1.
Humanoid robots.
I feel like something that isn’t super well appreciated in civilian world is quite how quickly humanoid robots will arrive, and quite how good they will be.
See, there are a bunch of humanoid robotics companies now. Here are five robots:
Atlas by Boston...
Diane, it’s Thursday and I’ve been figuring out how transcription fits into my everyday work. I had to make up a character to make it make sense, as I’ll say.
So I’m doing a little teaching this week and next. A two week mini module at AHO (Oslo) on designing interfaces for ...
Because I’ve been wool-gathering about homeostasis I picked up a Useless Machine (Wikipedia) from Amazon.
It’s a box with a toggle switch on the top. You flip the switch to ON.. a hatch opens, and a little hand emerges. It flips the switch OFF again.
You’ll have seen one, I’...
Two of my old app ideas have recently become buildable! Which is neat.
They’re very different… but, it turns out, connected by the principal of homeostasis – the ability to be self-stabilising.
And that, in turn, gives me a new perspective on self-driving companies.
Old idea...
In the spirit of: if you don’t ask, you don’t get…
There are some people I’d like to meet! They are ”speculatively things I do professionally in the world”-related though not immediately work related.
So here’s my wish list.
Books! I have a couple ideas for nonfiction books....
The phase space of coffee is large enough that many people can wait for their orders without collision, and that means the barista doesn’t need to take names, and you don’t need to memorise your place in line.
By which I mean: the gap between ordering and collecting is, say,...
File this one under: prototypes I would make if I had the time.
So the product concept starts with something I said the other week, in my write-up about MCP (Anthropic’s new plug-in protocol for chatbots). A big chunk of my AI use is chatting about things like
the Hanoveria...
I started blogging here precisely 25 years ago on 19 February 2000. I was 22 when I started and I am now 47.
My silver jubilee!
I felt when I started in February 2000 that I was coming to blogging late. I procrastinated about setting it up. People I knew were already doing ...
There’s that asteroid 2024 YR4 which currently has a 2% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
Uh oh.
I kinda feel like… reading the socials… people are weirdly gleeful about the prospect?
It’s true, it is somehow comforting to contemplate the potential of the end of the world tha...
I’ve been trying out a new technique to plug in knowledge and capabilities to AI apps like chat, using an emerging open standard from Anthropic called Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s early days but it has momentum.
So I would say that right now is the time for organisatio...
1.
The Heider and Simmel animation (1944) (YouTube).
It’s a big triangle, a little triangle and circle moving around a box – and part an early demonstration that people infer complex social intentions and story even though the geometric shapes look nothing like humans.
All t...
Part of getting older is finding that my PBs each time I train up - personal bests - are not as quick as they were before.
I record my runs on Strava but really I don’t need to check, I remember my old pace.
As an on-and-off-again runner who is motivated each time round by g...
You know those big illustrated boards with holes in? You poke your face through and you have the body of a cartoon wizard or something, and someone takes a photo. You get them at the seaside and tourist destinations.
They don’t appear to have an official name.
Though Wikiped...
