The car and the telephone allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion

Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

The car and the telephone, Kulak argues, allowed for the bureaucratization of coercion:

If you look at the orders given to British Captains and Admirals during the Napoleonic wars, these orders were often shockingly cursory. Sometimes only 1-2 sentences would be the whole of the Admiralty’s direction to a ship’s Captain for months at a time.

[…]

These orders were not so simple because the task was simple, but because it was COMPLEX and skilled British Captains needed the greatest of discretion with which to act. They were weeks if not months out from new orders, and the admiralty weeks if not months away from news of occurrences on the other side of the world.

[…]

You see this not only in the royal navy, but also on the American frontier, where Marshalls, Sheriffs, Mayors, and US Army Captains often wielded power to rival knights and dukes in the old world, and ran not inconsiderable risk in doing so.

[…]

What the invention of the Automobile and telephone did was it changed all of that. By increasing the speed of reaction times from days to minutes or hours, and by increasing the speed of communications from days or weeks to seconds, the very nature of authority changed.

Before applying something such as the income tax would be an unfeasibly dangerous proposition. A simple modicum of non-compliance would require tax agents to go out, and even if they went out in force, they’d probably be disappeared very quickly, with the only lead being that they disappeared between Thursday and Sunday and were vaguely going to be present in some area or county. It might take another 4 days after they were noted missing to get someone out there to check on them.

[…]

Whereas before trustworthy, competent, literate, moral Ethically predictable, men who were capable of distant travel, dynamic decision making, and enforcing their decisions with violence were the major limiting factor in the depths of state control that is possible… And such men were inherently prideful and had class interests around their rights as high status free gentlemen and their places of respect within the communities they administered; Former Colonel Washington LED the rebellion against the Crown… Whereas before you had to deal with all of that, Now you could use Anyone.

Indeed the modern state invariably chooses for it’s regulators and inspectors sexually failed women, the disabled, the sexually isolated or despised, and the racially and ethnically outcast. All explicitly BECAUSE they are of the lowest status without the state (what do you think Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means? It mean selecting people for being low status without the state) and will obey basically anything the state demands because, unlike the violent competent men of discretion who could do anything else or go anywhere and assume a leadership role, the DEI bio-slop who fill the government bureaucracy are complete nobodies without their jobs.

[…]

Unlike the earlier generations of lawmen, these infinitely expanding regulators need never actually enforce anything themselves, they need only send messages or “reach out” and if at any point they feel the slightest physical threat, they can call the police who are empowered to make ZERO decisions but are still capable of violence, and of calling in an endless stream of more police officers, tactical teams, and Helicopters should you prove resistant.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 2 Comments »

Do something, not everything

Monday, July 13th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn the spring of 2024, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he met up with a group of General Magic alumni to discuss their proto-iPhone:

It had been three decades since they went public—with no revenue—in Silicon Valley’s first “concept IPO.”

[…]

On the day of the IPO, Sony’s investment in General Magic instantly appreciated so much that it was more than they had anticipated making in their five-year business plan for the product. “And then it was gone,” Gruzen said. “For a moment, it was fantastic.”

[…]

Professor Tom Eisenmann, author of Why Startups Fail, rolled in a whiteboard so that the General Magic group and the audience could compile a list of what had gone wrong. The board filled up quickly. Too many partners; too early; too little attention to the limits of available technology; too vague a customer; too much making everything on their own instead of building on others; too little management. One audience member, an entrepreneur and mentor to Harvard and MIT students, described at length how watching the film reminded her of her mentees, whose giant visions often get in the way of accomplishing anything at all. Professor Eisenmann distilled her wisdom on the whiteboard: “Do something, not everything.” Laughter and head nods spread around the room.

Steve Jarrett explained to the audience that the software engineers were so skilled that they could imagine and build new things literally overnight. “We just kept inventing new ideas, and it kept making the product bigger, and bigger, and bigger.” The CEO, he said, “would just tell a new story every time there was a new idea.”

Jarrett recounted how one of the third-party app developers he managed, Jeff Hawkins, did what they could not—something, not everything. Hawkins had designed an app called Graffiti that could be used on General Magic’s platform. It allowed users to make quick strokes with a stylus that would be recognized as letters and punctuation. “So Jeff called and said, ‘How many devices have you sold?’ ” Jarrett explained. Jarrett shared the disappointing news, to which he recalled Hawkins replying: “Oh my God.” After that, Hawkins and his small team decided to build their own, simpler product. “When he told us that, we said there’s no way. How are you going to compete with Sony and Motorola?” Jarrett recalled. “And he crushed us, because he took this simple iterative approach to solving problems.”

