Digging for Fire

I noticed something weird about the things that interest me.

I’m fascinated by emerging technologies. I’m all about the bleeding edge, more than happy to trade software bugs for early access. Give me the beta!

I had an early smart watch, I was early to the smart home (much to the chagrin of my wife!), I bought into VR with the original HTC Vive, and I’ve been excited about LLMs since the launch of OpenAI’s GPT 3. I own two 3D printers (yes, I’m one of those people)!

But that's not so strange. The weird part is that I also long to return to the early days of the internet. I love black and white film photography. I DM a weekly D&D group (a game invented in the 1970s), which requires no more technology than a pencil, paper, and your imagination. It’s more than nostalgia, I’m just captivated by…

Depending on where you’re at in life, and what kind of processes you have in place, you may dive right into the idea. Perhaps you work on it nonstop, stay up late tinkering, and overall just can’t get put it down. At some point you’ll start to add some definition and try to bring shape to the idea.

Then, all too often, you abandon the thing right before shipping.

This happens to me. A LOT. Too many times to count.

I have so many unfinished projects. I've always felt low-key ashamed of my inability to ship. But Joshua's post has got me thinking. Maybe all my failed-to-launch products are not such a bad thing after all.

In the early days of the cigarette, smoking was considered a harmless or even beneficial activity. Cigarettes were considered stylish, sophisticated, and doctor-approved. By the early 20th century, smoking was so deeply embedded in modern culture that it was hard to imagine a future without it!

Of course, fast-forward to now and, at least in Australia, cigarettes are heavily taxed, not permitted to advertise, or even be displayed in a store. Cigarette packets are covered in grotesque imagery intended to discourage their use. Smoking in bars and restaurants is not permitted, nor is smoking within 10m of a store, beach, or playground. In New Zealand, cigarettes are now banned entirely for anyone born after 1 January 2009!

We're all physically healthier for it.

But a new health crisis has taken the place of Big Tobacco. A mental health crisis.

Everyone is making it up to some extent. This is the secret I didn’t learn until years into my career. I often thought I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on, and was in awe of the geniuses always surrounding me...

... Often people are making things up as they go along. They’re not sure, things are undefined and squishy.

Thankfully, this is a secret I learned very early, and has steered me true in every stage of my career.

In high school, everyone thought I was a programming genius. In reality, my VisualBasic apps were mashups of code I found online, and my websites usually started by copying the source from another site I liked.

And then I realised, that's what programming is.

Tuesday morning, I'm in the car with my son, and the topic of steganography comes up. Eli is an adventurous kid – he loves playing games involving treasure and discovery with his mates. No prize for guessing how fascinated he was with the concept of hiding secret messages in plain sight.

He wanted to learn a few steganography techniques, of course. I told him about some of the obvious ones. Despite my experience with steganography in the past, I struggled coming up with simple techniques he could put into practice without the help of a computer. Determined to figure something out, I explained Acrostic Steganography. Eli loved the idea. Now he could write letters to his friends containing secret messages.