Collected Thoughts

Apple seems to be having a moment—and not in a good way. The judge in the Epic v. Apple suit just excoriated top leadership for violating the ruling that required them to provide developers with a system to link users out to external payment processing. I won’t get into details here, but you should know that just about everyone outside Apple leadership viewed the order as completely reasonable. Yet Apple’s "compliance" was reverse-engineered to preserve their bottom line by imposing hefty fees on the external payments.

Then there’s the Apple Intelligence fiasco. They announced it with much fanfare last June at WWDC, and it looked like a reasonable (if ambitious) approach to integrating LLM technology into their platforms. And if they had done it right, it really would have been a game-changer for their platform and the industry. But they bungled it by announcing vaporware. They’ve released basically nothing of consequence over the past year, despite having used the moniker aggressively to market the latest generation of devices and operating systems.

From a consumer perspective, they’re doing OK, but developer sentiment is grim, and their diehard insider community has been distressed about their direction for at least a decade. I count myself among them. I’ve been an Apple user since the beginning, and much of what I see in Apple now pains me. But while the company seems to have turned to evil, more profit-extracting machine now than human-centered enterprise, there’s still good in it. They still make (some) amazing products. And, on balance, Apple employees are talented, creative, kindhearted, believe deeply in their work, and want to do good things in the world.

I saw a post on LinkedIn that got me thinking about the world I'm parenting my six-year-old in. It's equal parts scary and exciting. Things are changing way too fast for me to truly keep up, and it will only accelerate from here. Yet, fundamentally, my job as a father isn't all that different than it was for my father—it's just inflected with today's technology.

I'm the same age as the personal computer. It puts me in a unique position to understand today's technology, since as I grew up, personal computing grew along with me. I'm part of the first generation of humans who truly had the opportunity to be digital natives. I've witnessed every era of the personal computing revolution, and I've adapted to each one.

On one hand, AI is the latest in a chain of technological quantum leaps—from desktops, to laptops, to the public Internet and nascent World Wide Web, to the modern web, to smartphones. And yet AI is also different, a step change that defies a simple depiction as such. So what changes about parenting, and what remains constant?

Looking for a job is always challenging. Sometimes the struggle is rewarding and fun, and other times it's easy to succumb to darker thoughts. Here's an illustration in a single day.

The valley

I had a great job application process last week with a small startup for an iOS developer role. I talked to all three founders, and had deep, stimulating conversations with each one. We clearly mutually respected and liked each other, and I was feeling positive about my chances.

I came across Playlab as part of my exploration of educational technology as I build the next chapter of my career. They give teachers tools to build custom chatbot apps on top of all the main LLM platforms, and a community in which to share and remix them. In the universe of AI tech for education, I think their approach is unusual and thoughtful.

The interface provides a prompt construction area with guidance and templating, settings for persistent memory and documents for the LLM context window, and some other helpful tweaks to improve the standard experience of interacting with AI chatbots. (Imagine the Projects feature of Claude or ChatGPT, but thoughtfully designed specifically for education.) The community is pretty broad and has lots of interesting applications, from teaching tools like lesson planning, to student-focused ones like writing feedback.

I was in San Diego over last weekend for The AI Show, which preceded the ASU+GSV Summit. I'm considering career options in education technology, and I had a couple objectives for the weekend.

Get the lay of the land. I have a deep background in education, technology, and instructional design, always orbiting EdTech without ever being truly inside. How has it changed since I was a teacher myself? What influence is AI having?

Connect with people. To find the right opportunities, I need a broad network of people who are not in the industry, but operating at the forefront.

I love many of the projects at The Pudding, and they’ve inspired me to try telling a story with data, not just make some charts and graphs. There are more than a few challenges for me to tackle, but the principal one is finding the right data set. Without my emotional investment, any storytelling project will fall flat.

Since November’s election, and especially since January, I’ve struggled to find ways to engage and act in the face of the onslaught. I recognize how privileged my existence is, and even for me, everything is overwhelming on a daily basis. I’ve read many times that it’s important to stay active and do something, no matter how small, that helps you to feel that you’re part of a solution.

My love-hate relationship with searching for a job goes back to my first. On one hand, I'm excited by the possibility that lies in the unknown. But on the flip side, I struggle at times with focusing my research exactly because there are so many possibilities.

This time around, LLMs are in the mix. I'm trying to take advantage of them to tap into my excitement, while alleviating my struggles.

Simon Willison has a great post that—coincidentally—he published just a day after my own post on coding with LLMs. You should definitely check it out.

When I was working at Apple, they had a strict no-LLM policy, so I wasn't able to use them to accelerate my work. At the time, AI-assisted coding was considerably less powerful than it is now, but I'm sure even then I could have benefited from automating repetitive and simple coding and writing tasks.

Now I'm between jobs and exploring career options. Obviously AI is inevitably part of the process, in multiple ways. I'll write more about some other experiments and workflows in later posts, but here I'll get into my first impressions of AI-assisted coding.