Interconnected
Matt Webb — Designer, technologist, and co-author of Mind Hacks
A blog by Matt Webb. My notebook and space for thinking out loud since February 2000.
interconnected.org/homeI would know its presence only by the slop it left behind, slop as ectoplasm from where the ghost has been.
Matt Webb has been thinking out loud on Interconnected since February 2000, making it one of the oldest personal blogs still running. Posts wander freely between AI, design philosophy, computing futures, and cultural observation — a piece might start with a forgotten HTML file on his laptop and end at the idea of computers as haunted spaces. The joy is in the unexpected connections, drawn by someone with 26 years of practice at following curiosity wherever it leads.
Written by Matt Webb since 2000.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
9
Independent Blog
English
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New Wave Hardware
We briefly mentioned New Wave Hardware in last week’s Inanimate Lab Notes so this is me doing some unpacking. While you’re there, join 300+ other subscribers and sign up for our newsletter. You’ll get weekly links and updates on what we’re working on. There are a bunch of things changing with new hardware products, design and technology. Let’s say: the intersection of hardware and AI. But our hunch is that it’s broader than that. There are new ways to get hardware into the hands of consumers, a...
The violence of the Librareome Project
Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel Rainbows End (2006) is so prescient about AI training data. His short Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) is set in the same universe, and was written in that era where we felt like we had line of sight to pervasive augmented reality and also 3D printers. I read it at the time and it’s a low-stakes high school drama (about augmented reality and 3D printers), but from today’s perspective it is more like a utopia (of a certain kind) – democratised tools of production, re...
Speaking is quick, listening is slow
Thank goodness voice computing is finally happening. Now we can work on making it good. The tech is here, like the free Whisper model (what an unlock that has been from OpenAI, kudos) and ElevenLabs. Plus devices too, from Plaud - like an irl Granola video call transcriber - to Sandbar, a smart ring that you tell your secrets. Let’s not forget Apple’s recent $1.6bn acquisition of Q.ai, which will use "‘facial skin micromovements’ to detect words mouthed or spoken" – i.e. cameras in your AirPods...
Filtered for electricity and mayonnaise
1. Rain panels? Rain panels. researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels. – The Debrief, Forget solar panels. Here come the rain panels (2023) Reading the citations on the original paper, it works kinda but research is ongoing. Science rather than technology still. RELATED: Wild Video Shows Entire Mountain Range in China Covered With Solar Panels (2025)...
mist: Share and edit Markdown together, quickly (new tool)
It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease. If you don’t know Markdown, it’s a way to format a simple text file with marks like **bold** and # Headers and - lists… e.g. here’s the Markdown for this blog post. Pretty much all AI prompts are written in Markdown; engineers coding with AI agents have folders full of .md files and that’s what they pr...
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