Hawkins took his one tiny component of General Magic’s giant ecosystem and made it the basis of a much simpler device. It started just with functions for a calendar, contacts, a to-do list, a memo pad, and a calculator. That was the PalmPilot, which became a smash hit in the same era.

[…]

“We had too much on our plate,” Stern told me. “If you don’t whittle it down, you’re not gonna make it. And we kept piling it on. Why did we need sixteen partners? We didn’t. But there was all this FOMO.”

Why Startups Fail by Tom EisenmannIn Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann describes six patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures:

Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.

False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.

False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.

Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.

Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.

Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Runaway

Monday, July 6th, 2026

I have zero recollection of the movie Runaway coming out in 1984 — and, more tellingly, no recollection of it playing on cable or coming up in conversation after that. At some point in this last decade, it came up somehow, as a bit of a punchline, because it features Gene Simmons — yes, Gene Simmons of KISS — shooting a high-tech pistol with homing-missile rounds.

This did not sell me on the idea of seeking it out. Gene Simmons hams it up, but the other stars play their roles well enough — even though they’re hardly believable as a team of techies:

It turns out that this isn’t a sci-fi B movie — it’s by Michael Crichton — and it’s (unevenly) prescient about modern technology:

It’s about the introduction of smart weapons into civilian life – like the Exocet missile. The pilot who sunk the battleship Sheffield in the Falklands war never even saw the target. He just fired at it over the horizon. When people buy a coffeemaker these days, they expect it to have a microprocessor in it. What about when they buy a gun?

The setting feels like 1984, but with Heathkit robots that work like what we’re now expecting in the next few years. When a “runaway” robot goes rogue, they send in Tom Selleck’s character, who dons something like shark-diving chainmail and BMX gear — and calls for a “floater” drone with a TV camera to go in ahead of him. Prescient. He then dispatches the robot with a totally incongruous laser pistol, despite carrying a semi-auto pistol throughout the film. Again, its prescience is uneven.

Interestingly, the villain uses a “floater” with a smoke bomb, but when he goes to assassinate our heroes he uses what amounts to an RC car with a bomb — something we kids all came up with independently, back in the day.

Posted in Media, Technology, Weapons | 8 Comments »

The only option is radiation

Thursday, July 2nd, 2026

Years ago, when I first discovered Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site and its list of common misconceptions about space travel, I was taken off guard by a simple point that’s obvious in retrospect:

Rockets got wings. If your rocket has a multi-megawatt power plant, an absurdly high thrust thermal rocket propulsion system, or directed energy weapons it will need huge heat radiators to purge all the waste heat. Otherwise the rocket will melt or even vaporize. Radiators look like large wings or arrays of panels. The necessity of radiators a real problem for warships since radiators are pathetically vulnerable to hostile weapons fire.

(Also, there ain’t no stealth in space, but that’s less apropos…)

Andrew Cavalier, writing in IEEE Spectrum, argues that orbital data centers are harder than Silicon Valley thinks:

Space is cold, but it also has no atmosphere. That means the best heat-removal mechanisms, conduction and convection, are off the table. The only option is radiation. To prevent a chip from overheating in space, a large, costly surface area is required to dissipate the energy and then radiate it.

Solar energy is abundant, but collecting it with functional solar panels that maintain perfect alignment toward the sun is a complex task requiring extensive attitude control systems. On top of that, ionizing radiation in space from cosmic rays and other sources poses a unique challenge, degrading the solar panels, the radiative coolers, and the chips themselves. Because regular maintenance in space is difficult, redundancy has to be built in at launch, and cost estimates have to account for efficiency degradation over time.

At ABI Research, where I work as an aerospace analyst, we did a rough total-cost-of-ownership comparison between a data center on Earth and one in space. It showed that the cost to launch and run a GPU in space for a year is at least an order of magnitude higher than the same feat in a terrestrial data center. Our model was simple, assuming an Nvidia H100 server rack launched with the requisite-size solar panel and radiator on a spacecraft akin to Starcloud’s pilot launch. We assumed SpaceX’s Starship was used at a highly optimistic launch cost per kilogram of US $44, and a terrestrial energy cost of $0.20 per kilowatt hour. This is a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it does signal something real.

From our perspective, the cost of delivery and space hardening of the payload makes general-purpose space-based data centers difficult to justify economically today, despite the fact that data-center builders in many regions are scrambling for electric power. However, there are niche applications where the much higher costs of computing in space could be justified. Examples include preprocessing data from Earth-observation satellites, real-time detection and tracking of hypersonic missiles, and active collision avoidance in the increasingly crowded low Earth orbit. Even for these, though, contending with fundamental physics will still be a demanding challenge. And a technologically compelling one, too.

