Welcome to Tech Time By Tim  #100. As befits such a milestone, this is by far the lengthiest, most jampacked issue of the newsletter to date!

There are no ‘current events’ news items in this issue, though I have included snapshots from across my time writing the newsletter. I’ve included one of my very first prototypes, some items from my first full year of writing the newsletter, as well as plenty of self-reflection and anecdotes.

There’s even a full-length essay from a wonderful design newsletter that I had the pleasure of collaborating on. I’ve always done my best to make each newsletter issue as evergreen as possible. Yet I feel as if this milestone issue fulfills that ambition particularly well. You can truly take your tech time with it!

Without further ado, let’s dive right in!

They Who Climb Mountains

Have you heard of the saying that if you put 1000 hours’ worth of time and effort into something, you can master it? Well, that’s obviously not true in the most literal sense. Rather, it means that you have to slowly but surely may make your way up the mountain of mastery one step at a time.

It’s a rookie error that I’ve made plenty of times in the past to see the sheer scale of the mountain, compare its size to your own, and think ‘nah mate, that’s impossible.’ I’ve done that plenty of times myself. But back in August 2022, I decided to take that first step, and to just keep going, step by step.

Another proverb goes that the journey of 1000 miles (1609.344km) starts with single step. Unless I’m mistaken, Mt. Everest stands at about 8.8km above sea level. That’s an important detail because the deep sea has some thoughts about our landlubber sense of scale.

The journey of 8.8km also starts with a single step. How convenient! According to my napkin math, this makes it about 7x more daunting to start climbing. Yet people have climbed it. Ambition is also often referred to as a mountain, with the realization of ambition being considered the peak.

There are two kinds of climbers. The first is obsessive and impatient. They only see and value the destination. These manic mountaineers don’t care how they get to the summit, so long as they get there immediately. This is the self-destructive climber.

I know what you’re probably thinking. We’ve all rolled our eyes at least once at the proverb “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” Or some variant thereof. Don’t you lie to me. This proverb isn’t quite right if you ask me. I’d phrase it like this “The destination and journey grant one another meaning.” You enjoy and relish reaching your destination because of the effort involved in getting there. You can find the motivation to set off on a journey in the first place when a destination inspires you.

Milestones, basecamps, whatever you want to call them, these are sub-destinations. They aren’t the end goal, but they do allow you to reflect upon the journey thus far. A basecamp lets you savor a momentary victory whilst preparing adequately for future triumphs.

Who sets up and maintains such facilities? The mindful mountaineer. Mindfulness has been overcommercialised to hell and back so it’s understandable how the word ‘mindful’ might strain some tethers.

All I mean here though is that the mindful climber is simply aware of their present circumstances, capabilities, and limitations in the moment. To be mindful of these things is something everyone in tech should strive for. This is unironically how you fulfil your ambitions, regardless of what their exact nature might be.  

Most manic climbers destroy themselves well before they reach the summit. We call those who do make it to the top the big winners of society, but are they? When such people reach the top they are engulfed by the infinite emptiness around them. Uncertainty and regret fill the void with questions such as “Is this it? Is this my peak? All that sacrifice and for what? Just another horizon beyond my reach?”

The mindful climber looks at the endless horizon stretching out in front of them and thinks ‘My god, there’s so much left to learn, so much left to explore!’ They are able to look back at how far they’ve come over the course of their journey and remember all the trials, tribulations, disappointments, and triumphs that brought them to where they are.

Truthfully, I am mindful of my impatience and desperate desire to reach my destination ASAP. We’re all manic climbers every now and then. And that’s ok. I still want tech titans to speak my name with fear and reverence. I still want to have university professors at the best houses of learning in the world look to me as their teacher.

But It’s not like there’s a deadline for that. Maybe I will get there in the end, or maybe I won’t. Looking back at the hundred newsletters I’ve traveled so far, I am content. I’ll set off from this basecamp when I’m good and ready.

The Journey So Far

Since we’re still vibing in the basecamp, let’s reflect back on the journey so far. For this section, I’ll be providing a chronological overview of my past content for you. It’s a journey through Tech Time!

The contents of past newsletters are in cursive to make it easier to distinguish between them and my current writing for this special issue.

