I'm starting a newsletter on a privacy-centric future empowered by AI. Strong opinions & optimism ahead! First up: wildbuilt.world/p/ai-co-crea… AI won't just be chatbots. Instead, imagine AI embedded in tools co-created by you - evolving, personalized & profoundly empowering. 🧵(1/19)

Tonight in NYC, technologists, builders, and thinkers gathered to ask: what would it look like if software left us feeling nourished instead of drained? Introducing the Resonant Computing Lab — a fund dedicated to turning principle into practice. resonantcomputinglab.com

The same origin paradigm we use for apps and the web requires users to trust the creator of the code with their data. That's not a good assumption in the era of infinite software.

After 17 incredible years, today was my last day at Google! Next up a bit of time of and exploring things in the intersection of new user experiences, privacy and AI. Follow along at wildbuilt.world/.

File over app File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data. In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently: > If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s. You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

What distinguished the iPhone from prior smartphones was that Apple shrunk general computing into a new form factor and solved the input methodology. They did that again: iPhone = PC in new form factor new input method. Vision = PC in new form factor new input method.

Sam Altman on ChatGPT plugins: "The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet. He suggested that a lot of people thought they wanted their apps to be inside ChatGPT but what they really wanted was ChatGPT in their apps." website-754fwhahs-humanloopm…

Clear economic argument by @defrag and @pkedrosky about how software will become cheap and hence abundant, how today's costly software is holding back society and hence how fixing this will unleash huge amounts of productivity. I love this, of course; see wildbuilt.world/!

Great example of a quick AI generated tool. Not only was it a better experience with a GUI, the tool is still there for future use.

There’s one existential risk I’m certain LLMs pose and that’s to the credibility of the field of FAccT / Ethical AI if we keep pushing the snake oil narrative about them.

We just started rolling out support for @FIDOAlliance passkeys for Google Accounts, taking a big step towards retiring passwords. Exciting day! blog.google/technology/safet…

Great example of how LLMs will enable AI co-created tools!