by gnat | 2025-05-28 22:17:37+00:00
I used to blog Four Short Links for O’Reilly Media — every day, four interesting technical things around the net that caught my eye or seemed to be part of a bigger trend.

I have a Real Job now but still collect interesting links. Here’s my 2024 list, from before I got interested in AI. Perhaps some of that is interesting to you, and New To Me is almost as good as New To The World right?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S9pK6EYiJvRlBDdlIoNQCOkV...

I admit that I’m no longer trawling with a wide net. Interesting to me professionally and interesting to me based on what I already know are weighting that list heavily. They’re pretty “adjacent possible” is what I’m saying.

Beyond those, the trends I’d be watching are:

* Apple took chip design in house and the results are incredible. I’d be watching for other companies following suit, which industries/players does it make most sense for, are there any low hanging fruits in this world, what does it do for hiring, and then downstream for education?

* Quantum Computing is still in the physics phase of research. There are bullshit artists, claims and counter claims. I’d be trying to take a position on whether national security is the biggest driver or whether there’s commercial investment logic yet. Does NatSec tech even matter in an age of Doge? The technical advances themselves are still coming slowly. There was a Queensland U podcast that I followed for a while, and I’d dive in by looking for its spiritual successor.

* correctly implementing distributed systems seems like a rich company’s achievement because of the teams and systems required. I’m watching for systems that let teams of 8 build an “enterprise” product that can survive network and software outages without a massive ops team and platform engineers and and and

* AR/VR fizzled as virtual escapism and The Next Big Things. I’m interested in moving beyond physical monitors. Is it possible? Is it healthy? The VR advocates sneer at “just looking at monitors fixed in space”. That seems like low hanging fruit given I walk around offices full of monitors every day. I want to understand why we still have physical monitors and look for ways to replace them.

* privacy. Capitalism drove investment and development of ever more tracking and data exfiltration. I’d be looking for intermediaries like PiHole as ways civilians can limit tracking and exfiltration. Bit screwed for phones when every app is phoning home with fingerprints and metadata galore. Advances in this area excite me, as tech bandaids before the regulation that is the only way the big players will get reined in.

I don’t know enough about fab techniques to pay attention to nanometres news, but I do know the political topsy turvy will be interesting there in terms of who develops, protects, and houses advances in chip manufacturing.

Space tech doesn’t interest me. Med tech does but it’s very hard to separate press release hype from substance and then to understand the future based on that substance. No medical degree and too old to pack a PhD from ChatGPT U into my noggin.

I like my job but I miss being in a place where people would pitch me to get me excited by their tech and businesses and vision of the future. Tim O’Reilly’s “create more value than you capture” was my first filter, and it was good to have a source of excitement and optimism from what passed that. I reckon we all could do with a little more of that.