Mostly I go to sleep very easily. Like 3 minutes from lights out, max.
I’m content, I exercise, I burn my tokens each day, I think all that helps.
Often I wake early and think. I’m protective over what goes into my 4am thinking time, I enjoy it. You don’t get to choose what ...
Once upon a time I kept on meeting architects who had ended up working with the web.
I asked why. Some good answers:
Architects think about how people move between spaces (pages) and what that means for user experience - this was at a time when web designers often came from...
1.
The Amazon Ring Always Home Cam is an indoor security drone for your home.
Introduced with this video in 2020: "Yeah, it’s a camera that flies."
Sadly not yet on the market.
Ok Judge Dredd had Spy-in-the-Sky drone surveillance cameras in 1978 and Mega-City One is not an a...
We briefly mentioned New Wave Hardware in last week’s Inanimate Lab Notes so this is me doing some unpacking. While you’re there, join 300+ other subscribers and sign up for our newsletter. You’ll get weekly links and updates on what we’re working on.
There are a bunch of t...
Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel Rainbows End (2006) is so prescient about AI training data.
His short Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) is set in the same universe, and was written in that era where we felt like we had line of sight to pervasive augmented reality and also 3D pr...
Thank goodness voice computing is finally happening. Now we can work on making it good.
The tech is here, like the free Whisper model (what an unlock that has been from OpenAI, kudos) and ElevenLabs. Plus devices too, from Plaud - like an irl Granola video call transcriber ...
1.
Rain panels? Rain panels.
researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.
Forget solar panels. Here come the rain panels (The Debr...
It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.
If you don’t know Markdown, it’s a way to format a simple text file with marks...
What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?
Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.
I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take car...
If I got to determine the school curriculum, I would be optimising for collective efficacy.
So I live in a gentrified but still mixed neighbourhood in London (we’re the newbies at just under a decade) and we have an active WhatsApp group.
Recently there was a cold snap and a...
You couldn’t go a week in the 80s as a kid in Britain without someone saying "Oompa-Loompa stick it up your jumper."
You did this action too, pumping your hand to make a weird bulge under your jumper through a hoop made with one arm and a pretend arm made from an empty sleev...
AI agents do things for you, semi-autonomously, and one question is how we coordinate with them.
By "do things for you" I mean
Claude Code that writes code while you contemplate life
Claude Cowork, released this week, that does “knowledge work” tasks after you point it at ...
This chart from the back of Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home lives forever in my head:
Always Coming Home is a collection of texts from the Kesh, a society in far future Northern California which is also, I guess, a utopian new Bronze Age I suppose? A beautiful book.
Thi...
Hello! This is my summary of 2025 and the “start here” post for new readers. Links and stats follow…
According to Fathom, my most trafficked posts of 2025 were (in descending order):
Context plumbing (29 Nov)
Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matte...
I’m away with family this week so here are some more scraps from my notes (previously).
Disney is considering a reboot of the Indiana Jones franchise. Goodness knows how many Jurassic Park movies there are.
We need to create new IP.
Culture creates new ideas downstream. Wit...
1.
Why Were All the Bells in the World Removed? The Forgotten Power of Sound and Frequency (Jamie Freeman).
Church bells: "something strange happened in the 19th and 20th centuries: nearly all of the world’s ancient bells were removed, melted down, or destroyed."
(I don’t kn...
My new fave thing to go to is live coding gigs, a.k.a. algoraves.
There are special browser-based programming languages like strudel where you type code to define the beats and the sound, like mod synth in code, and it plays in a loop even while you’re coding. (The playhead ...
I left a loose end the other day when I said that AI is about intent and context.
That was when I said "what’s context at inference time is valuable training data if it’s recorded."
But I left it at that, and didn’t really get into why training data is valuable.
I think we o...
These past few weeks I’ve been deep in code and doing what I think about as context plumbing.
I’ve been building an AI system and that’s what it feels like.
Let me unpack.
Intent
Loosely AI interfaces are about intent and context.
Intent is the user’s goal, big or small, ex...
I’m spinning up something new with a buddy and you can guess what it is by what I’ve been writing about recently.
Big picture, there are two visions for the future of computing: cyborgs and rooms. I’m Team Augmented Environments. Mainly because so much of what I care about h...
I had a look to see when I first mentioned Samuel Arbesman here. It was 2011: the average size of scientific discoveries is getting smaller.
Anyway I’ve been reading his new book, The Magic of Code (official site).
There’s computing history, magic, the simulation hypothesis,...
Ok spoilers ahead.
But Oedipus Rex a.k.a. Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is almost 2,500 years old at this point so it’s fair game imo.
The Oedipus story in a nutshell:
Oedipus, who was secretly adopted, receives a prophecy that he will kill his dad. So to thwart fate he leav...
1.
When you sit with friends at a wobbly table,
Simply rotate till it becomes stable.
No need to find a wedge for one of its four feet.
Math will ensure nothing spills while you eat.
The Wobbly Table Theorem (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University).
2.
David Ogilvy ch...
I’m on my hols. Some recommendations.
Watch The Ballad of Wallis Island.
Charming, poignant comedy about a washed-up folk musician and loss. By Tim Key and Tom Basden.
Now I knew Basden can write - the first episode of Party is the tightest wittiest 25 minutes of ensemble r...
I belatedly joined the 3D printer club and got myself a brand new Bambu P1S. (Days before the next-gen P2S was released it turns out, but I got the P1S on sale so I don’t feel so bad.)
I have wooden floors.
So I’ve been printing printer foot adaptors to make the optional rub...
Loosely I can see two visions for the future of how we interact with computers: cyborgs and rooms.
The first is where the industry is going today; I’m more interested in the latter.
Cyborgs
Near-term, cyborgs means wearables.
The original definition of cyborg by Clynes and K...
When I was at uni I went with some friends into a cellar with a druid to experience his home-made 6 foot tall light-strobing monolith, what I now know was a type of Dreammachine, which was a pair of stacked out-of-sync strobing lights so bright that it makes the receptors in...
TV networks should have an extra channel that shows exclusively portrait mode content.
i.e. BBC Vertical.
Also: Netflix Vertical, National Geographic Vertical, ESPN Vertical, etc.
Why?
Because there’s demand
To discover how to make good portrait-mode content
To promote new ...
I looked in my home directory in my desktop Mac, which I don’t very often (I run a tidy operation here), and I found a file I didn’t recognise called out.html.
Here is out.html.
For the benefit of the tape: it is a half-baked GeoCities-style homepage complete with favourite ...
1.
With less human noise to compete with, the birds are able to have ‘deeper conversations,’ says biologist (2020):
Researchers studying birdsong in the San Francisco Bay found the sparrows’ mating calls became quieter, more complex, and just generally “sexier” now that the...