[…]

To understand how big this baseline area is in practice, I used the Stefan-Boltzmann law to model the heat-rejection area needed to keep a single chip that draws 700 watts of power—such as the H100 GPU chip, an AI stalwart—at a constant 60 °C, usually considered the sweet spot for GPU longevity and stability. I further assumed that the radiator is perfectly facing deep space, at a chilly background temperature of 3 kelvins. By this calculation, a single chip would require 1.4 square meters of radiator surface.

To put this into perspective, consider that a common AI rack can hold approximately 32 GPUs (four H100 server boards). With CPUs, memory, and networking equipment, this rack would draw around 40 kilowatts of power. This single rack includes 2.5 terabytes of memory—enough capacity to serve over 20,000 concurrent users or run 16 simultaneous instances of Llama 3, an open-source AI model. But to cool this thermal load in a vacuum, that single rack would require an 80-square-meter radiator, roughly the size of a pickleball court. For an aggregate 100-megawatt data center, you’d need at least 2,500 of those radiators.

And that’s the best-case scenario. Additional problems are hidden in the low Earth orbit environment itself. Space exposes radiators and their coatings to a chemically hostile brew of ultraviolet light and atomic oxygen, quite the opposite of a clean-room environment. Over a LEO satellite’s typical 5-year lifespan, these elements degrade the radiator’s surface properties and lower its ability to shed heat.

Including this degradation in the model reveals that as the radiator degrades from a “fresh” state to an “end-of-life” state, the physics demands a further penalty. To maintain that same 60 °C operating temperature for the GPU chips, the required surface area jumps from about 1.4 square meters per chip to nearly 2.0 square meters. In other words, the physics tax rises by 40 percent. Therefore, you must launch at least 40 percent more radiator mass, endure higher atmospheric drag, and sacrifice valuable launch volume just to survive the degradation of the thermal coating. This increase adds significantly to the launch cost and further erodes the economics of a space-based data center.

When Dwarkesh interviewed him, Elon made the point that the availability of energy is the issue:

If you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it’s more or less flat. It’s maybe a slight increase, but pretty close flat. China has a rapid increase in electrical output. But if you’re putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity? Especially as you scale.

The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So how are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?

[…]

It’s harder to scale on the ground than it is to scale in space. You’re also going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don’t need batteries. I almost wore my other shirt, which says, “it’s always sunny in space”. Which it is because you don’t have a day-night cycle, seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space. The atmosphere alone results in about a 30% loss of energy.

So any given solar panel can do about five times more power in space than on the ground. You also avoid the cost of having batteries to carry you through the night. It’s actually much cheaper to do in space. My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI. It will be space in 36 months or less. Maybe 30 months.

Posted in Science, Technology | 1 Comment »

Active flow control systems blow precisely directed jets of air over the wing and tail surfaces to reshape the airflow around the aircraft

Wednesday, June 24th, 2026

Aurora Flight Sciences has announced that the triangular wings for its X-65 demonstrator have arrived at its Virginia integration facility:

The X-65 uses a triangular, or delta-derived, planform with modular outboard wing sections that can be reconfigured between test campaigns, allowing engineers to evaluate active flow control performance across multiple sweep angles rather than committing to a single fixed geometry. That modularity is deliberate and goes to the heart of what the program is designed to produce: not just data from one flight configuration, but a flexible platform capable of generating comparative data across multiple aerodynamic setups. The wings are built with embedded effector pathways throughout their surfaces, housing the plumbing and structural provisions needed to deliver pressurized air to the fourteen active flow control effectors that represent the X-65’s core research purpose.

Those fourteen effectors are what makes the X-65 genuinely unlike any aircraft that has flown before at this scale. Active flow control, or AFC, is a concept that aeronautical engineers have studied since the mid-20th century: instead of using physical control surfaces such as ailerons, elevators, and rudders to change an aircraft’s attitude, AFC systems blow precisely directed jets of air over the wing and tail surfaces to reshape the airflow around the aircraft in real time, producing the same pitch, roll, and yaw responses without moving any mechanical components. The concept is elegant and potentially transformative, because control surfaces are among the most mechanically complex, maintenance-intensive, and aerodynamically disruptive features on any aircraft. Removing them eliminates the joints, actuators, and hinge lines that add weight and create drag, and it allows aircraft designers to pursue shapes that simply are not practical when mechanical control surfaces must be accommodated.

X-65 Design Rendering

The stealth dimension of active flow control is one of the reasons the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, Naval Air Systems Command, and the Office of Naval Research are all actively monitoring the CRANE program, as Kent confirmed to National Defense Magazine. The outer mold line of an aircraft, meaning the precise shape of its external surfaces, directly determines its radar cross-section, and current stealth designs must accommodate the joints and hinge lines of conventional control surfaces in ways that create radar-reflecting discontinuities. An aircraft that can achieve full maneuverability with smooth, unbroken surfaces throughout its flight envelope could achieve a lower radar signature than any conventionally controlled aircraft of similar size. That potential application to future stealth combat aircraft gives CRANE a strategic relevance that extends well beyond its immediate research objectives.

