For his 50th birthday, my buddy Chris Shiflett wrote a lovely post chronicling the ups and downs of his life in technology. We participate in tech in different ways but approach it with the same spirit, so I found a lot to identify with, and I enjoyed remembering the euphoria of my own mental growth spurts and moments of discovery like what he describes here:

For a few years, I was learning faster than at… See more →

Philly being Philly:

Within the first three weeks of the delivery robots’ arrival in Philly, videos emerged of people sitting on them, graffitiing them and eventually kicking one over.

And it’s not just Philly:

A quick web search produces a long list of examples of people being filmed or filming themselves attacking robots.

Buy why?

In Ouellette’s dissertation, “From Fiction to Friction: Abusing Autonomous Mobile Robots,” she created conditions to try and find out what motivated subjects… See more →

Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go… See more →

Gotta print some zines. Off to FedEx I go. The self-service printer/copier takes credit cards. I’m prompted to pre-authorize a payment amount. Look at the sticker on the machine with the printing rates. Recall my document’s page count and how many copies I want. Do the math in my head. Select an amount from the preset options. Pop my thumb drive into the machine. It won’t read. No problem, I have a backup. But that… See more →

Two and a half years ago, I came away from Kinference 2023 disappointed that more of my peers weren’t as put off as I was by the current state of tech’s dominant preoccupations. My experience wasn’t much different this time, except that in the intervening years, Web3 enthusiasm has fashionably given way to AI enthusiasm. This isn’t to say all the speakers were doing PR for LLMs, and among those intermittently expressing guarded misgivings, Frank… See more →

I finally ditched Spotify at the end of 2024. I never loved it, and I felt extra icky about giving them my money ever since they had no trouble finding $250 million for the sham supplement salesman and douchebag magnet Joe Rogan, despite their inability to promote or pay the vast majority of the musicians who are the heart and soul of their service. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was learning… See more →

From: Twitter <noreply@twitter.com>
To: Rob Weychert <rob@robweychert.com>
Date: October 10, 2007, 5:54pm
Subject: Welcoming you to Twitter!

Hello, new Twitter-er!

Using Twitter is going to change the way you think about staying in touch with friends and family. Did you know you can send and receive Twitter updates via mobile texting, instant message, or the web? To do that, you'll want to visit your settings page (and you'll want to invite… See more →

I had a website long before Twitter and I’ll have a website long after Twitter. Not sure what my future is on the social internet, but you can always find me and my RSS feed here: robweychert.com

The level of naivete, if not outright hubris, on display in a recent New York Times article about AI-generated art is gobsmacking:

The resulting image didn’t end up going into an ad, but Mr. Carmel predicts that generative A.I. will become part of every ad agency’s creative process. He doesn’t, however, think that using A.I. will meaningfully speed up the agencies’ work, or replace their art departments. He said many of the images generated by… See more →

Has VR tech or UX meaningfully evolved at all in its long lifetime? Still looks like this to me.