Month: September 2026

What’s new in Sonos 27 this fall

Sonos recently had a big press annoucement. Things I learned:

  • Sonos starts naming their software like Apple does. Sonos 27 is the software that comes out in 26.
  • There will be two features available soon: Portable Surround will let you use the two back-of-the-room speakers either with your TV surround sound or in other places. Plus, Sonos will make it easy to move music between their Ace Ultra headphones and Sonos speakers with a press of a button, “in preview” (read: alpha).
  • There will be a couple of AI and voice features “in preview”, but only in the US.

Up until about ten years ago, I have been very involved with Sonos and their development. Since then I have lost interest and am no longer using Sonos gear. But I remember that I discussed the portable surround feature already ten years ago. It is good to see this finally coming to pass.

Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys

Good story im The Atlantic about the tech billionaires who built our world having taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.

I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.

As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires.

This tale goes well with my observation that these men are still snickering about the same jokes 13-year-old-boys would.

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