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User error, it turned out, was actually designer error

Friday, June 19th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAfter Vietnam, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), the Army moved from Nylon flak vests to Kevlar, then added rifle-proof ceramic plates, and then added extra protection against “frag” for the neck, groin, shoulders, etc.:

When a vehicle rolled over, or caught fire, or went underwater, soldiers were unable to move quickly enough to escape.

In 2007, a redesign of body armor that was meant to improve mobility was only able to save a single pound. Instead of reducing weight, the new design featured a quick release tab that the wearer could pull to cause the armor to drop off. It was helpful in an emergency, but didn’t solve the overall mobility problem.

[…]

Shortly before the GAO report was published, the secretary of defense ordered the military to open all combat jobs to women, which made the issue of bulky armor even more acute. As women joined the close-combat force, some were outweighed by their equipment. Aside from the weight, it didn’t fit well. On average, of course, women are smaller than men, and shaped differently in ways that are both obvious and nonobvious—proportional to their height, for example, they tend to have shorter limbs.

Pierre-Zamora is thirty-eight, and told me that back when she got her first vest in basic training, the bottom of the ceramic plates were so low that they’d jab into her thighs when she bent down, making it difficult to squat or bend over. And the vest was so broad that she had to yank it to one side in order to shoulder a rifle.

[…]

“I’m a short, heavy guy,” Miller said. “My torso length says I should wear a small vest, but my gut says I should wear a medium.”

Miller’s comment is reminiscent of a story recounted by scientist Todd Rose in his book The End of Average. Rose described how, at the dawn of jet-powered aviation in the 1940s, US Air Force pilots were suffering an enormous number of training accidents. Seventeen pilots crashed in a single day. The carnage was ascribed to pilot error, until a young lieutenant prompted a closer look at the jet cockpits. They had been designed based on the average measurements of hundreds of pilots. But even taking just a few basic body measurements—like height, sleeve length, thigh circumference—the lieutenant found that essentially no individual was near the average on all of them. In designing a cockpit to fit the average pilot, plane manufacturers had designed a cockpit that fit no one. The solution was adjustable cockpits. User error, it turned out, was actually designer error.

The Army learned the same lesson with protective gear. Not long after the GAO report (and the stuck infantryman), the Army started rolling out the body armor version of an adjustable cockpit: the modular scalable vest, or MSV. With interchangeable parts, it allowed soldiers to remove weight if they didn’t absolutely need it. It also gave the flexibility to match a size small outer vest with the belly protection of a size medium, which solved Miller’s torso-length / gut conundrum.

The MSV was sleeker and lighter than its predecessor. Instead of eleven standard sizes, the new armor came in eight, three of which were specifically based on measurements of female soldiers: extra-small short (extra-narrow vest with short ceramic plates); small-short; and small-long (narrow vest with long plates). With those new sizes, something unexpected happened.

“Women are about two percent of the close-combat force,” Miller told me. “But what we found is about twenty percent of that force is best fit in equipment we built for these women.” So many men were better off with the vests designed for women that the Army made sure to brand them carefully. “I’ve had to explain to Congress several times that we built the vest for women,” Miller said, “but we call it unisex because we want men to wear it.”

In particular, physically fit men in the close-combat force often switched from a medium in the old vests to small-long in the new ones—a narrower vest but a protective plate long enough that it still covered their vital organs. A lot of men had also been yanking aside their vest to shoulder a rifle, but now they didn’t have to. Additionally, a notch behind the neck was built into the new gear to make space for women’s hair buns. As it turned out, everybody liked to be able to lift their head while prone, so it became a standard feature. And a new, more meticulous sizing process that benefited women benefited everyone.

[…]

As Miller told me: “Looking at some more extreme users, or niche users, and using them to make something better for everybody, that’s kind of what we did here.”

[…]

The challenges faced by “extreme users,” as Miller referred to them—whether they be people who are particularly small or big, old or young, or with disabilities—frequently represent more extreme versions of the challenges that many other users face. Universal design, then, is just good design, and centering user constraints is a way to focus on the most important challenges.

Todd Rose gave a Google talk on his book years ago:

Posted in Technology, War | 2 Comments »

The ideas that made an impact in the long run were those that embedded something new in something already established

Wednesday, June 17th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn Shakespeare’s era, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), creativity was more associated with the ability to improve upon something that existed than with sheer originality:

If the audience already knew the story, they could readily take in the unique aspects that each new creator brought to it.

[…]

Robert McKee, in his classic screenwriting book Story, coined the term “Archplot” to describe the structure of nearly every Hollywood hit.

