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I've been really energized lately, there just seems to be so much going on in AI right now and it's opening up a ton of new opportunities. Of course, there are a lot of problems that need to be solved, especially around security, privacy, fairness, not to mention the cost of running these systems. It's exciting though and it reminds me a lot of what it was like working on the internet in the very early days.
“back in the good ol’ days” (like in the early/mid 90s), internet culture in tech was very different from what it is today. We would write a lot of open source software, share ideas and have constructive debates about how to make things better. If you used someone else’s software, you would would patch it for your own systems and then send the patches back in so that other people could take advantage of them. Yeah, sure, we had tech holy wars like “vi (vim) vs emacs” - but no one really cared which one you used, just pick the one that makes the most sense to you.
You don’t have to be seriously into music to realize that you probably have a theme song. A song that describes you or your state of mind. A song that someone else might use to describe you. It could also be a song that reveals a side of yourself that most people never see or don’t know about. It could be a song that pumps you up in the morning or that you relax to at night.
It’s incredible to think about the amount of engineering work that goes into building a camera and the fact that most of those engineers probably do not use the final product. The photographer, on the other hand, has little idea of how it all works at a detailed level, like what does the math look like to make a shutter that can open and close in 1/4000th of a second, they just press the button.
In the last few years we have been making more of an effort to travel in Canada and within the United States. We have been all over Europe, to Singapore and New Zealand multiple times but we have not spent a lot of time travelling in our own backyard.
This year, we decided to return to Newfoundland, Canada for a two week trip starting in the province's capital St. John's, then traveling up to Fogo Island which is on the northeast corner of the Island of Newfoundland and then finally a trip across to the west coast to visit Gros Morne National Park.
It's incredible to think how many pictures have been taken that no one will see because they are not online. Maybe it's just as well for some of them as I've never been a big fan of pictures of myself, especially when I was young. My kids, on the other hand, are fair game. I mean, how am I going to put together a slide show for their weddings if I'm missing the first few years of embarrassing pictures? With that goal in mind, I decided I was going to see if I could figure out a way to easily digitize some of these old photos without spending a ton of money on a specialized negative/slide scanner.
Think about it this way, say you are starting a new company, and you realize that it's going to take a year or more to really start getting traction. What you want to do is figure out where today's tech is going to be in two years and build a product that leverages that tech, or solves a problem that today's tech will expose in the next few years.