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Four questions that open a philosophical abyss – What LLMs reveal about thought, language, being, and meaning

We did not intend to create a philosopher. We built a tool to complete our sentences. And yet, here we are. Staring into the language it gives back to us, wondering who, or what, is really speaking. Large Language Models (LLMs) are not conscious. They do not know, want, feel, or intend. They do not reason in any human sense. And yet they speak. They advise. They offer insights. They mirror our…

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The world’s lost weave – the cosmological condition of humanity

We live in a state of separation. From nature. From the whole. From ourselves. This is the result of a long cosmological shift in which humanity’s relationship to the world has gradually changed — from participant to ruler, from inhabitant to stranger. The historical journey of cosmology At the dawn of history, there was no separation between human and world. Hunter-gatherer peoples like the…

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AI as an Invasive Species?

What actually happens when something foreign not only enters a system – but begins to reshape the system itself? Isn’t this precisely what we feel AI (or what is popularly called AI) is doing? When we worry that AI will replace human jobs, or when AI is seen as a threat that could extinguish humanity – what are we really thinking? I believe that our feelings and scattered fearful thoughts on…

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It’s Not a Transition – It’s a Systemic Shift

Reflections on why most transformation efforts fall short – and what might actually be required Lately, I find myself returning to the same conversation in different forms. It doesn’t matter whether I’m speaking with CEOs, strategy teams, or transformation officers – the themes tend to converge. Everyone’s talking about transformation. The pressure is real: digitalization, AI, sustainability,…

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The Dead Horse Epiphany - What It Means for Futurists

In my previous post, The Dead Horse Epiphany: When We Realize the Ride is Over, I explored the moment of collective realization that many of the systems we rely on are no longer viable. The challenge isn’t just recognizing that the horse is dead—it’s deciding what to do next. For futurists, this epiphany forces a fundamental shift in how we approach foresight, strategy, and…

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The Dead Horse Epiphany - When We Realize the Ride is Over

There comes a moment when the illusion of progress shatters, and we recognize the uncomfortable truth: many of the systems, industries, and ideas we continue to invest in are, in reality, already dead. We are riding horses that no longer move, sustained only by inertia, denial, and wishful thinking. This is the “Dead Horse Epiphany”—a collective moment of awakening when societies, businesses, and…

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Pebble the wearable back from a long death

I started working on Pebble in 2008 to create the product of my dreams. Smartwatches didn’t exist, so I set out to build one. I’m extraordinarily happy I was able to help bring Pebble to life, alongside the core team and community. The company behind it failed but millions of Pebbles in the world kept going, many of them still to this day.

I wear my Pebble every day. It's been great (and I'm astounded it’s lasted 10 years!), but the time has come for new hardware.

You’d imagine that smartwatches have evolved considerably since 2012. I've tried every single smart watch out there, but none do it for me. No one makes a smartwatch with the core set of features I want:

Always-on e-paper screen (it’s reflective rather than emissive. Sunlight readable. Glanceable. Not distracting to others like a bright wrist)

Long battery life (one less thing to charge. It’s annoying to need extra cables when traveling)

Simple and beautiful user experience around a core set of features I use regularly (telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking)

Buttons! (to play/pause/skip music on my phone without looking at the screen)

Hackable (apparently you can’t even write your own watchfaces for Apple Watch? That is wild. There were >16k watchfaces on the Pebble appstore!)

Over the years, we’ve thought about making a new smartwatch. Manufacturing hardware for a product like Pebble is infinitely easier now than 10 years ago. There are plenty of capable factories and Bluetooth chips are cheaper, more powerful and energy efficient.

The challenge has always been, at its heart, software. It’s the beautifully designed, fun, quirky operating system (OS) that makes Pebble a Pebble.

Today’s big news - Google has open sourced PebbleOS!

PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time. 

Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).

