I recently read the excellent long form article The Metaverse Fever Dream by Pixel Envy (Nick Heer). It gets the general vibe right and I encourage you to read it, but I also think it doesn’t capture what the metaverse — meaning Mark Zuckerberg’s vision strong enough to rename the company after — really was. His vision wasn’t to bring the world together in immersive nirvana. It wasn’t even to sell more ads. The Metaverse existed to let Facebook own a hardware platform.
A diatribe in when I am greatly disappointed in my industry.
I find Large Language Models fascinating. They are a very different approach to AI than most of the 60 years of AI research and show great promise. At the same time they are just technology. They aren’t magic. They aren’t even very good technology yet. LLM hype has vastly outpaced reality and I think we are due for a correction, possibly even a bubble pop. Furthermore, I think future AI progress is going to happen on the app / UX side, not on the core models, which are already starting to show their scaling limits. Let’s dig in. Better pour a cup of coffee. This could be a long one.
Working in the Mixed Reality group at Mozilla was the most fun I ever had in my 30 year career. Helping to usher a new technology into the world. One with such potential. I’d really love to go back there. Unfortunately it seems there isn’t really a there to go back to. Cue memory fade.
I’ve been quiet lately, not because I’ve had nothing to say but because I’ve not felt well enough to say it. That changes today.
In the last couple of years I’ve seen a lot of lamenting about the browser mono-culture. I even wrote about it myself. Some complains focus on how complicated the web specs have become. So big that only a few companies can implement a browser from scratch. I think these complaints are misplaced. Even if the web platform didn’t have such a large API surface it still wouldn’t matter. You can’t build a large scale browser with large marketshare. The browser market would still be a monoculture. You can't solve a business problem with a technology solution. I also don't think that replacing the web with something smaller like Gemini is the answer.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked tech and much longer since I’ve talked about anything personal. There's a lot of updates to share, so buckle up.
It is often mentioned in Hacker News comments and the Twitters that it’s a tragedy that the web ecosystem is now dependent one only three renderers: Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko. Every time a new browser is announced I see comments like:
If you havn't seen the news, 25% of Mozilla was laid off this week, including me, so I'm looking for a new job managing an engineering or developer relations team.
I have greatly enjoyed the reliability of Rust so far, but a few things really annoy / mystify me. One is the type annotations. I understand that type annotations lets you say what type another type is defined in terms of. The common case is a vector of points, with something like:
I have done something very foolish. I've started building a new web browser. From scratch. Not a new wrapper around Chromium or WebKit or Gecko. No, an actual new browser. Why have I done such a thing?!
In my side gig as a science fiction writer I'm trying to suss out the modern market. I grew up reading golden age sci-fi authors like Asimov and Heinlein. The are less than relevant today. When I was a kid YA (Young Adult) scifi/fantasy wasn't really a genre. Now it's dominated by modern blockbusters like Harry Potter and Divergent. So, if I'm to understand the modern market I should actually read some of this stuff. So that's why I read the first Hunger Games novel. Spoiler alert, I didn't like it but I do get it.
I'm rebuilding my HTML Canvas Deep Dive book so I need a way to compile various source files into a final thing. I'm not producing an executable but rather a directory full of generated HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and possibly some other stuff; but it's the same basic idea. I need to turn a collection of things into another collection of things. I need a build system. So which should I use?
I'm optimistic about humanity's abillity to deal with climate change. I know that sounds ridiculous in the current political environment of the US, where one party can't agree on what to do and the other party denies that the problem even exists. But still I'm optimistic. Why? Because of the bomb.
I'm happy to announce that as of today there is no Google on my website. In fact, there is nothing loaded from any other domains than my own. No fonts, no images, and absolutely no trackers. Here's how I did it.
Or, an attempt to exercise my digital rights, badly managed.
Recently Nadia Eghbal posted about the history of independent researchers. One crucial point (hinted at in her article but I don't think is explicit enough) is that to be a researcher you don't need to have a big organization behind you or credentials, but you do have to publish. Sharing research, both the successes and failures, is what makes science work. If you hoard away your research and keep the results a secret then you aren't a scientist, you're an alchemist.
I tried to use my sparkling new Oculus Go on an airplane yesterday, since it seems like the obvious place to use it. The number one thing I think people will want to do with this device is download some Netflix movies for a plane. I mean, who wouldn't want to leave the cramped loud environment of an airplane for the calm of their favorite movie over a fun moonscape background. Sadly, Netflix doesn't support downloads in their VR app, even though they do in their mobile ones. Hey Netflix! Turn it on!
I have always loved The Beatles, even when I was little. I'm too young to have known about The Beatles in a cultural sense. I was 5 when John Lennon was murdered, far too young to remember, so to me The Beatles were always just music that existed. While I love their entire catalog I've always felt the White Album was their weakest effort due to lack of editing. Today we're going to fix that.
I'm annoyed that we don't have something like the Amiga anymore. A computer that doesn't give you apps, but instead gives you primitives that you can combine in different ways to be creative and make art. Okay, the Amiga wasn't quite like that, but it had the spirit and desire to become that.