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The Writing Habit
When pivotal events occur in life, you often fail to notice them at the time. When it comes to writing, there has been two such occasions for me.
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The Funny Thing With Smart
When the thermometer was invented, nobody really understood what temperature was. The same is now true of intelligence; we can measure it, but its nature remains a mystery.
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Introducing Straddle, a Framework For Validating Startup Ideas
I’m often dreaming up frameworks. Very few of them spread beyond my mind, but here’s one that I think has stood the test time.
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Back To Business
At its core, the Swedish political project has always been an optimistic one. Regardless of what party that ruled the country, our leaders seem to have shared a deeply held belief that we can handle whatever challenges we’re facing and that in the long run we’re making good progress.
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How To Pick A Party
When I go to cast my vote a few days from now, I feel confident that I’m backing the right horse. That’s thanks to something I learned during many years of recruiting tech talent.
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Dear Apple, Here Are Three Things I’d Like You to Fix With Contacts
Apple’s contact management app represents a glaring blind spot both in terms of functionality and user experience. That’s ironic given that the company’s marketing always revolves around connecting people.
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One Hell of a Book
Learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it – learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.
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First Principle Politics
No amount of innovation is going to save the world from climate change, unless politicians across the ideological spectrum also do their part. Which will *have* to mean changing the rules of the game so that we’re incentivised to adapt our lifestyles.
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Mode Confusion
Human factors engineering taught us the importance of building systems that minimise the risk for mode confusion. That’s highly pertinent when designing interaction with robots that are supposed to be perceived as social.
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Why We Keep Referencing The Past To Feel Good About the Future, or: A Brief History of Skeuomorphism
Why did the disciples of Bauhaus love to hate Parisian metro stations? And is VR really virtual?
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Something Big is About to Happen, and Apple Won’t Like It One Bit
Apple’s renowned “user friendliness” comes at a price, or at least that’s what Apple likes us to believe.
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The Cost of Optimism
I recently read two novels where the protagonists happened to be gay men living through the AIDS epidemic of the 80’s, who didn’t dare to take the test. Their reluctance reminded me of my own sentiment with regards to global warming.
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Why I Won’t Use The Best Software, Even When It’s Free
Productivity is hard. The more you realise what the optimal setup would look like, the further you get from starting to implement it. Perhaps that can tell us something about b2b sales.
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The Automation Paradox
The shift from nitty gritty to ever more elevated levels of abstractions has been a trend in technology for so long, that it almost seems inevitable. But some of the most interesting pieces of technology I see coming out of the labs, are extremely close to the machine. Starting from first principles, these teams go slow. They don’t stand on the shoulder of giants, they carefully lay out the foundations for whole new paradigms. I think in the end, that’s the only way real innovation can happen.
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The Sim-To-Real Gap
While watching babies and kittens learn by doing is cute, you don’t want to get in the way of a ten ton industrial robot figuring out the fundamentals. You also don’t want a soon-to-be autonomous car cruising your neighbourhood to pick up traffic rules.