I’m writing again

I’m Writing Again

For those of you who are still here — and given how long it’s been, “still here” is a real act of patience — thank you. I haven’t written a column since 2022.

Just like everyone else, I’ve been busy all this time on Artificial Intelligence, founding with two partners a company called 2Brains (why it wasn’t 3Brains I’ll never know) that I will explain to you shortly. The work we were doing together is unfinished, but it’s not stopped. The patents are filed, the architecture is documented, and the small team continuing the work includes me. Writing is part of how I think; not writing for three years has felt […]

I’ve been following the press and social media coverage of Apple’s pricey new Vision Pro Augmented Reality headset, which now totals hundreds of stories and thousands of comments and I’ve noticed one idea missing from all of them: what would Steve (Jobs) say?  Steve would call the Vision Pro a “hobby,” just as he did with the original Apple TV.

You know I’m correct about this.

And the fact that Apple hasn’t gone for the H-word and no other writers are suggesting it is the topic of this column, not the Vision Pro, itself.

It would appear that nobody at Apple has the balls to call the Vision Pro a […]

Sorry I’ve been away: time flies when you are not having fun. But now I’m back.

Moore’s Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law. It’s getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we’ve taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore’s Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through […]

My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among […]

I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no […]