August 2022 – Prototype 4:

The was the first prototype of the newsletter to be published internally at Triple. Look how short these items are! ‘The Week That Was’ focused on the ‘news’ part of the newsletter, providing a very brief summary and then linking to the article I’d summarised.

I had ‘Rules of Engagement’ to go a bit more in-depth.  ‘A Nice Cup Of Serendipity’ got its start back then as well. It’s probably the part of my newsletter that has remained the most consistent over time.

Here are two example items from the prototype, in no particular order:

Gadgets Marked For Death:

Ever noticed how gadgets always seem to break down just outside of the warranty period? Do you wonder how the issues with your device so often seem to be just outside the scope of what the manufacturer has to cover? If you think it's just bad luck on your part, think again. The term for this is 'planned obsolescence' otherwise known as the death warrant companies sign for devices before they even leave the factory. Curious what the life expectancy of your favorite gadget is? Have a look LINK + LINK

The Credit Devil’s Due

One of the most powerful brakes on our spending is the physical sensation of having money in our hand and being made to think 'damn, that's a lot of money' as we eye a pricey purchase. No such thing happens for digital payments. Humans are a lot worse at making sense of abstraction than we like to think. A thousand euros on your screen feels way less weighty than 10 euros in your hand, both literally and proverbially. In the past few years, a new means of purchasing has risen to prominence 'buy now, pay later.' This is exactly what it says on the tin, it's almost cruel in how honest it is, Psychologically, it feels like a purchase is free because you can 'check out' without paying in the webshop. As the sayings go, however, the devil's in the details and he always gets his due. LINK

The First Year That Was, 2022 Edition:

Since I’d just begun, this version of ‘The Year That Was’ was a relatively short and concise affair. Unlike the prototype, I’d moved on to publishing newsletters via an email mailing list for external readers.

Back during these first few months, I was bouncing off the walls throwing as many ideas, connections, and associations as I could think of in the newsletter. You can kind of see that chaotic energy in the first Year That Was (YTW) 2022 item. “A Tale of Goblins and Crypto.”

This item had not one but multiple links, spread across multiple items, all crammed into a single ‘space’ together. Back then, there were no guarantees you’d still be in the same place, topic, or business sector as soon as you got to the next paragraph, I was just blasting brain waves almost directly onto the page.

This certainly kept things varied and surprising. Yet it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to follow along with. Have a look for yourselves:

A Tale of Goblins and Crypto:

I want to start out with The Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. ‘Goblin Mode’ is a “type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” A more positive spin on that would be rejecting the idea of returning to normality defined by “increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and lifestyles exhibited on social media.” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages expands upon this by saying that “It’s a relief to acknowledge that we’re not always the idealized, curated selves that we’re encouraged to present.”

Two years of isolation and massive societal upheaval, whilst maddening for many, had forced just as many others to undergo deep introspection. People slowly but surely began to think critically again, to question again, to wonder about old things in new ways. Everyone was forced to re-examine how they related to others when the masks finally came off both literally and proverbially.

2022 started off with a wish being granted…by the monkey’s paw. The cryptocurrency world had long dreamed of going mainstream and disrupting both big tech and the mainstream financial establishment. It got its wish as a series of bankruptcies swept through the tightly interwoven world of crypto before ultimately spilling out into the mainstream. Many prominent public figures, financial institutions, and companies had gotten involved with cryptocurrencies at the peak of Crypto’s popularity. When the crypto crash happened, well… regulators were forced to take notice. Some of those regulators lost money themselves, after all.

2023 – The First Full Year Of Tech Time By Tim:

The Snackable Tech Take Experiment:

The ‘Snackable Tech Take’ experiment involved posting tweet chains of my newsletter items on Twitter. I was curious to what extent the situation had truly degraded since Elon Musk’s takeover and also wanted to practice ‘putting myself out there’ on social media.

I quit doing Snackable Tech Takes after 4 months because I had concluded my experiment and gotten the results I’d wanted from it. The conclusion was that there wasn’t much of a point in trying to ‘Twitterfy’ the newsletter. The texts were still too long to be considered snackable, and Twitter had long since stopped being an effective growth vector for fledgling creators.

