# David Nuñez — a public explorer of emerging futures
> I build little pieces of the future to probe what they mean: experiments, speculative artifacts, and field notes from the seam where   technology meets being human.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).

## Pages
- [About](https://davidnunez.com/about.md) - I'm David Nuñez. I make to think. I learn more from a rough prototype than from a polished deck, so I build the thing and watch what it does. I've been doing some version of this for decades. At the MIT Media Lab I did my graduate work in the Personal Robots group, on how people and robots get alon…
- [Signal Path](https://davidnunez.com/signal-path.md)
- [Work With Me](https://davidnunez.com/work-with-me.md) - Pick something I don't understand. Build the smallest version that would tell me if I'm wrong. Put it where people can see it. Do it again.

## Posts
- [Outhorse Your Email](https://davidnunez.com/outhorse-your-email.md) - Iceland trained three horses to answer your email. Google, Superhuman and 147 startups have been doing the same job without the hay, and the research on how that lands with the person reading it is not flattering.
- [Noonsight: a journal that gives your words back](https://davidnunez.com/noonsight.md) - 2026 · Ongoing. I'm building a journal app for iPhone because no journal I've used made reading back worth it.
- [The One Star Is for the Auntie Anne's](https://davidnunez.com/the-one-star-is-for-the-auntie-annes.md) - Three hikers who phoned the sheriff for directions, a tree, humans in the loop, and the worst airports in America.
- [Sixty Years on One Hand](https://davidnunez.com/sixty-years-on-one-hand.md) - A doctor cracked the knuckles of one hand for sixty years to test something his mother told him. Nobody else had bothered.
- [Elaborate Ways to Not Start](https://davidnunez.com/elaborate-ways-to-not-start.md) - The green in every control room I have ever admired was a factory safety regulation, mandatory since 1948. I found that out while watching strangers give tours of their home offices, which is apparently how I do research now.
- [The biggest screen I could find](https://davidnunez.com/the-biggest-screen-i-could-find.md) - Twenty-five theaters in America can show The Odyssey the way it was made. None of them are in Massachusetts. I found that out after I bought the ticket.
- [Chains of Snowflakes](https://davidnunez.com/chains-of-snowflakes.md) - I started a hundred-day making streak. Then I spent two days researching whether streaks actually work. This went about as well as you'd expect.
- [Oh, Look, There's Nana's Painting](https://davidnunez.com/oh-look-theres-nanas-painting.md) - My niece just earned her degree in cybersecurity, so of course, I had to give her an encrypted hard drive filled w/ 1337 h4x0r media and some incoherent ramblings for her to decipher. Told her to start w/ WarGames (1983), Hackers (1995), Sneakers (1992) then Primer (2004) and just binge all of Mr.…
- [Skating on a Little Lake of Ink](https://davidnunez.com/skating-on-a-little-lake-of-ink.md) - I'm spending the week at FAB26, the Fab Lab network's annual gathering, camped out at MIT with several hundred people who own more laser cutters than shoes. I'll send around my conference thoughts next week. Signals Worth Tracking The man who invented the metaverse writes with a fountain pen. Neal…
- [Every Fake You See Is for Real](https://davidnunez.com/every-fake-you-see-is-for-real.md) - Tom Cruise promised you real jets, not CGI. You got both. "Everything you see is for real," went the Top Gun: Maverick marketing. Danish VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examined the finished film and found CGI jets nearly everywhere, then kept going for four more videos covering Oppenheimer, Mission: I…
- [Work Harder, Not Smarter](https://davidnunez.com/work-harder-not-smarter.md) - I gave the assistant that runs my calendar the power to refuse me until I name a reason. Turns out the obstacle is the feature: learning science, behavioral economics, and HCI all drew the same line between friction that works for you and friction that works on you.
- [It's Not the Fake, It's the Lie](https://davidnunez.com/its-not-the-fake-its-the-lie.md) - A band with no humans in it, an actress who doesn't exist, a five-star write-up sitting on a hundred food-poisoning complaints. The machine isn't the scandal. The unlabeled swap is.
- [The Log Is Fake](https://davidnunez.com/the-log-is-fake.md) - I lost twenty minutes to a website that lets you chop firewood, and it handed me something my work keeps withholding: a finished pile.
- [Nobody Can Draw a Bicycle](https://davidnunez.com/nobody-can-draw-a-bicycle.md) - A spider, a fake FBI town, and a bicycle built for AI.
- [I Built a Robot to Read My Mind and Believed It Anyway.](https://davidnunez.com/i-built-a-robot-to-read-my-mind-and-believed-it-anyway.md) - I trusted a tool I made to tell me what mattered, until it disagreed with itself over a single misplaced space. A field guide to the confident outputs worth checking twice.
- [I was looking for a Nigel I could download](https://davidnunez.com/i-was-looking-for-a-nigel-i-could-download.md) - I wanted Nigel from Devil Wears Prada to walk into my bedroom. What showed up was a pile of apps and a piece of cardboard.
