Technology & Change: Field Notes From The Present Future
The SpaceX cap table, what it is worth, and what happens next. On June 12, a great many people become extraordinarily wealthy. Not one of them can sell a share until December — with one exception: up to five percent of the IPO shares are reserved for employees…
Lately there has been a lot of talk of how the foundational models are quickly becoming like every other iPhone release. They are ho-hum, till the next one comes around. But it is not the right analogy. I have a more boring, and more accurate, analogy that wil…
Every morning I sit down and open Feedbin on my iPad. It aggregates my RSS feeds and newsletters – about a hundred sources – covering everything from AI to zeitgeist. One story stopped me recently. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed: “Menswear Is in Its ‘Nice’…
Masayuki Amagai, Vice President of Keio University: In this age of excess, truth and fiction are intermingled. Truth tends to be complex and challenging to grasp, while fiction is often simple and easy to understand. Moreover, truth can be painful, whereas fic…
About a week ago I got a ping. Someone wanted to know if I knew someone who wanted $10 million of Anthropic common stock as a forward contract at $1 trillion. My first reaction was that we are so deep in a bubble that when we look up, all we see are sparkling,…
“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” Aaron Levie, CEO, Box About two months into first encountering ChatGPT, I decided it was time to…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false…
I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks. I apologize for my tardiness, but I have been busy with personal matters. Both my heart and mind were not in it. Anyway, this week I have some great (and fun) pieces that I enjoyed reading in between meeting…
SpaceX is in the business of rockets — how often they fly and what they do. The rest is imagination. The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of reality, sci-fi, and skullduggery. I dug into the freshly filed…
I love my snowcaps, in landscape photos and pens. I have been using Montblanc pens for a long time, about three decades now. Slowly the numbers have piled up. The newest pens have a sharper, more stylized white six-pointed star with rounded edges, representing…
After I published AI is the New Netflix, Surj Patel, a former colleague, intellectual sparring partner, and long-time reader, asked a sharp question. Given my argument that AI will drive the next wave of upstream traffic, are we headed toward more of a supersc…
At my 2008 NewTeeVee conference, I asked Reed Hastings, then CEO of Netflix, whether streaming video would become the first killer app of broadband. It seemed obvious: video would consume capacity. And eventually it did. Streaming became the thing that made pe…
Before turning in last night, I saw a video by Pete from Just a Few Acres Farm YouTube channel. I have followed him for a while. Reflecting on his goodbye, I felt a tinge of sadness every time one of my favorite creators signs off. I have zero interest in bein…
As is always the case, this started with a simple question: Will AI change how networks work? Will it impact the speeds we need at home and on our phones? My assumption was that AI would accelerate this — personal AI agents querying the cloud all day, your hou…
Every so often, I would notice that our upstream bandwidth consumption was going up. Average upload usage is growing 21.7% year over year, more than twice the rate of downstream growth. The network is finally tilting toward something symmetrical, after thirty…
First, a short apology. I was unable to send the newsletter last weekend. Life and sniffles got in the way — OM As has been the case lately, I have been writing a bit too much about AI, and its two most visible examples, Anthropic and OpenAI, either on their o…
Buried on page nine of Microsoft’s 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026 is a paragraph worthy of attention. Why? What does it reveal? A lot. For starters, Microsoft now holds approximately 27 percent of OpenAI on an as-converted basis, accounted for under…
The four biggest hyperscalers reported earnings this week. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively told investors they will spend roughly $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. That is nearly double what they spent in 2025. Three of the four…
Oh boy. Over the past few days, an article has been doing the rounds as a testimonial for the ludicrousness of AI versus human costs. From that piece, one specific quote (originally from another article) has gone viral and is now under scrutiny all over the in…
After my previous post about why we accept human errors but are harsher on machines, two longtime readers and pillars of the resilience engineering community reached out to point out the error of my ways. Courtney Nash of the Resilience in Software Foundation…
I have been writing about the growing need for uploads and how they are redefining the broadband landscape — first in We Are Now An Upload (Broadband) Nation and then in a quick follow-up. As a follow-up to those pieces, today I wanted to highlight research fr…
It is late April 2026. If you want to get a Mac you want, you cannot go into any Apple Store and pick the Mac you want. A Mac mini with 64GB of RAM, ordered today, ships in sixteen to eighteen weeks. A Mac Studio with 256GB of RAM ships in four to five months.…
Another day another deal which makes you question the meaning of money itself. SpaceX said this morning it has an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay the coding startup $10 billion for the work they are already doing together, Elon Mus…
Tim totally cooked as the seventh CEO of Apple. But effective September 1, the hot seat belongs to John Ternus, the company’s eighth chief executive. Also, a great day for being a John at Apple. Johny Srouji moves up to chief hardware officer at the same time.…
I am sending this out a day early as I have a new mystery book I want to finish this weekend, uninterrupted. Priorities, people! Also, I have decided that this weekend’s reading list has to be decidedly less technology. I mean, we get enough of it already. The…
Ron Conway, the longtime Silicon Valley investor and founder of SV Angel, announced on X that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Conway declined to disclose the specific type of cancer, saying he does not want speculation about his prognosis. Ro…
The New Yorker articulated something that has been on my mind for a long time. AI’s self-inflicted messaging crisis. This is as clear an example of my long standing argument that words have consequences. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetori…
Every speculative era has its favorite suffix. In the 1960s it was “tronics.” In the 1990s it was “dot-com.” Today, of course, it is “AI.” Nothing typifies a crazy, gambling, speculative degenerate economy like our present moment than what happened to Allbirds…
We forgive human error as if it were weather. We treat machine error as if it were heresy. That thought has kept nagging at me as I read about three recent technology screw-ups. Anthropic exposed unreleased files. Anthropic then shipped 512,000 lines of intern…
It was a week of mostly quiet work, that involved focusing on some personal matters, whether it was paperwork (tax day is approaching) or some annual medical check ups, like keeping tabs on my vision. Life was mundane. And that was reflected in my writing this…