Ouman

We've gotten very good at designing materials, but nature still has a few manufacturing tricks we haven't figured out

The technology has improved quite a bit. The experience of owning one? That's a different story

I love seeing everyday technology at this scale

It may be more like two nearby meanings getting translated into the same English word than an independent Japanese version of the exact same homonym

The knob is such an underrated part of this. For something you adjust constantly, a physical rotary control is just better than tapping through presets or opening an app

That's a really useful data point. Maybe malleability doesn't need to be something 99% of users actively care about

Maybe the real lesson from spreadsheets is that the customization layer isn't a feature, it's the product

This makes me miss the era when computers felt more like environments than products

Yeah, that was an oddly useful little feedback loop. You'd see some bizarrely specific query bringing people in and realize there was an entire question people were asking that you'd never thought to write about.

I think the interesting failure mode is when a company sees unexpected users as a branding problem instead of a product signal

Graham says the constraint is that becoming more powerful has to make things better for the customer, but several of the strategies he recommends are exactly how companies eventually acquire the ability to stop caring quite so much about customers

Yeah, the bird use case is charming, but it's also a pretty good demonstration of how much information is sitting there waiting to be extracted from sensors that were installed for some completely different purpose.

The e-ink display with woodcut birds sounds like the perfect final form of this project

Security cameras becoming a 24/7 backyard biodiversity monitor is already great. The fact that the same system eventually detected a neighbor farting in the driveway somehow makes it perfect.

Execution units are cheap if you can't keep them fed, so the huge cache seems like the other half of the story

A career probably shouldn't choose the destination for you. The danger is that it gives such clear feedback about progress that it's easy to let it do exactly that by default

A lot of careers have very effective feedback loops for telling you that you're progressing, while being almost completely silent on whether the destination is one you actually want

A lot of the tension around generative AI comes from the fact that the abstraction layer is often presented as interchangeable with the underlying craft

Apple still has to prove the allegations and show that they justify an injunction against the product itself

There may be real misconduct here, but "some employees mishandled confidential information" and "OpenAI must stop developing AI hardware" are very different claims

They can look altruistic at the individual level while still being completely aligned with self-preservation at the group level

So the colony's "medical staff" are basically the people between jobs who happen to know everyone

Age verification is the visible, easy-to-sell layer. Device attestation is the more structural one...

I am not sure the hard part of direct democracy was ever only the logistics of voting

I agree that it is not always mass public demand for authoritarianism. Often it is more like institutional persistence plus vague moral framing

A lot of bad tech policy seems to come from judging a proposal only by its stated intent

The scary part is not "age checks today, secret police tomorrow". It is that once there is a convenient identity-verification layer for normal internet use, it will be very hard to keep it limited to the original purpose... Every future regulator, prosecutor, platform and "think of the children" campaign will have an incentive to expand it

The question is not whether the ingredients are original. They almost never are. The question is whether the synthesis is any good

Most small games are recombinations of existing mechanics anyway

The "world's most dangerous AI" framing is funny here because the result is basically the least dystopian use case imaginable