Today is the day that we remember people we loved who died on active duty serving their country. My dad is one of those people. He died in an unexplained crash of an F4 Phantom fighter jet during a training mission. I found the crash site last fall and wrote about it here.| mattlumpkin
On October 6, 2024, my two brothers and I drove into the Ouachita National Forest. We were navigating to the best lead we’ve had in years on locating the place where my father died. Captain Richard Lumpkin was in the second seat of an F4 Phantom fighter jet when it crashed into the south Arkansas…| mattlumpkin
Discussing which jobs will be replaced around the campfire Last fall, I went camping with several other families from my neighborhood. As we sat around the fire the conversation turned from Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI to what the AI revolution will mean for us more generally. We had lawyers, professors, therapists, architects, designers, teachers…| mattlumpkin
A decade and a half into my practice designing products and software, some things keep coming up. I’ll keep up with them here. 1. Make the software explain itself Ideally software should need no manual, instructions or training. Instead the meaning and actions available should be discoverable by the user and they should be able…| mattlumpkin
Like so many of us, I’ve been watching in horror since October 7th. I’ve felt paralyzed by not knowing what to do or say or how to understand how we got here. It feels again like it felt after September 11th; the first time I felt myself clinging to the back of my country like…| mattlumpkin
Over and Under thinking On my walk this morning I was talking to my friend and linguist, Luke Wakefield, and I had an insight. For most of my life I’ve been deeply curious about how things work: everything from electronics to religion. I make models of the world to best fit the data of what…| mattlumpkin
Yesterday my friend Katie DiSimone died. I met Katie in an unsolicited direct message. She reached out to me after I had asked some questions in a facebook group she ran. I was trying to figure out which hacked automated insulin delivery software was most likely to save my family from drowning in the endless labor…| mattlumpkin
Or, how remote work can trick you into feeling more stressed than you need to There is no trash can or recycling bin in your computer, just different ways the system tags files. But the useful fiction of the recycle bin interface lets us know what to expect about files we put there even if…| mattlumpkin
When I was a boy, we used to visit my grandma Jodie’s house. Grandma Jodie was a short, quiet woman when I knew her. I only knew her after the great pain of losing her son to the public violence of a fighter jet crash. Truth is I don’t know how quiet she was before…| mattlumpkin
Every once in a while, friends whose kids are into photography ask for recommendations on what cameras they might buy for their developing photographers who want to move beyond their phones. Here are a few of the things I usually share. If you already own lenses of a certain kit, start there If your family…| mattlumpkin
