In the past quarter there are three category of toys I've been playing with:

• Virtual reality (Quest 2)
• Genenerative AIs (chat bots, image generators)
• Urbit (sovereign computing)

Each deserves a deep dive of its own. But here I'm thinking about it as a top-down sense-making attempt.

All of them are in the realm of solutions looking for problems. But if you want to know where the world is going in order to skate where the puck is heading, look at what hackers do in weekends. By the time toys turned into killer apps, you are late to the scene.

My hunch is the coming two years will feature some kind of path crossing between at least two of these three domains. In part because one domain needs the help of another domain to create a unique value proposition to cross into the mainstream.

In some ways I wish success isn't defined by mainstream adoption. emacs has been an enormous success without having to be popular. That way a domain need not cater to the lower common denominator, stay weird and stay alive for a long time. It simply needs enough headcount to carry on evolving, it doesn't need dominate.

With the exception of urbit though, my foray VR and chat bots were done with specific intentional use cases. But I set my expectations low enough that I'm largely happy with the results I'm getting.

The timing is rather interesting. I remember feeling the technology scene hasn't been producing anything truly exciting. That was a year or two ago (blockchain doesn't count), it's not like these domains didn't exist at the time.

Either the tech advanced so greatly I can't ignore it (deep learning) or I sunk the time cost to grok it. And suddenly there's something to look forward to again.