[…]

The more creative the setting of a film, McKee explains, the more closely it must hew to Archplot in order to resonate with a wide audience. He points to the counterintuitive fact that “of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.”

[…]

The stranger the setting, the more conventional the plot. (Conversely, for Woolf to use new narrative methods, she had to stick with extremely conventional settings.)

[…]

In a classic paper on technological innovation, a pair of researchers coined the term “robust design” to describe features that help the intended audience immediately place a new thing in the context of a familiar world.

[…]

At every turn, Edison used design choices that made adoption easy. He initially limited bulbs to 13 watts so that they would produce light similar to familiar gas lamps, and he retained lampshades even though they were no longer needed to protect gas flames from a draft. The effect was such that adopters might hardly realize that they were bathed in a new kind of light. For charging customers, Edison employed meters based on the familiar devices used by gas companies, even though this meant that early customers got six months of free lighting because he hadn’t yet figured out a way for meters to measure usage. Every choice Edison made prioritized the social context, even when that made his job more difficult, and even when it meant defying his most important backers.

In order to mimic the existing utility distribution system, Edison wanted to use underground wires to carry electricity from a central generation point to many buildings. But two of his biggest investors, William Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, insisted that Edison instead sell isolated systems of small generators, wires, and lights to individual customers. Edison had to threaten to resign to get his way. It led to lighting that was far easier for new customers to understand and use than if everyone had to manage their own isolated system. In just a decade, Edison replaced not only New York City’s gas lights with incandescent bulbs, but the gas infrastructure that had been both physically and deeply politically ingrained in the city for fifty years. “Edison triumphed over the gas industry not by clearly distinguishing his new system,” the researchers wrote, “but, rather, by initially cloaking it in the mantle of these established institutions.”

[…]

What I’ve been calling “Virginia Woolf’s rope”—the link to something familiar when trying something new—a Harvard Business School professor referred to with the more management-like moniker: “optimal newness.”

[…]

Some papers relied on highly novel combinations of knowledge: They primarily cited areas of research that rarely (or never) appeared together. Others cited only familiar combinations that recur constantly. But the “hit” papers, those that went on to be used by a huge number of other scientists, struck a balance. Papers that were grounded in conventional knowledge combinations, but featured an injection of unusual combinations, were at least twice as likely as average papers to become scientific blockbusters.

[…]

Most management concepts were fads that disappeared quickly. The ideas that made an impact in the long run were those that embedded something new in something already established.

[…]

Whether it is making new music, new Broadway shows, new movies, new video games, or new companies, the most successful teams tend to comprise members who have a wide variety of prior work experiences, but also some team members with prior collaborations or common background experiences. Creative teams that include only repeat collaborators, or, conversely, teams with only new members who have no common background experience, are less likely to find their way to the familiarity/ originality sweet spot.

[…]

There was no need for many early electric vehicles to be charged via a cable that looks just like a gas hose with a gas nozzle that plugs into a port near where a nonexistent gas tank would be, nor for an electric pickup truck with no engine under the hood to keep the same shape as its gasoline-powered cousins.

[…]

Today, this design principle is sometimes called skeuomorphism: New stuff retains facets of old stuff (like the “folders” on your computer) in order to communicate to users what the new stuff can do. “Without invoking existing understandings,” the Edison researchers warned, “innovations may never be understood and adopted in the first place.”

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | No Comments »

The device was designed to make an injured soldier more self-sufficient

Wednesday, June 10th, 2026

The U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command’s new Intrepid Battlefield EXoskeleton (IBEX) is a shoulder-to-foot brace that allows injured troops to stand, walk, and shoot when evacuation is impossible or delayed:

The device was designed to make an injured soldier more self-sufficient, so they can move themselves to safety instead of relying on the two-to-four additional troops it takes to carry a victim on a litter. The goal, the Army said in a release Wednesday, is to keep more soldiers firing until help arrives.

IBEX Mk2 Prototype

Weighing just seven pounds, the IBEX can fold into the size of a one liter bottle and be carried quickly to an injured soldier. It relieves the pressure on soft tissue, nerves and blood vessels, and is able to bear body weight.

Lower-leg injuries are often from gunshots or bomb blasts, the Army said, and soldiers suffered many such injuries during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They can also be injured operating in rough terrain or bad weather.

Troops deployed to combat zones sustained over 22,000 non-amputated lower leg injuries between 2001 and 2018, according to the National Library of Medicine, which also reported that 68% of extremity injuries were fractures or open wounds.

