Chris Anderson — personal site. Not the drone one, not the TED one.
I don't really do much outside of work that I want to tell the internet about.
That is not modesty and it is not a complaint about being busy. It is a position about what the internet is owed, which is nothing.
Every channel that reaches me now points the same direction. Text, cell call, DM, notification. All of them poke from the outside in. All of them arrive assuming I will look right now, and not one of them asks whether now is a good time. The person sending picks the priority. The person receiving pays for it. That asymmetry got built into everything while nobody argued about it.
The cost is not annoyance. I can live with annoyance. The cost is that some work only happens when you can hold a lot of state in your head at once. Working out why an antenna performs 9 dB worse in the product than it did on the bench means holding the ground plane, the enclosure, the cable route, the test setup and three previous measurements in mind at the same time, and turning them over until the wrong one falls out. That state takes twenty minutes to build. A text destroys it in a second, and rebuilding it is not free.
So the work that needs deep consideration gets done badly, or gets done at 11pm, or does not get done. What gets done instead is the work that fits between interruptions, which is mostly answering the interruptions.
Somewhere in there, response speed became the measure of whether you are good at your job. It is not. It is the measure of whether you are available, and those are different things. One of them is much easier to fake.
I know exactly where I am standing while I say this. I make my living building the radios inside connected devices. The thing I am complaining about runs on hardware I helped design, and some of the patents on this site are for antennas that make precisely this possible. I am not going to pretend otherwise and I am not arguing that any of it should not exist. I am saying the default is wrong. Reaching somebody instantly should be a thing you choose on purpose, not the baseline every channel assumes.
There is a working example of the alternative sitting on this site. My father investigated UFO sightings in Wisconsin in the 1960s, and his reports arrived by letter, by telephone, and by tape, with days between a question and an answer. One letter in that archive is a chemistry professor taking the time to work out whether burning swamp gas could explain what a man saw, deciding it probably could, and then writing "this explanation is weak but is about all I can think of." That is what consideration looks like once somebody writes it down. It took a week, and it is worth reading fifty five years later.
I do not think we get that back by being sentimental about paper. But nobody has ever sent me a text message that will be worth reading in 2081.
My work life is radio: antennas, cellular, certification. That all lives at f3wireless.com and none of it is on this site.
Nim is old. Two players, a few rows of objects, take as many as you like from a single row on your turn. In the standard version the player who takes the last object wins. It has been solved for over a century — write each row count in binary, XOR them together, and if the result is zero you're going to lose to anyone who knows that. The whole game fits in one line of arithmetic.
In 1978 Leo Christopherson wrote a version of it for the TRS-80 Model I and called it Android Nim. He replaced the piles of stones with rows of little androids.
The part that mattered wasn't the game. It was the machine. A Model I had a 64-by-16 character display, and the only graphics available were block characters that got you an effective 128 by 48 — no sprites, no bitmap, no color, and BASIC underneath it. That is not a machine you animate things on. Christopherson animated things on it anyway. The androids fidget while they wait for you. They react when you take their friends. The winner eats the loser. And the sound came out of the cassette port, because there was no sound hardware to speak of, so he drove the tape output as a speaker.
Every constraint on that machine said don't bother, and he went and did it, and it was charming. Versions followed on the Commodore PET in 1979 and the Apple II in 1980.
I was nine or ten the first time I ever saw a computer. It was my dad's. He had just bought it, and it sat in our living room, and it was playing Android Nim.
That is the whole reason this domain is called what it's called.
It is the same man whose files are in the archive on this site. He had his ham license as a teenager and ended up running the national radio network for a UFO organization, so a computer turning up in the living room was in character. The name of this site and the archive on it both trace back to him.
The rules of Nim aren't anyone's property — it's a math game older than any of us, and game mechanics don't get copyrighted. Christopherson's code and his androids are another matter, and they are still his. So the version on this site is written from scratch with my own androids. It's a tip of the hat, not a copy.