About This Blog

I learned to program in 1975, and never stopped, meaning I’ve been generating bugs for close to half a century. If “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”, then I’ve had a lot of chances to get stronger.

In this blog, I’ll be sharing thoughts on a variety of technical topics, from the perspective of someone who likes to think he has made pretty much all of the mistakes there are to make, though somehow new ones keep arising.

To begin with, I’ll be exploring the trajectory of AI: how capable are these systems today, where are they headed, how worried or excited should we be, and what can we do about it?

About Me

My name is Steve Newman. My biggest claim to fame is having co-founded Writely, the startup that became Google Docs, along with Scalyr and roughly half a dozen other software companies… with varying degrees of success. Somehow I also keep meeting people who remember Spectre, a 3-D multiplayer tank battle game (strongly inspired by Atari’s classic Battlezone) I wrote in 1990 with my frequent collaborator Sam Schillace.

I also write Climateer, a blog about climate change.

An older and less interesting incarnation of this blog, with posts from 2010 through 2012, can be found at http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/. (In 2011 I started Scalyr and quickly became too busy for personal blogging. I left Scalyr, or rather the company that acquired it, in early 2023. Along the way, I learned a lot about writing.)

You can reach me at amistrongeryet@substack.com. I also post or comment occasionally as “snewman” on Hacker News. On LinkedIn, I’m https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevescalyr/ (but I rarely check messages there).