luc p. @_swiftp - Twitter Profile

Matthias Wandel is an engineer, woodworker, and YouTuber who runs the most-viewed woodworking channel on YouTube. He was an early employee at Research In Motion, assigned employee number 13. Yacine (@yacineMTB) is an engineer and artist, formerly at X and Stripe. Both of them are tinkerers, explorers, and builders in their own right. They poke at the world, build and test things for themselves, and develop their own understanding. In this conversation, we traced a single thread through Matthias’s entire life: what happens when you grow up in a place where the only way to have something is to make it yourself, and then never stop. We started in Northern Ontario, in his dad’s workshop on a gravel road where the nearest store was an hour away, and followed that instinct through his first encounters with computers, a Bic-pen dot matrix printer on a Commodore 64, two brothers with two machines in a basement heated by a wood stove, lock picking in the Waterloo service tunnels, and what it means to be a nerd. Matthias and Yacine went back and forth on simplicity vs. ease, what LLMs change about the relationship between understanding and building, and why the probability of code getting reused is inverse to the effort you spend making it reusable. Matthias walked through building the DigiSync barcode reader for the motion picture industry, writing almost all the firmware for RIM’s first wireless modem in DSP assembly, watching BlackBerry’s network traffic flip on 9/11, and what it was like to work alongside Mike Lazaridis. He explained why he left BlackBerry while sales were at their peak and how a bandwidth constraint accidentally made his first viral YouTube video. This is a conversation about constraints that become capability, capability that becomes independence, and independence that becomes something you pass on. The Other Stuff is hosted by @internetvin, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and possibly the most curious man on Earth. Produced by New. The Other Stuff #34 – Matthias Wandel & Yacine: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out — Timestamps 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:25 ElectroBoom and Styropyro 00:09:55 Potato Guns and Air Guns 00:23:34 Growing Up in Northern Ontario 00:37:16 First Computers and the Bic Pen Printer 00:43:22 Markus Wendel and the Basement 01:00:19 University of Waterloo 01:03:37 Service Tunnels and Lock Picking 01:10:07 What Is a Nerd? 01:11:34 LLMs and Simplicity vs. Ease 01:31:19 How RIM Started 01:44:01 Building the Wireless Modem 01:58:43 Reusability and Optionality 02:14:13 The BlackBerry Pager 02:33:50 BlackBerry and 9/11 02:48:13 Lazaridis and Balsillie 03:05:28 The YouTube Channel 03:26:01 The Capacitance Sensor 03:42:41 Passing It On

3

174

13

222

42K

luc p. @_swiftp

about 2 months ago

@internetvin omg lets go you had matthias wandel on?!

0

2

0

42

_swiftp retweeted

とこよし @TKYSMMN

about 2 months ago

VRChatGaussianSplattingがいつの間にか更新されてて、VRC Light Volumesに対応してた！！革命来たでしょこれは！

1

428

70

190

33K

luc p. @_swiftp

2 months ago

https://t.co/gMpg9OrTZu

0

38

luc p. @_swiftp

2 months ago

Hosting a (full) touchdesigner workshop at New! Super excited!!

New

@newsystems_

2 months ago

Learning and playing. A creative coding showcase, Toronto Theory #2.5, a node-based tools workshop, Knightcap Chess, co-working with Offbrand Library, and "Not a Knitting Club" to close out the week. Open house Wednesday. Links below.

newsystems_'s tweet photo. Learning and playing.

A creative coding showcase, Toronto Theory #2.5, a node-based tools workshop, Knightcap Chess, co-working with Offbrand Library, and "Not a Knitting Club" to close out the week.

Open house Wednesday.

Links below. https://t.co/rxheFxzDeI

2

16

4

2

4K

1

12

3

1

1K

luc p.

@_swiftp

Who to follow

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users