Posted in Technology, War | 2 Comments »

General Magic had a right to any IP developed by employees

Monday, June 1st, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinGeneral Magic was already in trouble, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), when a tech-support guy named Pierre Omidyar used his free time and personal website to start AuctionWeb:

General Magic had a right to any IP developed by employees, so Omidyar dutifully showed the company’s lawyer that his site was generating traffic, connecting people, and facilitating commerce. Isn’t that what General Magic wanted to do? But they were already too committed to the partners of the gigantic Alliance and to a proprietary e-commerce network to change direction, even though the explosion of the internet should have completely altered their plans. General Magic passed on AuctionWeb. Omidyar, who didn’t have a business bank account and had been collecting checks in a pile at his desk, kept it going. He left General Magic, and changed the name of his site to eBay.

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Businesspeople weren’t going to use the Newton unless it included a phone

Saturday, May 30th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinLarry Tesler, who was leading Apple’s Newton group, hired an anthropologist named Eleanor Wynn, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), to test the theory behind their business plan:

Wynn reported back that business­people weren’t going to use the Newton unless it included a phone. But adding a phone at that point (as General Magic was busy learning the hard way) was unreasonable. In that case, Wynn reported, the market will be workers who already carry separate pieces of communication equipment, like police officers and firefighters. In an oral history interview for the Computer History Museum, Tesler recalled Apple CEO John Sculley’s response:

Sculley is deflated, “I thought my market was CEOs, like me. Not firemen.” And “No, no, no, we don’t want that. That answer is not acceptable.”

So they went hunting for another answer, using what Tesler called the “famous fake focus group.” Tesler was told that the supposed focus group would be in Minnesota, because people in the Bay Area were too tech savvy, and neither he nor Wynn were invited, and unfortunately there would be no recording of it they could watch. The focus-group team came back with a message: “We’re building the exact right product.” Apple plowed ahead, and the Newton flopped spectacularly.

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For every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way

Tuesday, May 26th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinBell Labs is often remembered as the epitome of unfettered exploration, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), but that framing misses a crucial point:

Eric Gilliam, who studies and writes about innovation history, coined the beautiful phrase “long leash, narrow fence” to describe the ethos at Bell Labs in its heyday. New researchers were given extraordinary latitude in determining what to work on, but were expected to interact with engineers and manufacturing facilities to identify specific problems that needed solving.

[…]

John R. Pierce, a Bell Labs scientist and “father of the communications satellite,” recalled in an oral history: “Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, ‘Do whatever you want to.’… It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.” What they had at Bell Labs, as another famous scientist put it, was “circumscribed freedom”—freedom within a framework.

Gilliam shares just an excerpt from an interview with Pierce, from 1979, after he had earned acclaim as the father of the communications satellite:

LYLE: I want to talk about research in the Bell Labs and how that’s done. That is, when you first started there, you were working with vacuum tubes. Who decides what problems will be worked on?

PIERCE: That’s very different then and now. I was told to do research on vacuum tubes. People sort of just left me alone. They did suggest that I go and see Philo Farnsworth, who was working on electron multipliers and television pick-up tubes, but I was left pretty much to myself. This was very, very confusing to me. I didn’t know what to do.

LYLE: Were you doing it alone?

PIERCE: Yes.

LYLE: Did they say, “So-and-so has been doing this and this is where he left off”?

PIERCE: No. I was just supposed to plan something to do and do it. I think that is close to cruel and unusual punishment.

LYLE: And full of anxiety, I’m sure.

PIERCE: Yes, but I didn’t know enough to be unhappy. I did crazy things. I did some useful things. I invented an electron multiplier. I was greatly helped at this point, but not so much by the people who were close to such work. I felt a certain secretiveness in the people who were working near to me. They were doing their own thing, and I was doing other things. Heaven knows how I found anything useful to do. I was exposed to things by some of the people who were less secretive. I was very much helped by Bill Shockley, who came to Bell Laboratories about the same time I did. He had been an undergraduate at Caltech but did his graduate work at MIT. He was a very sympathetic person, and taught me a good deal. Somehow I hit on things that were worth working on — electron multipliers and the question of noise in electron multipliers, and later trying to make high transconductance vacuum tubes.

Then, as the war came, I was drawn into microwave tube work, and the outcome of that was a little bit by accident. First, I tried to make klystron amplifiers—I’d heard about klystron. Then I stumbled onto reflex klystrons, which was not a new idea, but I stumbled onto it independently. Gerry [William Gerald] Shepherd, who’s now at the University of Minnesota, and I made some klystrons that were in all American microwave radar receivers. The magnetron was the big thing of the day, but we made these beating oscillators for receivers instead.

Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, “Do whatever you want to.” You’ve heard this story. There are various outcomes. One is, “Do I have to do what I want to?” Complete freedom is not very helpful to a person who is inexperienced in the world. It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.

LYLE: So, did they tell you why they wanted the vacuum tubes, when you started off?

