These the personal writing of me, Sean, a generalist software developer, founder, and hacker who has worked within and on the edges of the tech industry for more than two decades.
My new startup is Streams, which I’m building because our information ecosystem has long been a disaster. There is so much extraordinary work being shared with the world every day but we have to dig through mountains of garbage to find it.
We got rid of the gatekeepers, which was good, but we ended up replacing them with manipulative algorithms, meme accounts, and low-rent cult leaders, which has proven to be a terrible idea.
So, I'm trying to build something to help us replace the gatekeepers with a combination of algorithms we control (individually), social curation (by people we trust), and AI (as an assistant, not another gatekeeper).
A note on AI:
I write everything here myself without AI assistance. This is not because of a bias against the technology but simply because my goal here is not to write something good, but to instead think something good.
