle your flashlight, launch the camera, or turn on Do Not Disturb mode, these alternatives and more are now possible. The unspoken downside has always been that it’s hard to decide what the Action Button should do, if it can only do one thing. Continue Reading →

The post below was written by me, originally featured on the Plinky blog.

To celebrate the launch of Plinky you can get 50% off of a yearly subscription by redeeming this offer: plinky.app/offer/REDPANDA

There are few words I've ever said more excitedly than these: I want to tell you about my latest app, Plinky.

Plinky makes it incredibly easy to do something we do every day, save links for later. You may already have a way to save links, I know I've tried every method under the sun, to the point where I decided to build my own app. That app is Plinky, and today it's available to download on the App Store. Over the last 18 months people have been loving Plinky, because it fixes the same problems I ran into when I've tried to save links in the past. Continue Reading →

The Turing test is dead, and we killed it. The Turing test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. From the 1940s ¹ to the 2010s people programmed computers, and computers could only do what they were programmed to do in a rules-based deterministic manner. Sometimes a person would program the computer and it would do something unexpected, but 100 out of 100 times the computer was doing what it was programmed to do whether the person liked it or not. While there has been experimentation with what today we call AI since the 1950s, those machines were a long ways away from passing the Turing test.

Why does using ChatGPT feel more like a conversation with the smartest person you know than a computer? It's because ChatGPT doesn't solve problems deterministically the way a programmed computer does, it solves them probabilistically. ² ChatGPT demonstrates the ability to think about something in a logical, sensible way, the definition of reasoning. ³

We've created something completely new here, a reasoning computer. ⁴ Continue Reading →

When I wrote The Future Will Be Signed almost six years ago the latest in AI advancements was Google Duplex. If you're like me and have never used Google Duplex, it's a feature of Google Assistant that could make calls on behalf of a person and automatically perform a task, such as booking restaurant tables. While you may have never heard of Google Duplex there's a good chance you've used a generative AI tool like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or GitHub Copilot.

Authenticity

We’re going to need a way to prove the authenticity of a piece of digital content, everywhere, in a simple manner. This is where public key cryptography comes in. Our current solutions are noble efforts, but remain too complex.

It's quite an understatement to say that AI has come a long way since 2018, and yet the blog post's core thesis is even stronger today than when it was written. At the time I was concerned about a future where deepfakes, audio manipulation, and text generation spread across the internet. We're now living in the beginning of that future, this is our present. It has never been faster or easier to generate inorganic content, the tools to do so are more usable and accessible than ever.

AI already has us questioning what we see on the internet, and the problem isn't going away. Fake news articles are being written by ChatGPT, fake books are being written with ChatGPT, and of course fake reviews made up by ChatGPT are being used to sell all of this. Continue Reading →

Sometimes I think about all of the societal issues I cared about 10 years ago: privacy, government overreach, and platform accountability. More and more as I look at the technological landscape it feels like none of that care seems to have mattered.

When I worked on the Societal Health team at Twitter I had a voice and direct impact on these matters. If the feedback I received and still hear from my peers and higher ups holds true, that voice was not only well-received but considered thoughtful and led to meaningful change. With hindsight I can't say that every choice we made was right, there are few easy answers and no correct answers, but we made the best decisions we could with the information we knew at the time. These days I build indie apps like Short Circuit and Plinky for many reasons, it's what I think will make me truly happiest right now, but one of my reasons is to carry less emotional weight on my shoulders. I still have my morals, but without having the position I once had it’s harder than ever to translate my values into change.

The self-induced immolation of Twitter has caused a schism with the community I formed, cultivated, and connected with on the platform. People I follow, people I learn from, and many people I’d call my friends have all scattered to the four winds across a myriad of text-based social networks. I’ve spent the last week thinking about whether to join the latest Twitter-esque social network Threads, where many people close to me have made their way. Continue Reading →

To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (quite long), but I'm still proud of it enough to post for the world to read.

The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temperatures combined with the slow down of work, life, and everyone's collective desire to rest up after a long year afford plenty of opportunity to sit and reflect. At the end of every year I start to think about what I'd like the next year to look like, and then I set a theme for the upcoming year to help me make those ideas become a reality.

Yearly Whats?

A yearly theme is explicitly not a resolution, but a guiding principle you can look to over the next year. A yearly theme shouldn't be too specific, otherwise you could just craft a resolution, and it shouldn't be so broad that anything could fall into that theme. I've borrowed the idea of yearly themes from the Cortex podcast, where they discuss at length what yearly themes are, and how they approach their own themes.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

— A quote commonly misattributed to Aristotle

What I like to do for my yearly theme is to look at a part of my life that's stopping me from being the person I want to be, and then work backwards to figure out what ideas, practices, and habits I can adopt to become that person.

New year new me, right? Wrong. I treat yearly themes as a way to build upon the work I did in the previous year, always striving to become more the person that I want myself to be. Continue Reading →

Is coding a science or an art?

— Matthew Garlington (@dejadu13) May 21, 2022

I've seen many versions of this question posed over the years, and to Matthew's credit it's a very good question. As you can see in the replies people translate their lived experience writing code and answer art or science based on however they conceptualize and practice programming. A few years ago MIT conducted a study that concluded "reading computer code is not the same as reading language", answering the question of whether coding is art or science with a rigorously documented "both". While I'm hard-pressed to argue with science, I'd like to provide a different answer, one that's a little more conceptual. Continue Reading →