PIERCE: Not really. I found out some way, inadvertently. Some people were working on electron multipliers, and I made some improvements on them. It became clear that people needed better vacuum tubes for building negative feedback amplifiers, and I worked on that. I don’t think I was told this formally; I just found out by talking to people. Then, as the war approached and we got into war, it became apparent that microwave radar was very, very important, and I worked on tubes for radar. It was a process of osmosis rather than direction that led me into these things, as I remember it.

LYLE: How was the research tied in with the general business of Bell Telephone? kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?
That is, what kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?

PIERCE: It’s a very important relationship. The Bell System has AT&T, which is sort of a holding company, but it also runs the long lines that provide long distance telephone service. It establishes engineering practices for the Bell System. It owns Western Electric, which is a manufacturing organization, and it also owns, together with Western Electric, the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

I remember that during the war we saw a good deal of people from Western Electric, who were going to manufacture the things that we devised. Because all of these people were engaged in telephony, or during the war because they were all engaged in radar and other military things, you got to talk to people who were engaged in the operation of things, who were engaged in the manufacture of things, and you got a picture of the rest of the world which certainly influenced what research you did.

I can understand a university, which does teaching and research. But the idea of a research institute without ties to either teaching or to manufacturing or operational organization seems a terribly sterile idea. You see that in the Soviet Union; there’s a lot of good activity that never results in anything. When they want to build automobiles, they hire Fiat to build an automobile plant, instead of relying on what they have learned.

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The costs only explode once a film moves into production

Wednesday, May 20th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAfter Toy Story fulfilled Ed Catmull’s twenty-year dream, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he turned his attention to creating a place that could do it repeatedly:

The “Three Pitches Rule” required directors to pitch not one but three film ideas, so that they wouldn’t get stuck on one and fixate too early. Pixar directors were then allowed to spend years with a tiny team in the development phase of a film, probing ideas, trying out script drafts, and creating and re-creating storyboards while they hunted for and simplified the core of a story.

[…]

The costs only explode once a film moves into production, at which point experimenting and learning become slow and expensive.

[…]

Once in production, Catmull and his colleagues used the schedule to enforce regular feedback and learning. There were “dailies” every single morning, in which animators shared incomplete work with colleagues; “Braintrust” meetings, in which a small group watched a version of a film and highlighted aspects that weren’t working, without mandating solutions (Steve Jobs was barred, lest his powerful persona carry undue weight); and, after a film was done, postmortems, the main benefit of which was the pre-postmortem—the fact that the looming postmortem forced team members to collect and reflect on their lessons. Boundaries

[…]

Creativity, Inc. by by Ed Catmull

In his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Catmull recounts how the director of The Incredibles became obsessed with getting the fish in an aquarium in the background of a scene to flicker like flames, so animators worked on the inconsequential detail for months. Meanwhile, major characters still needed work. Eventually, a producer and department manager created a system in which popsicle sticks — each one representing the amount of work a single animator could complete in a week — were Velcroed to a wall and arranged next to characters that needed to be animated. If the director wanted to keep obsessing over the fish, he’d have to start taking sticks away from some other character and moving them to the fish. As it turned out, crafting visible constraints did the trick.

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The “think slow” part of Pixar planning started before Pixar even existed.

Monday, May 18th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinThe “think slow” part of Pixar planning, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), started before Pixar even existed:

Catmull was surprised then, in 1980, when a Lucasfilm competitor spent $10 million on a Cray-1 super­computer. He and his colleagues wondered if they should chase that competitor, so they sat down and made specific estimates for the computing power it would take to animate an entire film. Their estimate: It would take one hundred Cray-1 computers, which would cost $1 billion. Totally out of the question. “It was like, OK, they’ve just done something unwise economically,” Catmull told me. “So we decided we’re not going to worry about them, and there are a whole bunch of other things we have to solve first.”

[…]

At one point, they calculated the exact number of pixels (five million) and “micropolygons” (eighty million) that they figured software would need to render in order to make a Star Wars quality sequence, down to the realistic blur of speeding objects. Like the summaries in By Space Ship to the Moon, the estimates were guiding lights that helped them keep track of the distance between their current work and their goal.

[…]

In 1988, Pixar released its RenderMan software, and changed filmmaking forever. It was used to seamlessly integrate computer graphics into live-action films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. And then, in 1995, to create an entire film: Toy Story. After twenty years of small steps, Catmull finally achieved his personal moonshot.

The Last Starfighter came out in 1984, well before then:

Computer graphics for the film were rendered by Digital Productions (DP) on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. The company created 27 minutes of effects for the film. This was considered an enormous amount of computer generated imagery at the time.[6] For the 300 scenes containing computer graphics in the film, each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons and had a resolution of 3000 × 5000 36-bit pixels. Digital Productions estimated that using computer animation required only half the time and between a third to half of the cost of traditional special effects. The result was a cost of $14 million for a film that made close to $29 million at the box office.