The experience would prove invaluable for figuring out just where to ‘trim the fat’ of my newsletters though. The harsh word limits forced me to really buckle down. It forced me to write more concisely and to consider fully reconciling with the full stop.

I also started doing a better job at breaking up paragraphs, so they’d be less intimidating.

One More Year Of Things – 2023 Edition:

“One More Thing” is a small status update about my life and what went on it. I put it at the bottom of each week’s Tech Time by Tim, and in 2023, I summarised each month to give a snapshot of the entire year at a glance. This was another experiment for making my writing more concise, hence why it’s in the same subheading as the Snackable Tech Take experiment.

January:

• I met Millie for the first time, just a wee newborn pupper at this point

• Mailchimp was definitively phased out and replaced by the LinkedIn + Substack combo

February:

• I pondered how “being beholden to a big tech company is quite like waiting for a bus during a strike. You don’t know when it will show up, you don’t know if it will show up. Yet there you stand, at the central station. Waiting. And I guess this might be it, the realization that instead of waiting at the station for that bus that might never show up, you just go where you want to go with your own strength. You always have options if you keep your mind’s eye open enough to see them. Modern problems, as they say, require modern solutions.”

March:

• A growing Millie learned how to wiggle into flowerpots but couldn’t quite figure out how to get out.

April:

• Millie grew large and powerful enough to destroy the plastic flowerpots that she used to keep getting stuck in. The dramatically different reactions Millie had to flowerpots as they changed overtime made me ponder the nature of interfaces.

May:

• I thought I was being clever by adapting a famous Game of Thrones song to cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s financial difficulties. “And who are you?” The proud fintech lord said, “that I must bow so low? Only an exchange of a different coin, that’s all the truth I know. A Line of code, a line of credit, a banker still has pockets. And mine are deep, and vast my lord, as deep and vast as yours.” And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that lord of the cryptosphere. But now regulators circle o’er his hall, with no one there to hear.” Hilariously/tragically (depending on your position) enough, this ended up being way more accurate than I could have ever imagined. Who would have ever thought that ALL the major crypto power players would lie bloodied and broken at the end of the year? And that this would actually make crypto prices go UP?

June:

• The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity felt like it was even heavier on advertising this year than the previous ones. The balance has shifted too far, something that would also happen with other Ad based awards ceremonies like ‘The Game Awards’ later in the year.

July:

• I noticed ‘Temu’ creeping up on Amazon using the same loss-leading strategies Amazon itself used in the past. This is now a major source of conflict between the two and another Chinese retailer Shein.

• Microsoft’s Office autosaving decided that there would be no saving and it struck me once again how hypocritical ‘always online’ requirements are. Users have to always be online, yet servers are becoming ever more unreliable. Hardly fair, is it?

• With help from my friend, I got a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC). The setup sucked, and the protective case was damaged out of the box…twice… a shit initial experience but man was it worth it to be patient and look past the surface blemishes. Comfy music vibing ever since.

August:

• I got hooked on Armored Core 6 and man, that took me down some engineering rabbit holes.

September:

• I got philosophical about the cafeteria’s new blender wondering “Gravity, huh… All ingredients falling back into the blender no matter how far they end up getting launched by the centrifugal force of the blending process. I think there’s an analogy in there about how when we allow platforms to become too critical to our everyday lives and societal functioning, we’re all just gonna keep being pulled back into those spinning blades.”

• So anyway, I bought my mother a blender so she too could have lunchtime smoothies. My mother was extremely happy with this. Millie was upset she wasn’t allowed to have any.

October:

• I read a friend’s MA thesis on using AI image recognition to reliably spot rumen flukes in cow shit. His difficulties in making the system reliable enough were remarkably similar to moderation efforts in social media, and the difficulty of fine-tuning machine learning systems.

• I found a whole bunch of edible chestnuts and whilst cleaning them felt as if they were quite like the truth sometimes. Prickly, annoying, and at times painful to actually get to, but so, so good when you do. It’s well worth it, but a lot of people just can’t be bothered with the hassle.

November:

• One bright November morning, whilst walking Millie, I saw light reflect off of the wooden stairs in the dunes that I walked up and down countless times this year. Old, weathered wood isn’t reflective, so naturally, something else must have been going on there. Ads. They put ads on every step of the stairs! Even in the heart of nature, some people will still find a way to make you look at their ads. However, Millie’s choice of shitting spot also showed that even in the heart of nature, some people will still find a way to block your ads.

