What Really Makes You Dangerous?

Thursday, 7.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. – Bruce Lee

I have a new toy.

It’s unopened. I’m saving that for the weekend, but it’s a pretty nerdy thing.

It’s a Devterm from ClockWorkPi – a handheld computer that runs Linux and works off batteries.

An A5 notebook size “retro-entertainment” terminal.

It joins several, relatively low-cost computers that I’ve acquired over the years, although my main machines are a decent desktop computer and a Framework laptop.

The thing that unites all the things I buy is that they can be built and fixed – you can repair the Framework, the Devterm has open specs and you can 3d print parts for it and a desktop lets you choose parts and put them together.

It’s the opposite of the closed boxes the leading manufacturers sell, which really aren’t designed to be opened – once they die you throw them away.

That’s what’s happening to the Microsoft Surfaces that have died on me.

Closed boxes are not a good thing to get hooked onto.

That goes for computers. It goes for phones. It goes for the cloud and all that stuff as well.

You really need to have some say in the technology that you use.

Well, that’s not true. Many people are happy buying technology and not knowing anything more about it than that there’s a big company behind it and the software lets you do cool stuff.

It’s like some of the AI tools we see now. Text to video sounds amazing. You tell it to make a dancing bear and there it is.

No need for anyone to create and animate that thing – it’s just there.

I mean… just look at this stuff.

From a text prompt!

Entertainment is just going to explode – and the imaginary worlds we live in are going to get so much more attractive than these boring ones out here.

We have two options.

We can be consumers of content.

Or we can be creators that use these new tools that let us tell stories better.

What do you think we should work on?

And which tools should we use? Closed boxes or open ones?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh