Humanoids Weakness Policy

Robots don't need to be very strong to carry out most servant tasks, so it should be impossible for any stronger than a typical man to enter civilian territory. Jobs requiring great strength should be assigned to other machines of lesser intelligence and mobility.

Lisbeth Salander

The antisocial hacker from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Parking Spot Saver

On the left is an early prototype of a parking barrier I was designing in 2013 and on the right is the finished model. I have no training in engineering but took the project from concept to a production ready model (cheaply producible with a 40% profit margin) in under a year with a few thousand dollars.

CGI & After Effects

While editing Cherries and Clover I got into 3D animation using Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects. The amazing thing about CGI is that you're not just sketching an image, but creating a world, complete with it's own physics, and then "filming it" with a virtual camera.

Software Engineering

When I was roommates with the future co-founder of Checkr, I became interested in computer programming. I decided to specialize in Node.js in 2013, which is unique in allowing developers to write almost their entire application in one language: JavaScript.

Full Stack Developer

In line with my Jack of All Trades Methodology, I build both the front and back-end of my sites and applications (plus design and SysAdmin — so I do everything). This has a lot of benefits, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Computer programming is the art and science of doublespeak — you must write for humans and computers at the same time. Like if a Francophone and Spaniard each asked who I am, to respond "Jack" would answer both at once. But to say: "My name is Jack," could confuse them since they would've needed: "Je m'appelle Jack" or "Mi nombre es Jack." People can work around that but computers need exactly the right code, which is far from how people talk, but other programmers need to understand it too. This should be easy for specialists — except there still isn't enough consensus on how things should be done.

Enterprise Sound

This was a music platform that I cofounded in 2015. For a monthly subscription, our clients could listen to +100 stations generated by our algorithm. We developed it for a fraction the cost of our competitors, but despite investor interest, I abandoned the project to focus on bitcoin instead.

AI: Gradient Descent

An interesting look at how neural networks learn. Though game-changing, I still think artificial intelligence is overhyped and a long ways off from outperforming any idiot with a smartphone. Nevertheless, I am investigating how it works and will probably have my own universe-destroying superintelligence app by next Christmas.