December:

There was no December entry because I’d not used any of my vacation time at all, barring a brief week off in November. Oops! So I was encouraged to peace out for December. One of my big new year’s pledges for 2024 was to learn how to take breaks properly. At time of writing I’ve actually made good on that pledge and the ‘learning how to holiday’ training continues to go well.

The Year That Was, 2023 Edition:

This 6162-word behemoth was the first time I fully got to do a yearly retrospective-style document. In retrospect, it was kind of representative of 2023 as a whole for me. My writing skills and efficiency improved significantly over the course of the year. I was able to focus better, and make sharper judgment calls, and overall writing quality was on a steady upwards trajectory.

Even so, I was impatient, I was anxious. I was too desperate to prove myself though. I was too insecure about whether or not I was truly providing enough content. I was anxious not to miss stuff people might want to know. So I crammed more and more into the newsletter until it was bursting at the seams!

Heading into 2024, I knew that I’d need to do something about both confidence and wordcount. And so I did. But before we get to that, here are some examples from YTW 2023:

Nintendoes What Hollywoodn’t, July 11th – July 18th:

Let’s talk about scarcity, primarily about its importance to the film industry of yore. Back around the 1960s when major strikes of the same scale as this one rocked Hollywood, there were limited slots in theatres and on TV. Limited hours in a week could be used for viewing by potential audiences. ‘Residuals’ were a point of contention because talent was essentially competing with itself whenever a rerun took time away from new content. This was the scarcity that studios and creators fought over. Today though, with the internet enabling global distribution and on-demand consumption of media, that scarcity no longer exists. Thus, companies struggle to attract and retain customers who they themselves drowned in an ocean of choices.

That brings us to Nintendo. Commonly thought of as a gaming company until one looks closer at its merchandising empire, or checks the figures of its feature-length movies, that recent Mario movie for example. What allowed Nintendo to be the Switzerland of the console wars was its mastery of artificial scarcity. Artificial scarcity is the company’s secret weapon, a control valve to manipulate supply and demand in Nintendo’s favor. Streaming exclusives were intended to accomplish this same effect. However, therein lies the issue. Researchers estimate that around 87% of classic games are out of print. What this means in practical terms is that Nintendo gets to use the old and gone as leverage, whereas new and exciting is what streaming success depends on.

Studios have cornered themselves. They now need to cut as many costs as possible, to streamline as much as possible. Using AI to replace content creators represents an easy way out, which is why studios are particularly obsessed with the technology. Indeed, whilst AI tech is often touted as giving people superpowers, the villain of Pixar’s Incredibles once observed that “when everyone’s super, no one will be.” So long as studio executives want superpowers at the cost of their normal workforce, the crisis of abundance will only deepen. This streaming war can only end in Mutually Assured Deficits (MAD), an acronym that might ring a bell for some. LINK

The Lethal Blind Spots Of Mass Surveillance, Oct 2nd – Oct 9th:

Hamas, a Palestinian political and military organization primarily active in the fiercely contested Palestinian/Israeli (that’s what the conflict is about) Gaza Strip, launched a large-scale multi-pronged offensive against Israel on Saturday, October 7th, 2023. Hamas was able to breach both physical and digital barriers meant to keep them out. Early coverage of the attack has focused in large part on how atypical it is for one of the most advanced and comprehensive surveillance apparatuses in the world to have failed to anticipate this attack.

That’s what we’ll be looking at today. Politically charged though this topic may be, it is the perfect example of one of the core contradictions inherent to mass surveillance. Mass surveillance, the kind Israel conducts with regard to the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants, produces unfathomable amounts of data. There is a critical mass beyond which the human parts of a surveillance apparatus will no longer be capable of keeping up with the deluge of information pouring down on them. In such cases, the contradiction is this: the more one observes, the less one perceives.

Computer software and algorithms can only ever act within the boundaries of what their programmers could think of. And what they didn’t think of…the internet will. The degree of precision with which state authorities are able to pierce veils of anonymity, and how closely they can stalk elusive ‘prey’ is largely the difference between less advanced and more advanced systems. Yet all such systems have blind spots, which is how Chinese netizens (network + citizen) keep finding new ways to subvert and undermine their state censorship for example.