Thank you, Google and Rebble! I can't stress how thankful I am to Rebble and Google, in general and to a few Googlers specifically, for putting in tremendous effort over the last year to make this happen. You've helped keep the dream alive by making it possible for anyone to use, fork and improve PebbleOS. The Rebble team has also done a ton of work over the years to continue supporting Pebble software, appstore and community. Thank you!

In addition to PebbleOS, we’ve been supporting development of Cobble, an open source Pebble-compatible app for iOS (soon) and Android (works great today, it’s my daily driver).

We’re bringing Pebble back!

I had really, really, really hoped that someone else would come along and build a Pebble replacement. But no one has. So… a small team and I are diving back into the world of hardware to bring Pebble back!

This time round, we’re keeping things simple. Lessons were learned last time! I’m building a small, narrowly focused company to make these watches. I don’t envision raising money from investors, or hiring a big team. The emphasis is on sustainability. I want to keep making cool gadgets and keep Pebble going long into the future.

The new watch we’re building basically has the same specs and features as Pebble, though with some fun new stuff as well 😉 It runs open source PebbleOS, and it’s compatible with all Pebble apps and watchfaces. If you had a Pebble and loved it…this is the smartwatch for you.

More info to come soon! Follow the fun with @ericmigi and @pebble.

Are you like me?

Do you have a hole in your heart (and on your wrist) that hasn't been filled by any other smartwatch? 

Sign up to be the first to get one at rePebble.com. 

Eric Migicovsky

Pebble Founder

FAQ

When can I buy one?

As soon as we nail down the product specifications and get a firm idea of the production timeline, we'll share it with everyone on the list and invite people to order.

Will it be exactly like Pebble?

Yes. In almost every way. 

Aren’t you the guy who screwed this up last time?

Yes, the one and only. I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons. 

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The magic in nature seems to come from emergence. So why do we humans still solve problems by analysis and have a reflex to organize ourselves in complicated hierarchies modeled after machines?

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*Wait... how MANY fingers? That's kind of a lot

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The Strongman Fantasy

Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.

Timothy Snyder is very clear about this. And history backs him up.

The Strongman Fantasy

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The New Caesars Part I

The advent of the Internet has also given the New Caesars something their predecessors could not have hoped to have: the ability to bypass or marginalize traditional custodians and gatekeepers of public knowledge—the established media, academia, and other authority figures—without imprisoning or killing all that many of them.

Claire Berlinski call this new class of authoritarian leaders the New Caesars and not fascist because the term fascist is historically incorrect. A agree with this and much of her analysis even if I think we need to find a better term for them.

The New Caesars Part I

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Have you wondered why so many people have started to talk into their phones as sandwiches with the speakerphone feature turned on? And many of them doesn't even recognize that they have changed their behviour.

I have!

Part of the answer seems to be that we have something called peer instinct which is a uniquely human ability and make us constantly aware of each other and seems to have a blurry line between what I do and know and what the others do and know.

When I learn a skill through observing group mates, the code is tagged in my head as shared by the group. Because I know that they know it, I can anticipate their moves, understand their intentions, and make complementary contributions.

An accidental side effect of this might be this unconcious copy cat reflex by which many of find that we suddenly and unconciously have changed our behaviour to that of others.

Unfortunately this is likely the mechanism underneath many of the swarm like behaviours which is starting to be problems when they scale to global proportions via global digital communications platforms.

(via The “peer instinct”: The ancient tribal instinct behind human culture)

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(via @johnhagel on LinkedIn)

We are clearly heading in a new direction in the West. We are writing less about progress and future and increasingly more about caution, worry and risk.

I also connect this result with the ideas of e g Ulrich Bech in his famous book Risk Society where he saw how we became more scared and risk averse when we become an increasingly embedded in technology.

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Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. - James P. Carse in "Finite and Infinite Games"

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We talk as if the machines were the active participants in history, and humanity the passive ones. We dance around the machines as if they were deities. Forgetting that we have created them with our own hands. Fed them with data from our own minds. It is a narrative that leaves us both powerless and without responsibility. Owned by our own creations.