The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were osten...
One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and soc...
“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.”
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possibl...
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing...
The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms...
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that ...
It’s rare that you get to see work that directly helps those who most deserve it, but I want to tell you about the opportunity we so seldom get to actually contribute in a way that we know will have real impact.
I’ve been on the board of the Lower Eastside Girls Club for abo...
In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen a series of software security vulnerabilities that, until recently, would each have been the biggest exploit of the year in which they were discovered. Now, they’ve become nearly routine. There’s a new one almost every day.
The reason f...
These days, we’re all living in a constant state of crisis, foisted upon us by a world where those who are meant to keep things stable are the least stable factors in our lives. The chaos and stress of that reality makes it difficult to make any plans, let alone to make deci...
One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and th...
I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts, as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. ...
Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights onl...
You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat.
It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it o...
For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI? LLMs are now quickly advancing to where they ...
Last week, Apple released a parade of hardware announcements, and the one that captured the most attention across the industry was the $600 ($500 if you’re in education!) MacBook Neo, the brightly-colored low-end laptop that they launched to great fanfare. The conventional w...
TL;DR:
Apple is adding support for video podcasts to their podcast app
Podcasts are built on an open standard, which is why they aren’t controlled by a bad algorithm and don’t have ads that spy on you
Apple’s new system for video podcasts breaks with the old podcast standar...
A big tech headline this week is Anthropic (makers of Claude, widely regarded as one of the best LLM platforms) resisting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s calls to modify their platform in order to enable it to support his commission of war crimes. As has become clear thi...
Talking through the tech reckoning
Many of the topics that we’ve all been discussing about technology these days seem to matter so much more, and the stakes have never been higher. So, I’ve been trying to engage with more conversations out in the world, in hopes of communica...
Taking action on AI harms against kids
In my last piece, I talked about the harms that AI is visiting on children through the irresponsible choices made by the platforms creating those products. While we dove a bit into the incentives and institutional pressures that cause t...
I have to begin by warning you about the content in this piece; while I won’t be dwelling on any specifics, this will necessarily be a broad discussion about some of the most disturbing topics imaginable. I resent that I have to give you that warning, but I’m forced to becau...
I wanted to share one of the bits of advice that I find myself most frequently giving to teams when they’re working on a product, or founders who are creating a new company: launch it three times.
What I mean by that is, it often takes more than one time before your idea act...
In each successive generation of code creation thus far, we’ve abstracted away the prior generation over time. Usually, only a small percentage of coders still work on the lower layers of the stack that used to be the space where everyone was working. I’ve been coding long e...
Ten years ago I wrote that there is no “technology industry”. It’s more true than ever.
There is no “tech”. There’s no such thing as “a FAANG company”. There is almost nothing in common between the very largest tech companies and the next several hundred biggest companies th...
This past week, over a series of events, the New York tech community celebrated the 30th anniversary of a nebulous idea described as “Silicon Alley”, the catch-all term for our greater collective of creators and collaborators, founders and funders, inventors and investors, e...
There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially ex...
I've been working in and around the technology industry for a long time. Depending on how you count, it's 20 or 30 years. (I first started getting paid to put together PCs with a screwdriver when I was a teenager, but there isn't a good way to list that on LinkedIn.) And as ...
Something actually new?
There’s finally been a big leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI — not just “it’s doing some work for me”, but “we couldn’t do this before”. What’s new are a few smart systems that let coders control fleets of dozens of coding bots, all working i...
When Wikipedia launched 25 years ago today, I heard about it almost immediately, because the Internet was small back then, and I thought “Well… good luck to those guys.” Because there had been online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, and anybody who really cared about this stu...
How to know if that job will crush your soul
Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing...
Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give...
