I love thinking about how technological advancement will intersect with our desires as humans. My book on this topic is called The Real Internet of Things. We have all these gadgets, technologies, and services, but towards what goal are they moving us? What’s the endgame? We see the features—like email and personal devices and various kinds of applications—but…

Benedict Evans is one of my favorite tech analysts. His content is usually great, I often agree with it, and his presentation style is quite unique. His annual presentation on technology trends should not be missed. I had a chat with him in person once, and it was dissapointing to show him my long-term thoughts on where technology…

AI—and specifically machine learning—are going to empower humans the way a futuristic exoskeleton would empower a 4-year-old. When they want something from the kitchen cabinet—they’re going to get it. And if they don’t want to brush their teeth, it’s not going to happen. And in the process of expressing these concerns, the kitchen, bathroom, and perhaps the entire…

If you’re a programmer, a systems administrator, or really any type of IT worker, you probably have your favorite go-to IP addresses for troubleshooting. And if you’re like me, you’ve probably been using the same ones for years. Such IPs can be used for: Testing ping connectivity Checking DNS resolution using dig or nslookup Updating a system’s permanent…

If you’re like me, you care if your website goes down. There have been services available for years that monitor your site and let you know if it goes down. The one I’ve been using for over a decade is Pingdom, which is great. It gives you tons of advanced options like searching for text within probe responses,…

Few things are more annoying than being stuck inside a bad UI, and withinin virtualization environments is a common place for that to happen. Here’s how to do the three-finger-salute inside VMware. Regular: Ctrl+Alt+Del Full-sized Mac keyboard: FwdDel+Ctrl+Option (Delete below Help key) Abridged Mac Keyboard, Fn+Ctrl+Option+Delete

Starting around October 1st I saw something catastrophic happen to my incoming traffic from Google. Compared to the beginning of the year I have gone from around 10,000 pageviews a day to around 5,000—a 50% loss in traffic. Once I noticed (which took a while), I started reading a ton of articles on all the various potential causes.…

For people looking to get into reverse engineering, the barrier to entry can be fairly steep—starting with the terminology. Here are the differences between a few key tools you will encounter on the path. Decompilers reverse binaries into higher-level languages, like C++. Disassemblers reverse binaries into assembler language. Debuggers allow you to view and change the state of…

Medium has quietly been making a series of changes that are all bad news for writers who still publish articles on their platform.I discovered the most recent—and most significant—change when I emailed the Medium support a few days ago asking to update the canonical links of the e-Residency article that I had just re-written and updated on nomadgate.com.It’s…

To me the main feature is that they’re the beginning of config-file-based infrastructure. Imagine a language that can translate a business requirement into a full tech stack. That’s where we’re heading.— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) December 15, 2018 I saw this tweet by Dan Kaminski recently, and gave a quick response as one does on Twitter. But I think…

Amazon has completely crushed it again at this year’s re:invent conference. They continue to innovate a truly frightening pace. And when I say frightening, I mean…in that it creates fear within me. It’s just doing so much, so quickly, that I can’t help but feel uncomfortable. But it’s a good thing. I think. It’s definitely sending a great…

Aliases are one of those things that follow you, from laptop to laptop, and server to server—like snippets of your educational DNA. Here are some of mine that have followed me for two decades: Type f to find things by name using find $ alias f="find . -name" A super quick speed test You can do this with…

There are lots of ways to organize the apps on your phone. You can have lots of screens of single apps, or you can have lots of screens of app folders, or you can have something in-between. I do something simpler. I have one screen of apps, and everything else I have to invoke via the down-swipe. Not…

This year’s WWDC Keynote was all about software, and it had updates for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Here were my favorites. iOS Share back in photos Siri shortcut integrations Shortcut editor Travel plans Heading home Screentime Time limits Allowances Memoji Personalized animoji Group FaceTime with up to 32 people Pivot directly from Messages to group FaceTime watchOS…

