It may seem silly to celebrate the anniversary of my first Mac purchase, which I named Serenity (after the Firefly-class vessel from the TV show by the same name). But it is not silly, because without that machine which I unboxed 18 years ago today, I would not be who I am.

Without Serenity I would not:

• Have made a video game in the-then-Mac-only Unity Game Engine with my best friend (the demo was downloaded over 1 million times), which
• Taught me to code in the Apple ecosystem (foreshadowing), which allowed me to
• Use that game to impress professors when visiting a specific private University and feel confident that Computer Science was the ideal degree track for me, which
• Pushed me to attend University to get a Computer Science degree, where I
  • Met my wife at that Univerity,
  • Met lifelong friends (some whom I message with on a daily basis), and which
  • Happened to be the first school in the USA to give out iPhones to all incoming Freshmen, which allowed me to
• Port the Mac game to iOS to kickstart my iOS development career, which
• Funded a full semester of private University using my iOS development skills, allowing me to take out fewer loans [1], and
• Met the USAA recruiters who convinced me to take a “boring” banking job in an exciting nascent iOS development ecosystem before many banks had iPhone apps, where I
• Built a virtual assistant before AI was a cool buzzword, which
• Caused me to outgrow the available opporunities at USAA that challenged me, which led me to leave, and
• Work at Big Nerd Ranch (RIP[2]), famous for their mobile developer consulting skills and educational books that taught many famous developers how to code, where I
  • Learned how to work remotely full time just before the pandemic hit
  • Made lasting friendships with brilliant people
  • Tore apart and re-architected apps for companies like Peloton, Apple, and (ironically), a white-label banking software provider.
  • Learned SwiftUI and other important cutting-edge iOS skills I wasn't getting to practice at USAA
  • Gain leadership experience (both as a tech lead, and as a manager) which,
• Prompted me to look for Principal Engineering roles, where I
• Joined a team at Stryker and helped build one of the first Apple Vision Pro apps for the medical industry[3].

Cheers to you, 2006 MacBook Pro with the 2GB ram upgrade. I would not be where I am without you.

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1. Kiplinger Magazine (Archived Link) ↩︎
2. LinkedIn Page for Big Nerd Ranch (Archived Link) ↩︎
3. 9-to-5 Mac (Archived Link) ↩︎

#technology #history #ios #ai #reminiscing #career

In an interview with Russ Roberts on EconTalk, author and futurist Kevin Kelly convincingly suggests that we should treat AIs like Midjourney and ChatGPT as alien intelligences (in a non-spooky way):

I've been using the AI image generators for a year now, every day making AI art and they have different personalities...

But in every case, they're alien—the way that they do things because they're running on a different substrate than, than what we run on.

Their creativity is legitimate. It's really creative, but it's off, it's different than us. It's different, it's alien. They have a slightly different alien way of doing it. And that is, it's true benefit.

That's the main reason why they're valuable is because they're not doing it like humans. When they start to do proofs, they're not gonna do it like a human does it.

If they have/when they have consciousness, it'll be slightly different. It will be akimbo from us because it's running on a whole different thing. It's different latencies in all different ways in which is gonna be different. And that is its benefit.

Video

Listen to the full interview on:
Apple Podcasts
Overcast
Google Podcasts

#technology #ai #artificialintelligence #aliens #podcast #quotes #interview