But there’s also another problem, a system that’s too good. If blind spots are tiny, if barely anything slips between the cracks, there’s that much more to stuff in need of human processing. If it doesn’t get processed properly, this otherwise critical information becomes less than worthless, it becomes an obstacle. We’ve been using water analogies so far, so let’s call this ‘drowning’ in data. ‘Drowning in data’ is the Achilles heel of effective surveillance, good job, you see everything, now how to prioritize… LINK

To CTRL ALTman, Nov 14th - Nov 21st:

Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and I took 5 days off from work before getting back to the grind. His break was rather more chaotic than mine though. The return to the office seems to have been particularly awkward. Somewhat buried in the hysteria over Altman tabbing out for a bit was the willing departure of an executive at major rival Anthropic, which OpenAI’s now-ousted board attempted to merge with, to no avail.

Now, we could spend all newsletters and then some going through the couple dozen press releases, opinion pieces, and other assorted articles on the matter. I have about 69 of them, which is pretty nice, but not very practical. So let’s cut to the chase. The most popular theory focuses on OpenAI’s chief scientist Illya Sutskever. Disclaimer, the situation is still too chaotic and rapidly changing to say anything with certainty, this is simply the most popular narrative at the time of writing.

Supposedly Sutskever convinced OpenAI’s other former board members to fire Altman, at which point Altman’s loyal lieutenant Greg Brockman also quit. His very upset wife then called Sutskever in tears. Sutskever felt bad then and was about to feel a whole lot worse. Unfortunately for Sutskever and the former OpenAI board, the investors, and staff of OpenAI were on Altman’s side. Investors in particular wanted heads to roll. And roll they did.

Altman coming back is being lauded by some as a ‘return of the king’ moment. That’s not quite right though. The real king of OpenAI was never Sam Altman, it was Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Indeed, you’ll notice that there’s a policymaker with no particular tech background amongst those new board members. This is for the same reason that Microsoft has only ever owned 49% of the company. OpenAI, and especially Microsoft have been under a regulatory microscope this entire year, it would be insane for Nadella to go for a direct takeover when he already, as I’ve been saying all this time, functionally owns the company anyway. That is what it truly means to CTRL ALTman. Whether he defected to Microsoft or came back to OpenAI was only ever a superficial difference in the grand scheme of things. AI training and operations are simply too ruinously expensive right now. Microsoft has the funds and the infrastructure Altman needs. He’s still actively looking for a way out from under Nadella’s thumb, but has not quite found it yet. LINK

2024 And Beyond:

We’re still in 2024 at time of writing, so no retrospectives yet! Have a funny anecdote instead.

A colleague of mine recently said that one could tell that these newsletters aren’t being written by a grizzled 40+-year-old veteran. They supposedly had a certain childishness to them, which I was very happy to hear. That’s because I had chosen to share the writing workload with my inner child.

We hadn’t talked or seen eye to eye for a very long time. This was a good way to reconnect with one another. I’m particularly happy about how much more spontaneous and playful my items have become, as well as becoming more robust and easily digestible.

It now takes me much less time on average to produce more content of higher quality. Mission accomplished! For this final quarter of 2024, and heading into 2025, I want to continue having fun with the actual writing process itself. At the same time, I’ll continue my efforts to make things even more concise and elegant without sacrificing overall quality and depth.

By the time I get to the next base came, I want to have writing that’s as pleasant and intuitive to grasp as a children’s book, yet with the analytical acumen and depth of a cum laude post-doctorate thesis.

You be the judge about how close I’ll end up getting over the course of 2025.

An Example Of Longform Content By Tim:

These past two months, I’ve had the pleasure of being Alice In Wonderland and aiding with the (re)launch of a design newsletter called SuperCurrents. The past 100 issues of Tech Time by Tim might have given it away already, but I love design!

I mean that in the broadest sense, be it architecture, landscaping, interior design, etc. As a tech writer, I particularly focus on the countless ways in which design both literally and figuratively shapes our technologies and experiences.

