in|retrospect
Posts on page 11
AI De-Identity
Of all the use cases for AI, the one that feels the most dystopian, Black Mirror -esque is its ability to replicate personalities. Companies like character.ai already offer models trained on historical personas and celebrities, but a research paper…
The Underwhelming State of Digital Family Calendars
I guess there's real demand for easily visible family calendars. The NY Times recently featured an article on the Skylight Hearth calendar: essentially a vertically mounted touchscreen monitor, dedicated to running a subscription calendar service with a couple…
Strategic Leniency
I recently came across an article discussing Riot Games' anti-cheating division. All their games revolve around competitive multiplayer gameplay—the biggest and most famous being League of Legends—so it's been a core area of focus…
The Wearable Decade
For about two decades, the blistering pace of smartphone hardware improvements has driven manufacturing advances. We've made massive engineering improvements in all the components in the latest flagship phones: touch screens, systems-on-a-chip, tiny camera modules,…
Review: Ask Iwata
Ask Iwata is a fairly unique biography, as far as biographies go. Satoru Iwata was the beloved Global President of Nintendo Corporation Limited. It's a posthumous memoir, but one written based not on lengthy engagements with professional journalists—…
Beyond Servant Leadership
I've never liked the term "servant leadership." As I eased into my engineering director role, one of my main responsibilities was conducting interviews for a wide breadth of engineering and engineering-adjacent roles. With engineers, the…
