2025-05-09I mentioned earlier this week that growing up, I was lucky to have access to the Internet before the web. This meant I was able to take full advantage when I figured out how to use my dad’s dial-up account at Vanderbilt University during Christmas break in early January 1995.
Being a kid, one of my first instincts was to find a game to play online. With web search engines still rudimentary back then, I turned to Usenet, which I had been using for a few years. I posted a message to comp.sys.mac.games to help me find a game I could play over TCP/IP. For the sake of posterity, I posted the full message here. A less detailed version is also available on the Usenet Archives.
2025-05-04What happens when kids grow up with powerful technology they’re not allowed to understand? We risk creating a digital world with few true digital natives. How public terminals, old Macs, and a programming teacher shaped my political imagination and tech skills.
I sometimes think back to the fact that few people my age or younger experienced the pre-web Internet or remember the transition to our current corporate model. I only remember it because I was a geeky kid without a computer at home, so I spent a lot of time at Vanderbilt University, where my dad was a grad student. That would’ve been late 1990 or early 1991, soon after my family moved from Canada to Nashville. I was about to start middle school.
2025-04-27On the Fragility of Automation, Big Data, and AI
The insurance industry markets automation as a force for efficiency. But when said automation introduces an error, that error can propagate silently across systems, damaging consumers without warning, accountability, or remedy. This is my experience.
In 2020, after a catalytic converter theft here in San Francisco, my insurer (Metromile, now part of Lemonade) incorrectly flagged my car internally as a total loss—despite paying for repairs and leaving my DMV title clean, without ever informing me.
