All is well, I’m still grinding — working on next-gen tech is hard! On many levels it makes LeftLane feel easy.
Every once in a while I indulge in a fantasy of opening up an Activate franchise shop, or making n+1 products like apps, books, games, or even going back to work in big tech.
It’d be so simple to make a few million bucks over a few years, take a trip first class annually, retire at 45, have a few kids, and live a nice life.
Easy mode 🏖
While I’m sure that’s sounds great for many, to me, it’s an insult to both my potential and my duty to the human experiment, and… its boring.
You’re going to die anyway, may as well go big.
Besides, this is the fulcrum century where we either go to zero or we go to infinity — sitting on the sidelines is the biggest miss in all of human history.
Space Update
I’m working towards releasing SpaceKit this Fall — a plug and play system to make the real world trivially programmable for just about anyone, but initially targeting home assistant hobbyists — it’s going to be awesome.
Imagine if programming the physical world was like running a broadway show.
Your programming language is positions and cues.
Forget desktop, think theater
SpaceKit enables something like that.
Your little robot camera is like the stage manager sitting in the back waiting for cues.
Little robot camera watches (no internet needed)
When it sees a gesture or you walk into a virtual trigger it does the thing you told it to do. It’s like having a theater running on skynet but less hostile.
You get super powers
SpaceKit gets you set up with a twin and gives you spatial events like collisions, proximity, and gesture. You in turn use these in your IFTTT home automation or custom scripts.
You “program” by placing shapes on your house.
You could make:
automations for getting in the shower, in bed, in the bath, etc.
when a box is placed in at your front door play audio or send a text or trigger a robot picker
you can also make an escape room or game
I’m working towards a fall early access release. The first iteration of the kit is going to have:
a camera
a visual spatial programming editor
an API client — probably python and typescript
If you want to follow along:
If you or a friend would be interested in early access drop me a DM!
Health & Longevity
I’m going to have a full update on this next month but I’ve made massive gains:
5 lbs of muscle
can sprint ~25% faster — I’m faster now than I was in high school despite training about 1/4th the time
my posture is crazy different
I look very different
I’ve been asked to post my progress on a 1+ million account at my gym. I’m excited to share some pics.
Flying Solo
The hardest part of development for the robots and for Space isn’t the tech — it’s working alone.
Day in, day out, working on incredibly hard deep tech is a special kind of adventure. No where to hide, no slack in the system. No one to talk to who understands. It’s brutal.
It’s fun too. It makes for a great future story by the hearth. I always like to think about what a great story hardship and challenges will make in the future.
The greater the suffering or disadvantage, the greater the glory when you win. Just make sure you win.
You can take a skim of my internal review of many experiments from the last 12 months to get an idea of what I’ve worked on — it wasn’t just robots. This doesn’t include the agentic stuff I worked on but it still covers a lot of ground.
I have expanded my list of super powers significantly:
create 3D designs
repair 3D printers
print stuff in house in a dozen materials
assemble electronics
program anything
make, tune, or adapt AI models
make games or simulations
make AI agents from scratch
This is my foundation — good for rapid prototyping and for future team management.
On Mission
The more I work on making the physical world programmable for normal people the more conviction I get it’s urgently needed.
We are in trouble as a nation. Serious trouble.
Working at the edge in embodied AI, drones, robots, electronics, 3D printing, and so on it’s never been more obvious who is leading — and it’s not us, not even close. While we spend 20 years to build one light rail line in Seattle entire cities (with subway) are built in Asia.
It’s humiliating.
I believe if we don’t learn how to build physical things 10x better in the next 5 - 10 years the US won’t be the supremacy anymore. And I don’t know if it’s even possible to catch up, but our only hope is to innovate by creating such natural interfaces that average people can get into physical programming with zero re-training.
If you are working in software, I’d urge you to consider pivoting to physical tech.
First, it won’t matter how cool your LLM coding agent is, or your fake video generator, or your app if we can’t:
hold the pacific (we no longer have the biggest fleet, I’m sure it’s better… for now)
100+ year old bridges start falling down
don’t embrace drones and robots in war
don’t have the capacity to scale it up to infinity
Second, ever more digital supply is chasing a fixed supply of attention.
Third, the macro tailwinds and the technological tailwinds will never have this sort of momentum shift again. Both policy at the government and corporate level will drive favorable macroeconomics. Meanwhile the LLM craze is bringing real advances to embodied AI by proxy. The transfer opportunities are endless.
Fourth, there is whole new ways to advertise that are opening up — think real world drone banners, planes, physical parties, and other creative ideas has huge latent potential. What a contrast to yet another piece of probably fake news in your feed.
Something to think about.
If you know people who are interested in working to make the physical world as programmable as the digital world — please connect me or point them at the space newsletter here .
Cheers,
— Michael