On the news of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros, I’m reminded of how good Netflix has been at innovating their business model. Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Calendars are for Commitments or How I Use a Calendar in 2025
Patrick reminded us a decade ago that Everything Happens in Time, said another way: “everything happens at a time – whether deliberate or not.” It’s been three and a half years since I wrote about my ever evolving calendaring practice. Everything I wrote about in 2022 is still true. The biggest change has been in …
Continue reading “Calendars are for Commitments or How I Use a Calendar in 2025”
Reminder: There’s Always Room for Improvement Somewhere
A 5 gallon bucket with a spout that’s also a paint tray and a dustpan. At the risk of evoking all of my past writing on chindogu, this is a nice reminder that there’s always room for improvement. It’s just a matter of determining that developing improvement is worth your opportunity cost. It might not …
Continue reading “Reminder: There’s Always Room for Improvement Somewhere”
Mike Doughty on Art & Computer Technology (AI)
I recommend AI: How/Why I Use It in its entirety here are just a couple of my favorite passages: “As any musician knows intimately, the most interesting part of a new musical technology is its glitches: the inventors of the synthesizer hoped to position it as a replacement for strings or horns, but what we …
Continue reading “Mike Doughty on Art & Computer Technology (AI)”
Beer Style Triplet Graph
The intention of this graph is to help those studying for the BJCP Written Exam in prioritizing which styles to focus on for the compare/contrast portion.
An Increasingly Worse Response
Generative AI and LLMs continue to provide the least controversial answer to any question I ask them. For my purposes, this makes them little more than a calculator for words, a generator of historical fiction short stories. As I mentioned two years ago, this doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does greatly shrink their usefulness …
More Jobs and More Automation than Ever
When I first got a robot vacuum cleaner, the first thing I noticed was how much worse its cleaning quality was compared against a person. The second thing I noticed: it added a job to the household (one that came with zero training): robot vacuum maintenance Just as we handwash dishes even though we have …
Calm Tech Principles
https://www.calmtech.institute/calm-tech-principles
Simultaneously
FedEx was started in 1971 The first email was sent in 1971 The Pony Express began in 1860, ceased operations just 2 days after… …the transcontinental telegraph was completed in 1861
Neopunk Tech Projects
There was a time when the internet was mostly silly technology experiments. Where that it worked at all was the win. All the projects were primarily for delight of the creator and delight for others. There was no advertising. No polish. Simply a neopunk aesthetic of “let’s just do it, it’ll be fun.” As the …