mehrshad

This was literally the hero utility use case that the HoloLens team previewed to partners back in 2015. The user played the role of "electrician", communicating with another party over Skype who was using a version of MS Paint to "wire" connections in real-time over the HUD.

That technology is now creeper Ray Bans serving ads.

I'll repost what I wrote on his wall just now. Probably the most impactful SF/SV passing for me since Jobs.

"I first met Om in the mid-2000s when I started in public relations. He was patient, kind – not what you’d expect from a journalist hounded by every PR agency trying to get column inches. I met him again when we were fundraising for my first startup in 2006 – he listened with intent, he provided genuine feedback, he supported us emotionally. I would see him occasionally at the odd event or two in the years that followed. He always had a smile, always gregarious, always maintained a presence without agenda – or effort, for that matter. He embodied the hidden human amid the sterility and coldness that would slowly engulf Silicon Valley in the years that followed. I’m blessed to have benefited from his kindness across the few brief interactions, and I wish his family and friends the comfort in knowing he left an outsized impact on many of us."

The guy was a mensch. He made this space welcoming because he cared about the individual.

Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.

I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.

Never been a fan of Pogue's 'pop tech' take on things, but GREAT interviews here with Woz, Bill Fernandez, Ron Wayne, Chris Espinoza, John Sculley(!), Robert Brunner, Avi Tevanian, and John Rubenstein - never going to see a team like this again (Federighi and Ternus sighting at 56:54). Also good to hear names like Burrell Smith, Joswiak, Jef Raskin, Wendel Sander, and Andy Hertzfeld throughout (would've been great to have Gassee and Markkula, but I'll take what I can get). And while I miss Steve Jobs, he went out on top, and I'm sure the current landscape would have relegated him to outcast status yet again.

Growing up across the bay in the 80s during Apple's heyday makes me so very nostalgic for the culture of innovation, creativity, and fun that once made us elementary school nerds excited about building great things and outshining other nerds, with our unsung heroes not too far from us geographically. Also, the massive pranks at Sun and SGI just made everyone believe they can be a kid well past their teens. Now I'm seeing the high school and college kids I coach are so obsessed with scale, clout, and unbridled control, through hedged iterative development efforts and overhyped marketing. Grit's been replaced by grift.

For me, the final nail in Silicon Valley's coffin was when Weird Stuff closed - an obscure milestone, but one that marked an end to that era. Nevertheless, glad to have CHM continuing to carry the torch with amazing retrospectives like this.

As a part-time returning student at a community college - who's really just taking advantage of their fantastic advanced manufacturing facilities - most every teacher in this department subscribes to this approach. YouTube channels such as NYCCNC, Blondihacks, Weld.com, Titans of CNC, The Engineering Mindset, and others provide far superior material over any textbook, and the lecturers realize that any textbook they're obligated to assign just cannot keep up with the pace of innovation from the creator community. As such, "textbook sharing" is implicitly encouraged here, and the one or two students per class who actually buy the printed books are the butt of most of our jokes throughout the semester.

Now if only the languages department at this school would realize this. Those textbooks and "CDs" are the most egregiously overpriced materials, and it seems that none of the lecturers in the department want to put in the time to build a course around collaborative learning (group discussion) and the abundance of free materials available online.

TL;DR - thanks for being a goodguy/goodgal professor.

“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity.” -A. Edward Newton