The Lightning One
1.5
This week’s newsletter will not have a Feature. But yes, Beyoncé was incredible.
🌟 Feature
Check in next week. Lots to talk about.
📚 Reading list
A great episode on the existential threats AI pose.
⚡️ Lightning
Twitter is now “X”? Sure man whatever.
I need iOS app folders to be different. They have been basically the same for ten years now, and it’s an unnecessarily complex user experience.
I accidentally exposed a roll of film I had in a film camera to the light briefly. Remember when physics used to matter a lot more in the technology we used?
It obv still does but like you don’t gotta know about it.
I’m curious to hear from people whether they use an iPhone or Android. If so, what would you need to switch to the other platform?
I learned about p-adic numbers this week. Don’t go down that road!
Have we reached peak hardware?
📕 Glossary
Nothing this week.
☎️ Answers
I posed this question to a friend this week:
Have we reached peak hardware?
He adamantly rejected even the premise of the question. But I think it’s an interesting one. What I mean by it is this: Is there a next place for our hardware to go? Our personal consumer technology is basically just a series of progressively larger black rectangles. Smart watches, phones, tablets, desktops. Obviously, there are dozens of companies angling to find the next place, whether it’s virtual reality goggles, augmented reality glasses, or surgical implants. But I am curious if any of that will meaningfully take off. The use cases are a much harder sell than the little black rectangles, in my opinion. As for the black rectangles industry, there’s just a few companies (at least in the US) that have the capital to both develop new hardware and squash any opposition. This limited competition doesn’t exactly stoke a ton of innovation, folding phones not withstanding.
So I wonder if we are at a significant plateau, considering the physical limitations of the battery life to processing power ratio, the crusty internet infrastructure in this country, and the immediate need to scale back technological consumption for the survival of our planet.
If “the next step” is not in portable, personal computing hardware, what might it be? I think there’s a next place to go in cloud and ambient computing. Computing that is actually more device-less than it is now, where you wouldn’t need to rely upon just a few personal nodes of access to the world’s information and the power to do incredible things with it. I can see a future in which extraordinary computing power is not only available to specific people or entities, but democratized and immediate. Our current broadband infrastructure is appalling, so it will be quite some time before the ground to even build such a thing is stable.
Obviously, this sort of system can have awful ramifications in the worlds of privacy, security, surveillance, corporate overreach, and so many more. Our federal government is not currently suited to address the next 30 years of consumer technology development.
That’s all for this week. Sorry it was chill week here. Next week there will be more.