What is tech for? Humans? Who is tech made by? Humans! Tech for humans by humans should be self-evident, but it isn’t. Instead bad design has been made self-evident by the economic incentives of our society.

I explored both good and bad design intentions in detail for one of my deep dive items for SuperCurrents. You can read it directly below if LinkedIn allows me to upload a newsletter with both a word count and a power level that’s over 9000! If not, read it along with the rest of that SuperCurrents issue right here!

Occasionally Asked Questions:

For this special issue of one more thing, I thought I’d do an FAQ, but instead of Frequently Asked Questions, I felt it would be more entertaining to highlight some of the most thought-provoking questions that people asked me ‘occasionally,’ since I started writing this newsletter.

The closest to a frequently asked question would definitely be what my workflow is like though. So let’s start with that.

Tim’s Workflow:

Several times in the past, people would ask me about my workflow. Back then I was still figuring it out. I wasn’t able to provide a satisfactory answer then, but I can do so now. Here is my workflow at the time of writing.

Thursday – Monday Afternoon:

I process 3500-5000 articles on average per week. I’ve done as much as 9000 on particularly busy weeks though! What does processing mean? It means that I arrange my handpicked sources into tiles via my news aggregator and then scan through them. I mark the ones that seem interesting to cover, saving them for later.

When I need more information, or I’m not quite sure an item is a good fit, I read it. Generally, though, I only read the headlines, check the cover images, and make a snap judgment call then and there. I’m a one-man editorial department!

Monday – Tuesday:

I organize all of my saved items into a ‘resource doc’ as I call them. Since I go from newest to oldest, all items are also kinda of chronological as well. I mostly just pick what I find the most interesting or relevant for the actual items.

My newsletters have a time lag of one week because Tuesday afternoon is the absolute cutoff point no matter what. That’s right! It’s called ‘the week that was’ for a reason haha! I write my items to be as evergreen as possible, but it can’t be helped that readers who prefer breaking news coverage might sometimes consider me a bit late to the party.

Fortunately for me though, being fashionably late has yet to go out of style. Not only that, but most readers can pick up any given item days, weeks, or even years later, and still benefit from it in one way or another.  

Wednesday Morning – Wednesday Afternoon:

Also known as ‘deadline day.’ I write the newsletter in a single sitting, writing to the best of my abilities from early morning until I’m done. In the early days ‘until I’m done’ frequently meant all-nighters and frantic finishing touches at the office on Thursday.

As I’m writing I double-check my chosen sources to make doubly sure they’re relevant/interesting enough. I also do my best to make sure I’m not getting key facts wrong.

These days, when life doesn’t get in my way, I’m able to produce my newsletter neatly within my allotted working hours.

Even when life does get in the way, delays are now down to only around 2-3 hours, barring particularly extenuating circumstances. It is thanks to this drastic increase in sustainable efficiency that I am now in a position to take a more active role in the publication of my content.

Wednesday Afternoons At The MidJourney Casino:

Ok, so the writing is done and sent. Time for the images! What is a solo writer with an hour or two to spare to do? Had I the time and the talent, I’d draw my own images, but alas. Whilst I aim to make my pen flow like water, my pencil flows like gravel…for now.

This is my use case for MidJourney and other generative AI. They are not artist’s easels; they are slot machines. You pull the lever and hope you hit the jackpot. I think this is fun, I wouldn’t have a nice cup of serendipity so often if I hated surprises.

I do have three golden rules though:

• No human artists or signature styles in the prompts. To do my job I need to use this tech. That’s simply a fact of my work life. However, I find it distasteful and boring to use artists and their signature works as direct prompts. We can’t close pandora’s box again with regard to how these models were(and continue to be) trained. We can, however, be as transparent and honest as possible about how we choose to employ them. So no editing before publication, only resizing. Simple, human-readable prompts in natural language. That’s it.

• The image needs to look presentable enough to meet my minimum standards of quality. This is why you’ll often see robots and architecture but never human beings. I just don’t think MJ does a good job on them without significant behind-the-scenes work.

• I want the images to be relevant to the topic at hand, or to be personally entertaining to me. Usually, the first item of any given week will serve as the prompt inspiration. Sometimes I just come across something that I just vibe with and roll with it.

