Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

What about AI?

Grand places help me get proper context — when juxtaposed against the vastness and timeliness of the planet we call home, the human construct is merely just that – an edifice, a reflection of our selfish need to scream: I am! 

And nothing prays louder to this narcissism is the current obsession with AI, a technology generating as much fear as it inspires fabulous. In our world where hype trumps deliberations, we forget that technology is there to augment us — and if we want to obliterate us. A wheel takes us afar, and it runs us over. Telephone connects, and it makes us vulnerable to proverbial Jordan Belforts. Atomic bomb kills at an inhuman scale, yet the same technology can be harnessed to produce energy to power our world. 

Intelligence can be artificial. Or it can be a tool to help humans survive a more complex, more connected world

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Technology
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A Letter from Om. Issue #02/2023

Hi! In case you are new around here, I am Om. If you are new around here, here is something About Me and why you should read my newsletter. In this letter, I share what’s on my mind, my latest writings, articles worth reading from around the web, my recommendations & sometimes my photography. It’s mostly about technology and how it impacts our present future. 

In this issue, I address the following: 

  • Housekeeping update
  • Personal update + what’s on my mind 
  • ChatGPT: A Netscape moment. 
  • 2 Good Reads + Watch This
  • A Mirror Conspiracy! 

Housekeeping: The new format has met with the approval of the community. As an experiment (and by popular demand), I will increase the frequency of the newsletter to twice a month – the first and the fifteenth of every month, starting today. 

Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is

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A Letter From Om
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An Alaskan Sojourn

You might have noticed that it has been very quiet around here! Well, I went for a short trip to Alaska to take in the brutally cold winter weather, and take some photos. I had originally planned on visiting Alaska at the end of 2022, but the universe conspired against my plans. 

Alaska is one of my favorite places in America, and had I discovered it in my younger days, I probably would have made it home. Its vast emptiness, extreme nature, and, most importantly, its landscapes speak to me deeply and emotionally. It allows my inner introvert to exist without interference from the outside world. I have returned, replenished, my mind and soul in sync. I suppose I like it because, like all grand places, it reduces us humans to our true context when juxtaposed against the vastness and timeliness of the planet that’s home. 

Winter in Alaska is

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On Photography
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Just say no!

shallow focus photography of just say no carved on tree trunk
Photo by Andy T on Unsplash

iA Writer has no focus, or vision, for what they want to be. There’s a little bit of the hyper popular wiki-style linked notes apps (Craft, Notion, Mem, Obsidian, and all those who came before). There’s a little bit of the historical writing interface that iA Writer made obscenely popular. And then there’s this sense of Text/Code Editor they have baked in. And there’s file management.

iA Writer, when it came out, was extraordinary. I loved it. But the current iA Writer feels like an app being product managed by someone who feels as though they need to morph the app into whatever the latest bit of feedback they got in their emails — without a sense of being willing to say ‘no’. It’s not a good app anymore.

Brooks Review

So many apps and services suffer from feature creep and this desire to

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Technology
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I was skimming through my photo library and came across this image from my most recent trip to Iceland. Given it didn’t get dark till very late, these photos were made in the wee hours of the morning. I was sitting down and having coffee in the hotel’s dining room, when the light caught my eye. It is nothing special, and yet it is.

February 14, 2023. San Francisco

On Photography
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Sweet Streams are made of this

Matrix movie still
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

A few weeks back, I posed the question: Is “stream” as a design paradigm over? I asked because of some behavioral changes that have become prevalent on the internet. First, most of the internet is now algorithmically organized by large platforms, so we are increasingly predisposed to receive information in atomized form. With those two trends in mind, the idea of people going to a destination — say a blog — to consume information in reverse chronological order doesn’t isn’t relevant as much. 

I shared the article with two fellow bloggers who are big thinkers about web architectures, user experiences, and Internet software — Jim Nielsen and Jeremy Keith. Jim sent me an email and subsequently shared his thoughts on Mastadon. He is still thinking about the design concepts, but his way of organizing information is simple: “his words” (aka posts) and other “people’s words” (aka links.) He will

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Technology
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Surfing in Alaska!

Alaska is one of my favorite destinations, especially during fall and winter. When visiting the state back in 2018, I came across a usual sight — surfers paddling into the middle of the the Turnagian Arm. I normally associate surfing with warmer destinations such as Hawaii, Southern California, Australia’s Gold Coast and Portugal. So to see surfers in Alaska was a pleasant surprise. Seward is quite a hot spot for surfing. Turnagain Arm, in particular is an exciting spot as the silt changes all the time and makes the waves quite unpredictable. 

It was around 8 pm in the evening. I had my 90-280 lens on my Leica SL and fired off a few shots. The surfers were sillouheted by the setting sun. The light itself was harsh, but the thick cloud cover helped cover the landscape in a wonderful warm reddish tinge. Sadly, I didn’t do multiple exposures to capture more

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On Photography
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