About#

TLDR#

What this site is

• technical notes and resources
• influencers I am following
• technology I am using
• technology I want to use
• learning resources

Background#

What we thought the future would be

In 1984, like many of my peers, I sat and watched The Terminator, produced by James Cameron. We were amazed.

The idea of machines travelling back through time to rewrite the future felt extraordinary. It was science fiction at its most imaginative — and slightly unsettling. We caught a glimpse of a world filled with autonomous machines, artificial intelligence, and technological acceleration.

It felt distant.

What is actually became

Over the past decade, we’ve seen reboots of that franchise. We’ve seen series like Black Mirror. We’ve explored stories where technology is both miraculous and terrifying.

And then, almost quietly, those stories stopped being fiction.

In the last five years, that imagined world has become part of our everyday lives.

Living through change#

becoming Star Trek - pens * keyboards * speech

I’ve lived through a remarkable arc of technological change.

I remember using pen and paper. Reading physical books. Buying encyclopedias because knowledge was something you owned, heavy and bound, sitting on a shelf.

Then came keyboards and the internet. Search engines replaced encyclopedias. Surfing the web replaced flipping pages. Information became searchable instead of stored.

And now, in the 2020s, something else is happening.

We don’t just type anymore. We talk to our computers — something we only ever saw in Star Trek. We no longer “search” in the traditional sense. Artificial intelligence searches for us. It doesn’t just return links — it returns tables, infographics, presentations, code, videos, even audio discussions.

The interface has shifted from query to conversation.

Creating this blog, twenty years ago, would have taken days — perhaps weeks. Writing, formatting, editing, publishing. Now, it can be assembled in hours. And often, for free.

That in itself is extraordinary.

When AI becomes free#

There was a time when Oracle and Informix were battling across interstate billboards. Databases were expensive. Infrastructure was expensive. Compute time was expensive.

Before Linus Torvalds released Linux, the idea of free operating systems at global scale was almost unthinkable.

Before open-source databases, the idea of production-grade software being freely available would have sounded naïve.

And today?

We are entering a moment where artificial intelligence — once locked inside multi-billion-dollar research labs — is running on personal laptops. Models that, five years ago, required vast corporate infrastructure are now accessible to individuals.

How will we adopt#

The question is no longer whether AI will shape the world.

It already is.

The question is how we choose to engage with it.