Philosophy
Can I Interest You in a Self-Riding Skateboard?
Friends — how much of your skate session do you waste actually skateboarding?
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It Certified Its Own Forgery
When I was a kid we played the telephone game at birthday parties. A dozen of us in a line, somebody whispers a sentence to the first kid, it travels ear to ear down the row, and the last kid says it out loud. Purple monkey dishwasher. The whole game is the gap between what went in and what came out, and the laugh is always proportional to how far the thing drifted. It was lossy transmission before I’d ever heard the term “lossy.”
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We Already Voted With Our Lives
I’m an electrical engineer by training and a software developer by trade, and these days I build AI-assisted creative tools, which means I spend a lot of my time arguing (largely with myself) about how much of the judgment has to stay human. And the longer I argue it, the more I keep tripping over one strange fact that nobody on either side seems to want to look at.
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The Self-Riding Bicycle
Picture the launch. The lighting is good, the founder is in the nice plain t-shirt, and the thing under the cloth is a bicycle. The GhostRider™, he calls it. We asked a simple question, he says. What if riding a bicycle could be effortless? The bicycle, it turns out, rides itself: sensors, a gyroscope, a motor where the crank used to be. It balances, it steers, it accelerates, it leans through the corners. We removed the seat, he adds. And the pedals. What would you do with them? Not to mention the handlebar. Nobody’s there to hold on! It takes a clean lap around the stage, riderless, to applause.
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Becoming Gnarly
I keep bees, I ride skateboards on ramps, I ride bikes up hills without gears, I’ve written a lot of technical books, and I build software and games for a living. On a site that asks you to take all of that in at once, the reasonable question is what any of it has to do with the rest. The honest answer is that they’re the same decision made over and over in different spaces. I tend to pick the harder way to do a thing, and I’ve done it on purpose for long enough that it stopped being a series of choices and turned into a disposition. This is an essay that acknowledges the disposition, because everything else here is downstream of it.
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