Getting that killer combo of topic relevance and ‘presentable enough’ does sometimes take quite a while. That’s just how fickle Lady Luck is. It is what it is. If you want to precisely dictate the exact characteristics of a work, I hear artist commissions are pretty neat!

Is ‘One More Thing’ Inspired By Steve Jobs?

No, it’s inspired by my boss. Who was inspired by Edward H. Land, who also inspired Steve Jobs. It’s hard to talk about one’s boss without coming across as disingenuous. However, please do give me a chance to explain here.

The reason why I specifically enjoy and continue to work at this company is because the particular bosses that I work under inspire and motivate me. We were just talking about casinos, so with regard to bosses and colleagues, I do genuinely believe I hit the jackpot.  

One such boss has Edward H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, as a great source of inspiration. It is via him that I first learned and looked into ‘one more thing.’ It’s not about the phrase. It’s about the showmanship. After a long, exhausting presentation, people are zoned out. They’ve already checked out mentally and are preparing to also leave physically.  

A person who can blow minds with one more thing under such circumstances is truly powerful. It’s the personal touch that elevates the presenter to a true showman. And that happens via anecdotes and glimpses at the person beyond the rank

This boss sharing anecdotes of his personal life and interests inspires me. I hope to do this for my readers as well with just one more thing.

Why Is Tech Time By Tim Published By Triple?

Up until now, the newsletter has been published directly by Triple on the company's LinkedIn page for both practical and personal reasons.

Practically speaking, I wanted any initial attention and engagement generated by the newsletter to go toward the overall company brand. In those very early stages, I felt that it would be a good way to prove that Triple’s claims of genuinely believing in its employees and supporting them weren’t just corporate bollocks.

The tech world is a world of cults, be they cults of personality or brand loyalty. No matter how big I may or may not get in the future, I reasoned that Triple believing in me back when I was ‘nobody’ would serve to prove its earnestness in a world full of duplicity.

On a more personal level, my lack of experience when I started Tech Time by Tim meant that I just couldn't handle self-publication. I was supported through those initial growing pains by my colleagues, and they also allowed me to focus on honing my skills even after the starting jitters passed.

I am now ready to take those reins. Over the course of the next few issues, I will be moving toward publishing content myself.

This basically means that Tech Time by Tim will start being published directly by Tim on LinkedIn and reposted by Triple. Up until now, it was the other way around. I’ll also be more directly involved with publication on whatever future channels might crop up.

What Kind Of Hobbies Do You Have?

None, sorry to disappoint! Ok that’s not a particularly helpful answer, is it? Let’s elaborate a bit.

If we go back to the example of the two kinds of climbers from earlier. I was the manic mountaineer for sure. The kind that sacrificed everything for the sake of their ambition and would have found emptiness at the top.

However, before I knew it, I wasn’t climbing alone anymore. People supporting and looking after each other is something I’m still getting used to slowly but surely. But they’ve helped me be more mindful of my strengths, instead of just my weaknesses.

I was convinced for quite a long time that the only way to succeed was as a lone wolf. I know better now. Lone wolves aren’t actually as cool and enviable as society has convinced us they are. They’re sad and lonely, and no one will be there to celebrate their accomplishments in the end. I prefer my current pack life, actually…wait a minute.

Since I was going with a mountain climbing analogy this whole time I probably should have picked like uh…a mountain goat or something. Well, shit. What are mountain goat groups called? Uh…moving on!

The things I’m looking to pick back up as part of a healthier work/life balance going forward include:

• Cooking: I love all cuisines but am personally most familiar with the Italian and Japanese kitchens.

• Writing: What a shock, it turns out that I enjoy writing. I want to keep getting better at it.

• Making Visual Art: Using AI image generators has made me more appreciative of human artistic expression, not less. As such, I want to become more visually artistic.  

• Game Design: I want to make my own games, or at the very least understand game creation on a deeper level.

• Sports: A sound mind dwells within a sound body, so I’m going to see about sorting that out. Lord knows what sport it’ll end up being though! Perhaps I actually should just take up mountaineering…

And that’s a pretty good note to end on if you ask me. Though in all honesty, I’ve never been too good with endings. That’s one more thing I’m excited to work on. Thanks for joining me on this journey. It means the (tech) world to me.

Tim Groot, Tech Time by Tim author