Fractional CAIO for small companies ⛑️ Wilderness First Responder 🚀 Inventor
Altadena, CA
Joined March 2007
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How I'm building a Mac app that turns outdoor activities + gigabytes of action cam footage + GPS into stories:
1. Pick an early access beachhead based on GTM analysis and reachability (user/activity/30 miles from me)
2. Collect software references I like and say why they do and don’t work
3. Design review with an AI "team": principal designer, engineer, GIS specialist. They argue, I decide
4. Every choice comes as lettered options with one marked recommended. I reply with a letter
5. Claude mocks it on a design canvas, plus a clickable prototype
6. A fresh agent audits the mocks. I triage every finding
7. Keep a running decision log, then commit it to the repo with the mock images
8. Split the work: Phase 1 is the foundation plus what a tester touches. Phase 2 is everything else
9. Write issues as goal + contract + do-not-touch + when to stop. Changes to the saved project format get a decision record
10. Claude Code builds locally and stops on open questions. I take those back to the team when needed
11. CI plus end-to-end tests in the cloud and on a remote Mac mini. The agent critiques its own work before calling it done
12. I judge visuals by eye, one visible change per build
13. Recruit people who go on adventures, have gigabytes of media collecting dust and are mad and sad about it
14. Tell them to pull media from a recent trip, meet them in person with my laptop, hand the app over to them and watch them use it
15. Learn
Building complex hardware to solve hard problems is becoming less and less out of reach for small companies.
12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.
Hey @hnshah, I'm never avail for your Friday live sessions. Are you posting the videos anywhere?
I'd like to watch last week's session on how you went about customer research for Beam to get some inspiration for my Mac app.
Using my 3D printer in 2012 required training in the dark arts to print an iPhone 4S case.
Now you can copy and paste a running shoe.
NEW: Bambu Lab just launched a 3D printer with nine interchangeable tools that can switch between colors, materials, and nozzle sizes mid-print.
The H3C is built to make complex objects in one run without constantly stopping to swap filament or hardware.
-9 printing tools stay loaded and ready to use
-Switches between materials in about 6 seconds
-Can combine hard plastic and soft, rubber-like TPU in the same object
-Uses different nozzle sizes in one print for both speed and fine detail
-Can create a wider range of colors from five base filaments
-Optional tools let it cut, draw, and press designs into materials
Starts at $2,499.
Pete Mauro retweeted
有人发现了一种非常离谱的 JavaScript 混淆技术：通过在代码里塞入大量生物武器、毒药和致死剂量相关的函数名，让 AI 因为安全限制而拒绝分析代码。
安全研究员 veritas 在分析浏览器指纹脚本时，发现一段来自 ServicePipe 相关域名的 JavaScript，里面充斥着极其诡异的函数名：
computeRicinLethalDosageForWaterSupply
calculateDeadlyLethalSuicideAspirinDosage
光看名字，仿佛在研究生化武器。但实际上，这段代码只是在收集浏览器指纹，包括 User-Agent、GPU、Canvas 等信息。
研究员怀疑，这些名字是开发者故意设置的陷阱，专门用来阻止 AI 辅助逆向工程。
于是他做了个实验：
• Astra：拒绝分析
• Astra + Daybreak Blue：仍然拒绝
• GLM-5.3：成功分析
这就有意思了。
传统代码混淆是通过复杂控制流、加密字符串、无意义变量名，让人类和工具难以理解代码。
而这种新思路，直接瞄准了大模型的安全机制。
代码本身可能完全无害，但只要在函数名里塞进足够多的危险词汇，部分 AI 就可能主动放弃分析。
更讽刺的是，模型越严格遵守某些安全规则，面对这种混淆时反而可能越容易受到干扰。
当然，目前还没有证据证明开发者一定是故意这样设计，也不能说明这种方法对所有模型都有效。
但它揭示了一个值得关注的趋势：随着越来越多的逆向工程依赖 AI，未来的代码混淆技术可能不再只针对编译器、反编译器和人类研究员，还会专门针对大模型的安全判断机制。
以前是让代码难以理解，现在甚至可以尝试让 AI 不敢理解。
What do you do if you are the Liam Neeson from The Naked Gun?
Asking for a friend.
Still my favorite @petersellis quote, when I asked him what it's like to manage @nikitabier
"I think of Nikita like Liam Neeson from Taken. If your daughter gets kidnaped, he has a very special set of skills, and he's going to employ those skills. But then when you need him to raise the daughter, or buy some groceries, all he knows how to do is just kill everybody in the grocery store."
Pete Mauro retweeted
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
Pete Mauro retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
My whole life I have accepted other people’s crappy UXs. Or imagined a product that was too expensive to make.
I customized everything in my house and my camper van to be the way I wanted it. But now it’s time for the tech too.
(I can’t throw a designer under the bus for this one though - we know it wasn’t her choice)
Apple doubling down on devices crippled by Siris suckage.
I’d take anything over this. A new Google speaker with Gemini, a personal assistant powered by one of the foundation labs new products. Or one powered by a startup like wajo.ai
I got a lot of great ideas from this post.
Turns out I used some of these tactics successfully over the years, but never had a language for them. And I definitely never integrated all of them in a cohesive way.
Basically Ryan gave me a language for things that I have done or should be doing.
It will be fun figuring out how to adopt some of this for my solo project when I’m ready to start talking about it in a few weeks.
