Thoughts on the software industry

I noted once that the most interesting potential for virtual/mixed reality wasn’t to put yourself in a virtual office or the ocean floor; it was that you could experience entirely different worlds with different physics, where time flows differently, where acoustics mutate as sound waves fly through the air. In VR, you could move through scales...

In the year 1972, a pair of spacecraft departs the Earth atmosphere, headed towards the outer gas planets of the solar system. These spacecraft, bearing the name Pioneer 10 and 11, become the first artificial objects to fly beyond Pluto and escape the gravitational grasp of the sun. They each carry a gold-plated plaque bearing etchings of the...

tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. Essays, photographs, videogames, podcasts – these are what we create. They live on mediums, like word documents, film, canvas, software, and audio. On the other side of the canvas or the lens or the microphone are the humans casting their ideas into form. And in between, at the point...

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. I’ve been working through Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory this month. The book covers the early history of the storied industrial research lab Bell Labs. Though I’m not finished yet, the book, combined with a week-long vacation in Paris, has triggered some thoughts in me I wanted to...