Tech Can Be Better

Tech Can Be Better

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Latest — 06 Aug 2026

Small Steps

We are awash in maximalist thinking and news. Token maxxing. Billion-dollar valuation rounds. TAMs larger than the entire tech sector. Hyperscalers. Trillion-parameter models. AI that is going to change every job or eliminate every job. National government involvement. Everything is big, has massive impact, is changing everything. And

More issues

Irrelevance

What is the worst that can happen if I write something dumb here? When I was about 13 years old, I sat out one summer night looking up at the stars and the Milky Way. The vastness of the universe really hit home. I saw thousands of stars and the

Irreverence

In the early 90s, I was leading a team in the Systems Division at Microsoft working on a version of Windows. The Microsoft campus in those days was still pretty small; you could count the buildings on two hands. The company was growing very fast, with new employees showing up

Breadth and Depth

In one of my first work projects, I worked with an automotive electronics firm, and its executives were trying to determine how much to invest in LED and LCD display technology — most dash displays were electromechanical gauges at that time, or simple lights. The details of the decision are not

Details

The picture above is my brand new HomePod Mini and its power adapter. You can buy HomePod Minis in 5 different colors to match your decor! And they all come with a stark white power adapter. This is what I expect if I buy something from Logitech or Belkin or

Stumbling

I had something written up this week and it sucked. It was uninspired, repetitive, and not worth your time or my time. That happens I guess. There is a time-tested solution to uninspired writing, but it may not be worth it: Literary Hub » Are Writers Intrinsically Vulnerable to Alcohol

Culture Eats Strategy

I’ve related this story before, but it seems relevant. In 1995, as the Internet was exploding, Microsoft was abuzz internally with efforts to build Internet products. Every product team was thinking about the Internet and what they should do. There were multiple teams building authoring tools, servers, and browsers.

Room at the bottom

One view of AI coding is that it can help you generate 10x more code or 10x more features. As Dare and others point out, we are starting to see the failings of that idea — for many use cases, we don’t need 10x more code or 10x more features,

Time

As I age, my eyeglass prescription wanders, particularly the astigmatism component. I’ve been trying to adjust to a new prescription as of late, and it has been a killer. I have had to really whack down my screen time, and am still struggling with fatigue, headaches, and some depth

Personal Software

I wrote my first significant piece of software back in 1979. I had done some trivial things before that, but at that time, only cassette tape storage was available to me. Coding, saving, and iterating on software was painful – reading and writing to the cassette was slow and error-prone.