What the Navy Taught Me About Perspective
I joined the Navy at 18 and got deployed to Desert Shield right out of boot camp....
Hard-won lessons from 45+ years in the trenches.
No optimism theater What actually works
I joined the Navy at 18 and got deployed to Desert Shield right out of boot camp....
Third-party API integration costs 56% more than initial estimates when you account for maintenance, breaking changes, and troubleshooting....
Technical debt accumulates because of organizational dysfunction - pressure to ship, fear of refactoring, knowledge silos....
In the 1990s, I built RUM (Real User Mail) - a challenge-response system to fight spam. It worked. I never released it. Years later, the industry reinvented it....
What I learned doing technical due diligence on blockchain startups seeking funding. The technology works - for exactly one use case....
1980s BBS culture created authentic communities through sysop relationships and local control. Taiwan's PTT still has 1.5M active users....
ASR systems need training data. Training data contains sensitive audio. How federated learning solves the conflict between ML requirements and privacy laws....
Netscape's IPO established the template for modern startup culture: growth over profit, massive early valuations, and boom-bust rhythms....
Why Zoom transcripts attribute quotes to the wrong people. The cocktail party problem isn't solved - it's hidden. Multi-device synchronization as a workaround....
ICQ invented instant messaging and reached 100 million users. Then it died through corporate neglect, software bloat, and missed mobile transition....
Build tool complexity has gotten out of control. A 50-line shell script often does the job better than any framework....
NFTs crashed 95% from their 2021 peak. This was predictable from the start....

Contrarian takes on tech, startups, and software. What vendors won't tell you. No spam.
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