Hjálmar Gíslason
Five-time startup founder.
Curious about tech, media, life, the universe and everything.
Spreadsheets ran the world. Then AI showed up.
The handmade spreadsheet is going extinct, and calculations are moving to formats where few can check the math.
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Is AI making us dumber?
Offloading mental tasks to external aids is what made the modern world possible. AI is the latest in that line - with one important difference.
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A Second Brain for an Audience of One
I've been building my own personal knowledge base for 2.5 years. It feeds on every digital trace of my life, I reach for it dozens of times a day, and it's only useful to me. That's the whole point.
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When Code Is Free: 9 Things That Still Matter
Network effects, data, distribution, trust, ideas. When anyone can ship anything, everything that isn't code matters more.
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Building for an Audience of One
Software got easier to build. The mindset is harder to change.
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Claude Shannon's Maze-Solving Mouse
In 1952, Claude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that could solve a maze. The clever twist: the intelligence wasn't in the mouse — it was in the floor.
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The Spark
What skills should students focus on as AI reshapes the job market? The answer is simpler than you might think.
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We're all product managers now!
With the rise of AI coding, every programmer, analyst, designer and end-user has become a product manager. The question is: how do we become good ones?
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Only for Sissies
The reception of Fortran in the 1950s sounds uncannily familiar. A passage from Richard Hamming's 'The Art of Doing Science and Engineering'.