John Gruber of Daring Fireball took a big shot at Google Duplex recently. He basically said that the way the demo was conducted should make us doubt the legitimacy of the tech. Why not demo it live? Why only play recordings? When is it rolling out to actual customers? Was there a hands-on after the event where members…

The best definition I’ve ever heard for DevOps is the ability to practice frequently and well. I prefer DevOps to DevSecOps because I feel security should be part of both development and operations, but I also see the merit in calling it out where this isn’t regular practice. I think there is a powerful analog here to professional…

There are few technologies as misunderstood right now as Machine Learning. Some think it’s 100% hype, sales, and marketing, and others think it’s humanity’s Messiah in the form of math and code. Unfortunately, there’s currently not a lot of space between those two extremes. Here’s how I think about it. Machine Learning is much like Love and Sex.…

Gizmodo just did an article about how silly smart homes are, how broken the tech is, and how it’s all annoying and creepy. This type of journalism seriously annoys me. It’s the equivalent of looking at an R&D lab at CalTech in 1973 and saying, “Wow, computers are stupid.” It’s quite sad to see a tech magazine throwing…

I wrote The Real Internet of Things to answer the question of where all this consumer tech was eventually going to lead us. I think I mostly captured it there, but wanted to summarize here. I’m not sure where Microsoft is in this, and neither is anyone else. Right now we basically have Apple and Google fighting for…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Thanks to Saša Zdjelar, Andrew Ringlein, and Jason Haddix for reading various versions and fragments of this text. Your input and support throughout this precarious first-book experience was deeply felt and appreciated. Thanks especially to Saša for enthusiastically talking through many…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. San Francisco CA, London UK, Newark CA 2016 macOS Sierra Vim Markdown Pandoc Zomby, Glitch Mob, Technoboy, Ratatat, Cryptex, Behemoth, Opeth, Gojira CHAPTER NAVIGATION