The computer graphics are quaint:

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Even literal Moon shots aren’t “moonshots”

Saturday, May 16th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinEd Catmull, the cofounder and longtime president of Pixar, was watching the General Magic documentary with David Epstein when he headed to the bookshelf, Epstein explains (in Inside the Box):

When Catmull returns from the shelf, he’s holding a laptop-size book with giant red letters splashed across the cover: By Space Ship to the Moon, published in 1952.

By Space Ship to the Moon by Fletcher Pratt and Jack Coggins Medium

The text is clearly targeted at adolescents, but it gives meticulous summaries of the state of 1952 technology — everything from space fuel to space food — and the distance between the current state of the art and how far it needs to go for a trip to the Moon.

[…]

Nearly two decades before the actual Moon landing, scientists and engineers were thinking slow, breaking a giant challenge into tiny pieces. “It goes through chapter by chapter the things that have to be solved,” Catmull explains. “The supplies; the fuel; how do you get up into space; what’s it like to actually be there; landing; food; the process of getting back. It’s a step-by-step of what it takes to get to the Moon.” His point is that even literal Moon shots aren’t “moonshots” in the way they’re often mythologized — just give bright people an inspiring vision and tons of money and the rest will fall into place. General Magic, he suggests, went the mythical moonshot route.

Returning to the documentary:

“The greatest people are self-managing,” the man says. “They don’t need to be managed. What they need is a common vision. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it.”

Catmull looks like he just opened a carton of sour milk. The man on screen was his longtime Pixar business partner, Steve Jobs. It doesn’t sound like the person Catmull knew, the one who obsessed over the number and placement of bathrooms in the Pixar office such that people would be forced to bump into one another and talk. “That is not how Steve ended up working,” he tells me. He concludes that Jobs was either just very young in that clip, or in “mythmaking” mode, providing inspirational soundbites for the media.

I managed to find some scanned pages from the book:

By Space Ship to the Moon 1 Medium

Crewman wheels fuel tank from cave, as moon-to-earth missile is readied for firing.

The station on the moon would be pretty safe against any kind of attack from earth…and guided missiles fired from the moon against a target on earth would be almost impossible to stop. So the first trip to the moon will be made to explore for a place where a military base can be set up.

By Space Ship to the Moon 2 Medium

Base ship will be dismantled to build moon-base. Observatory will be re-erected on mountain top,

By Space Ship to the Moon 3 Medium

Battery-powered, tractor-mounted drill at work. Gravity one-sixth that of earth makes handling of heavy equipment easy

There is nobody on earth rich enough to pay for a rocket that would go to the moon. The big business corporations might possibly find the money, but they would want to see some way of getting it back. At present, it is believed that many valuable minerals are to be found on the moon, but nobody knows for sure. It is not very likely that the big corporations will risk their money. So it appears that the moon rocket will have to be a government project

By Space Ship to the Moon 4 Medium

Sun’s rays are focused by large reflector on mercury boiler. Vapor will drive engines to furnish electric power.

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He called it the Pocket Crystal

Sunday, May 10th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAs I mentioned recently, I quite enjoyed David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, so I went ahead and got Inside the Box the day it came out.

He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream and contrasts that myth with the reality that Mendeleev had a deadline approaching for the second volume of his textbook, and he needed a way to discuss dozens of elements more sensibly and efficiently.

His primary example though — or counter-example, since it demonstrates what a lack of constraints does — is General Magic, founded by two Apple legends and the guy who coined the term Information Economy, Marc Porat:

One day, Porat took a Sharp Wizard — a new electronic organizer with a calendar and phone book — and duct-taped it to a Motorola analog cell phone. He had his concept.

[…]

He called it the Pocket Crystal.

[…]

The Pocket Crystal schematic depicted a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons—just a touch screen. It would be a computer that combined a phone and fax machine; you would use it to send text messages, watch movies, play video games, buy plane tickets, and download new apps. It would fit in your pocket, and it would be beautiful. Following the sketch, Porat wrote in his red book: “It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.”

In 1989, only 15 percent of American households even had a computer, which didn’t fit in anyone’s pocket; zero percent were browsing the web, because it didn’t exist. And yet, there was Marc Porat, essentially sketching the iPhone.

Apple took a board seat, Sculley introduced them to Sony, and soon “General Magic’s partners controlled so much of the world’s communications industry that Alliance meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they were prohibited from discussing.”

Porat raised so much money so quickly to create “heaven for engineers.”

“They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?”

The answer, it turned out: a little less freedom.

The General Magic documentary explains:

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