Author | Lightnews

Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 16h

AI is an assistive technology. It'll be a long time, if ever, before it's anything more than that. Anyone that tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 16h

AI agents tried to do graphic design, video editing, game development, and administrative chores like scraping data. "Even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991," writes @willknight.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/ai-age...

AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers

A new benchmark measures how well AI agents can automate economically valuable chores. Human-level AI is still some ways off.

www.wired.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 16h

Resurfacing something I wrote for Hackster.io last year, "Dividing the Stack into Thirds," talking about the ongoing trade wars the splintering of our global approach to technology. www.hackster.io/news/dividin...

Hackster.io - The community dedicated to learning hardware.

Hackster is a community dedicated to learning hardware, from beginner to pro. Share your projects and learn from other developers. Come build awesome hardware!

Hackster.io

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 17h

"Don’t build platforms, solve problems," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. It turns out that #AI will commoditize the mediocre and automated, but amplify the value of the obsessive and hand-crafted. negroniventurestudios.com/2025/10/29/d...

negroniventurestudios.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 1d

On this day in 1971, the U.K. successful reached orbit using the Black Arrow launch vehicle lifting the Prospero satellite to orbit from Woomera, Australia. The U.K. remains the only country to reach orbit after already cancelling their launch programme. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_A...

Black Arrow - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 23d

Nobody will ever have nostalgia for the nGage.

Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · 23d

Anyone else getting nostalgia for the Nokia 3650? www.theverge.com/news/793136/...

Google Japan’s concept keyboard is inspired by rotary phones

Speedy touch typists might want to look away.

www.theverge.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Sep 23

In Amsterdam for this year’s #thethingsconference. It’s fascinating to see how things have evolved in the LPWAN space over the last few years. It’s a very different conference than their first which one I keynoted in 2018. aallan.medium.com/teaching-a-n...

Teaching a new dog old tricks

What the history of the Internet can teach the Internet of Things

aallan.medium.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Aug 13

Oh! Now I'm interested, ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-.... I far preferred the design of the Pebble Time to the original #Pebble. Always considered the death of Pebble as a real waste of potential. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcPz...

Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal!

YouTube video by Tick Talk w/ Eric Migicovsky

www.youtube.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Jul 20

Yes. Entirely normal to grieve its loss, even as it comes into the world... and congratulations.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Mar 5

"Commercial fusion is now just 20 years away…" yes, for about the last 50 years. 🤦‍♂️ hackaday.com/2025/03/05/c...

China Claims Commercial Nuclear Fusion By 2050 As Germany Goes Stellarator

Things are heating up in the world of nuclear fusion research, with most fundamental issues resolved and an increasing rate of announcements being made regarding commercial fusion power. China&#821…

hackaday.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 27

[Alexa] will know "almost [everything] in your life — your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you’re using, the people you’re connected [to and] the entertainment you [enjoy]…" they understand that most people don't think that's a *good* thing? techcrunch.com/2025/02/26/a...

Amazon unveils a new and improved Alexa, Alexa+ | TechCrunch

At an event in NYC, Amazon announced an upgraded Alexa experienced powered by generative AI tech.

techcrunch.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 20

Flash generally won’t start to loose synchronisation till you push past 260 to 270MHz.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 19

Should just be a rebuild of the MicroPython binary with SYS_CLK_MHZ=200 set shouldn't it?

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 19

The RP2040 has now been certified to run at a system clock of 200Mhz! See github.com/raspberrypi/....

Release 2.1.1 · raspberrypi/pico-sdk

This is a minor release of the SDK with many bug fixes and documentation improvements, along with some new features. Highlights are listed below, or you can see the full list of individual commits ...

github.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 19

Released into the wild in April last year, the Humane AI Pin, that's a $699 device, is dead less than a year after launch. Although the reality is that it's really been dead for six months or more. www.hackster.io/news/the-dea...

The Death of a Salesman

Have products like the Humane AI Pin or Rabbit R1 failed? Or are they the next underlying model around which our computing will be built?

www.hackster.io

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 19

The only shocking thing here is that the dead carcass of the company was worth $116 million. techcrunch.com/2025/02/18/h...

Humane's AI Pin is dead, as HP buys startup's assets for $116M | TechCrunch

Humane announced on Tuesday that most of its assets have been acquired by HP for $116 million. The hardware startup is immediately discontinuing sales of

techcrunch.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 18

By me for @hacksterio.bsky.social, “The return of Pebble: you can’t keep a good watch down!” Some thoughts on @ericmigi.com’s announcement and the return of #Pebble. www.hackster.io/news/the-ret...

The Return of Pebble: You Can't Keep a Good Watch Down!

Eight years after the demise of the both the watch, and the company behind it, the Pebble smart watch is coming back from the dead.

www.hackster.io

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 11

I genuinely sorta scared about what Apple is going to do to my favourite image editor. The precedent of the Dark Sky weather app fiasco looms large. www.macrumors.com/2025/02/11/a...

Apple Completes Pixelmator Acquisition

Pixelmator last year announced that it was being acquired by Apple, and today the company confirmed that the acquisition has been completed after...

www.macrumors.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 11

So I'm unsurprised by the news that we're now seeing a drop in average CPU performance after 20 years of increasing benchmark results. Most people don't need more performance, and manufacturers know it. www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

PassMark sees the first yearly drop in average CPU performance in its 20 years of benchmark results

After the MHz and multi-core wars, performance drops.

www.tomshardware.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 11

About a decade ago I talked about what I called at the time capable computing, that is to say, computing that is “good enough," aallan.medium.com/capable-comp....

Capable Computing

Computing that is good enough.

aallan.medium.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 11

The problem with asking successful people about how to get to where they are now is that how to get where they are has inevitably changed since they did it. You almost certainly can't do what they did, and end up in the same place. That's just not how the world works any more.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Feb 4

Stumbled across this piece by Wil Schroter. Was absolutely fascinated, because he's right. Doesn't matter whether you're working a job, freelancing, or building a startup. Plenty of people will encourage you to start, nobody will tell you when to stop. fortune.com/2025/02/03/s...

I had a VC-funded unicorn-in-the-making and I messed it up—here's how

I was humiliated. I had nothing but success in my previous ventures, and this was a very public failure. Now I barely remember it.

fortune.com

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Jan 29

Currently about 2,000 words into a piece putting the return of the Pebble into some sort of context. While I've always had a soft spot for Pebble, it's an interesting move with some real potential to disrupt the market.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Jan 28

Pretty much what Jenson said during his #CES2025 keynote, although I'm guessing they were expecting a bit more lead time before we saw something like #DeepSeek. Whatever nutty thing the stock market is doing, this doesn't hurt #NVIDIA.

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Alasdair Allan @alasdairallan.com · Jan 27

Was it though? news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4282...

CEO of Scale said Deepseek is lying and actually has a 50k GPU cluster. He said ... | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com

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