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. There are many who will read this book and see nothing but dystopia. In certain moods, I’m one of those people. What’s important to understand, however, is that I’m not conjuring this reality into existence. I’m not enabling it to happen.…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. So we’ve talked through the various concepts. But what does this all get us? How is this the future of technology and humanity? There have been three main themes throughout this book: That we can predict the future of technology through…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. We covered a lot of ideas here, so let’s just review the main points. There are basic trends in technology that we can see crystallizing: centralized to peer-to-peer, forced to natural, obvious to invisible, manual to automatic, periodic to continuous, scheduled…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Each of the chapters you’ve read so far have introduced a single concept per section. I did this to make the concept crisp and simple, which isn’t possible if you start talking about how it might be implemented. In this section…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. We’ve talked about how the future of work is largely person-to-person interaction mediated by a daemon-powered tech layer, but the peer-to-peer model goes far beyond employment. What daemonized peer-to-peer really enables is less reliance on centralized institutions. If you are in…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Now that we’ve talked about the infrastructure for collecting, analyzing, and presenting information, we can move on to a concept I call Desired Outcome Management (DOM). The assumption underpinning DOM is the simple claim that we want to improve things but…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Once we are powered by realtime data and the infrastructure that makes use of it, the intelligence of our algorithms will become paramount. Two areas seem particularly promising: machine learning and evolutionary algorithms. Machine Learning Machine Learning is basically the upgrade…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. There are many different information technologies that will be invented and adopted in the coming decades, but I believe there are four (4) primary categories that they will all fall into. Realtime Data Data Transfer Analysis Algorithms Presentation Interfaces Realtime Data…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Daemonization will fundamentally alter how people work. Businesses will continue shedding human jobs because humans will become increasingly costly, inconsistent, and low-quality compared to algorithms. The future of work is the exchange of value between individuals and groups of individuals, which…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. The algorithm is the centerpiece of expertise. It’s ultimately the way of doing something, and that’s what makes one offering better than another. In the past, the core algorithm of a business has been combined with a massive number of other…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. The combination of daemonization and digital assistants will have another application (beyond providing monitoring for safety) that will prove extremely compelling: They will give people extraordinary powers of perception, knowledge, and even action. As you move through the world on a…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. We’ve already discussed the concept of continuous advocacy, whereby the digital assistant is constantly studying the world, curating, and presenting you context-sensitive data that might help you in your life. But there’s another use case for your digital assistant being continuously…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Connecting algorithms to sensors is going to have a profound impact on how we parse reality, and this effect will be magnified exponentially as people start lifecasting. Lifecasting, as I wrote about in 2008, is where a significant percentage of the…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. In addition to curation and advocacy, digital assistants will also provide another key type of experience enhancement—continuous customization of our environment according to one’s desires and preferences. When you consider all potentially customizable elements of a restaurant, a vehicle, a workplace,…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Once identity (supported by proper authentication) is thoroughly established, the next thing it’ll enable is a rich reputation infrastructure. Reputation has been a crucial human attribute for thousands of years. Whether you’re in a village, a family, or a corporation, your…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. A key component of daemonization is the fact that each person’s (or object’s) daemon represents their unique and centralized identity online, and all object daemons are speaking authoritatively as themselves. So when a DA requests to see products, requests a ride,…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Augmented Reality is a particularly important addition to the combination of Daemonization and Digital Assistants, as it will give humans entirely new ways of seeing and interacting with the world. When you look at a strange person in a non-augmented (NAUG)…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. One of the most powerful aspects of Digital Assistants is that they will be constant and inexhaustible consumers of the world’s services on behalf of their principals. What music should you listen to? What food should you try? Who should you…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. The most visible and significant role that Synthetic Intelligence will play in the near future will be serving as the interface between humans and the world. To clarify, I don’t mean the ever-promised, conscious, and self-improving brand of SI that so…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. We’ve seen the benefits of realtime data for gathering information about the world, but the interactive part of daemons will prove even more powerful. Daemons will likely begin as REST APIs, and all manner of intuitive endpoints will be available depending…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Perhaps the best way to think of a daemonized world is to imagine a fabric of interactive and interconnected nodes made up of every object. Then imagine each of these nodes having instant access to the state of every other node…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. There currently isn’t a good way to maintain real-time information about objects in the world. The way it’s currently done is indirect in a way that will seem primitive once we leave it behind. If you want information about a human,…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. Before we discuss the main concepts, I want to call out a number of technological and civilizational trends that are useful to notice and observe. While the forces are somewhat independent, they often interact with one another, and when grouped together…

These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017. The “Internet of Things” means many different things to many different people, so let’s start with what this book is and is not. This book is not about the transient technical details that will inevitably transition over the next few years.…

A while back I wrote that Evolutionary Algorithms Could be More Significant Than Machine Learning. The reason for this is that they keep improving towards a specific goal, without additional input, by leveraging the powers of evolution, i.e., reproduction, variation, heritability, and differential success. Reinforcement Learning is considered a subset of Machine Learning by many, so this isn’t…

I keep thinking of interesting use cases for Machine Learning at various stages of its development (near and more distant future), and I figured I’d capture them. I’ll also include common ones and interesting ones I’ve heard elsewhere. Extract faces from video, and tell you 1) if they’re known criminals, 2) if their agitated in some way that…

People mean many different things when they use the term Net Neutrality, but I think what they generally reduce to is, “Maintaining an internet that is fair and useful for all users.” That’s hard to disagree with, and I certainly don’t. If that’s what it means, then I’m 100% for it. But some people think Net Neutrality means…

I think there’s confusion around two distinct and practical benefits of Machine Learning (which is somewhat distinct from Artificial Intelligence). Listen to the Audio Version of this essay. Superior Analysis — A Machine Learning solution is being compared to a human with the best training in the world, e.g., a recognized oncologist, and they’re going head to head…

I’m annoyed that I don’t have a perfectly clean opinion about net neutrality. It’s not that I don’t have a strong opinion—it’s that I feel like I could be missing some major counterpoint. To me it’s matter of ideal vs. non-ideal worlds, where in an ideal world net neutrality would be a bad thing because it limits the…