Josh On Design

I find Large Language Models fascinating. They are a very different approach to AI than most of the 60 years of AI research and show great promise. At the same time they are just technology. They aren’t magic. They aren’t even very good technology yet. LLM hype has vastly outpaced reality and I think we are due for a correction, possibly even a bubble pop. Furthermore, I think future AI progress is going to happen on the app / UX side, not on the core models, which are already starting to show their scaling limits. Let’s dig in. Better pour a cup of coffee. This could be a long one.

Working in the Mixed Reality group at Mozilla was the most fun I ever had in my 30 year career. Helping to usher a new technology into the world. One with such potential. I’d really love to go back there. Unfortunately it seems there isn’t really a there to go back to. Cue memory fade.

I’ve been quiet lately, not because I’ve had nothing to say but because I’ve not felt well enough to say it. That changes today. 

One of my original IdealOS blog posts from 2017 showed up on the front page of Hackernews the other day (comments here). This got me thinking about IdealOS again. I haven’t worked on it in a couple of years, but as I read through the comments and links to articles by people with similar ideas, I came to a realization. I am still working on it. Maybe not directly, but I’m still exploring ideas that are needed to build IdealOS. So with that in mind let’s take a look at what I’ve been working on lately.

It's been a bit since I've posted on my round screen watch project. Most of my time has been taken up by work, travel, and family stuff, but I did have a few seconds to add a feature or two.

It’s a truism of the web that when something becomes free it turns to crap. This is largely due to advertising, tracking, and SEO hackers getting their crappy version of something to the top of the search index. When this has happened to a tool I want to use I can’t fix the underlying problem, but I can make my own non-tracking version and share it with the web, doing my little part to make the world a better place. Today it’s a CSS Text Style builder.

I’m continuing to work on a little smartwatch prototype using a little round LCD and I want to have nice looking text. The default font for CircuitPython is fine, but it’s very tiny. This LCD has a pretty high DPI compared to other hobbyist screens( > 200 ppi), so I need to find a new font. CP has a way of importing new fonts, but there are a few pitfalls and tricks I discovered, so that’s what I’m covering today.

For my next project with the WaveShare Round LCD I want to create an animation of Dr Strange's Eye of Agamotto. Here is my first attempt in JS (looks more like the comics than the movies). Not bad, I think.

I'm enamored of all of cheap and hackable screens and embedded CPUs coming onto the market. I'm frustrated, however, that despite embedded computing being more accessible than ever, the mass manufacturers products are all becoming more and more the same. Where are the phones with oval screens? Where are the steam punk pocket calculators? We have the technology to make devices that are ever more niche and increasingly creative and different, yet what you can actually buy is more glowing rectangles. I'd like to fix this.