- [A Meteor Fell and I Couldn't Find the Crowd](https://davidnunez.com/a-meteor-fell-and-i-couldn-t-find-the-crowd.md) - A meteor boom over Boston, a real-time town square that had quietly fragmented into a hundred private instruments, and why the fastest civic response in 2026 is to build the answer instead of post it. Plus Watch Duty, a 48-hour moving model, and someone in a blueberry-muffin costume.
- [The Card Apple Would Rather You Not Use](https://davidnunez.com/the-card-apple-would-rather-you-not-use.md) - Why digital-first wallets still mail you a piece of metal.
- [The Pocket Test](https://davidnunez.com/the-pocket-test.md) - A field guide for naming what your phone is actually doing on a walk. Five answers, one honest question.
- [Some apps want you to go outside.](https://davidnunez.com/some-apps-want-you-to-go-outside.md) - On the small genre of software that uses the screen as a door, not a wall.
- [My calendar lied to me, and I have only myself to blame](https://davidnunez.com/my-calendar-lied-to-me-and-i-have-only-myself-to-blame.md) - A small operational fire, followed by the four-jobs question I now ask every tool in my stack. Plus: pilot logbooks, an inaccurate-planning study from UCL, and Andy Matuschak on bending software around real life.
- [Hearthless: How Streaming Stole Our Shared Fires](https://davidnunez.com/hearthless-how-streaming-stole-our-shared-fires.md) - How the shift from scheduled broadcasts to on-demand streaming changed the way we gather around our stories.
- [Austin, TX: Progress & Nostalgia](https://davidnunez.com/austin-tx-progress-and-nostalgia.md) - I'm in Austin over the 4th of July weekend to visit family. Every time I come back to Texas I have incredibly mixed feelings.
- [100 Days and a Restart](https://davidnunez.com/100-days-and-a-restart.md) - Today we launched a new MIT Museum website, and started our 100 day countdown to the opening of the Museum in its new building at Kendall.
- [That New Computer Smell](https://davidnunez.com/that-new-computer-smell.md) - Do you remember the way your first computer smelled?
- [Anything but NFTs](https://davidnunez.com/anything-but-nfts.md) - So I was tempted to make this week’s newsletter about NFTs.
- [The Grief Multiplier and Gratitude](https://davidnunez.com/the-grief-multiplier-and-gratitude.md) - Personal reflections on loss, grief, and finding gratitude during the COVID-19 pandemic after losing a brother.
- [Happy New Year? If you say so.](https://davidnunez.com/happy-new-year-if-you-say-so.md) - I regret my jokes at the end of last year about how “it couldn’t get any worse than 2020.” At the very least, to the extent that this country is relevant to the rest of the world anymore, we have a lot of explaining to do in 2021 and beyond.
- [Patience](https://davidnunez.com/patience.md) - There's something about December that sends me into a frenzy of trying to wrap up projects...
- [The Show Must Go On(line)](https://davidnunez.com/the-show-must-go-online.md) - Somewhere in middle of Act II of Hamilton, I think between “The Adams Administration” and “We Know,” I fell fast asleep. This was the original cast on Broadway, mind you, and I was sitting in some of the best seats in the house.
- [Choose Your Own Adventure](https://davidnunez.com/choose-your-own-adventure.md) - Exploring the branching narratives of CYOA books through data visualization and what they teach us about choice.
- [Bricolage 002](https://davidnunez.com/bricolage-002.md) - This reminds me of why you should never poke a hardboiled egg after you put it in the microwave.
- [Election Day 2020](https://davidnunez.com/election-day-2020.md) - Almost all jurisdictions rely on electronic voting machines at their polling stations. It is worth understanding why we use them, how they work, and to what degree we can trust them.
- [Error 1202](https://davidnunez.com/error-1202.md) - Aboard the Lunar Module Eagle (LM-5), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 30,000 feet above the moon surface and rapidly descending.
- [(Not So) Quiet, Please](https://davidnunez.com/not-so-quiet-please.md) - In a fan-less season, the home teams’ noise advantage diminishes, and players’ performance is altered. Sporting venues have resorted to many tactics to restore some crowd normalcy to the game, including pumping in fake crowd noise.
- [Bricolage 001](https://davidnunez.com/bricolage-001.md) - Consider these interstitial episodes a bit of a release valve for us, or perhaps a palette cleanser to let us catch our breaths between the longer essays.
- [Eye to Eye](https://davidnunez.com/eye-to-eye.md) - Dressed in a long-sleeved, untucked white shirt, he climbs onto a platform in front of the audience.
- [Press 1 to Continue](https://davidnunez.com/press-1-to-continue.md) - I had a meeting with a colleague a few days ago, and she requested that instead of a video chat over Zoom, we should pick up the phone
- [Time is Weird in 2020](https://davidnunez.com/time-is-weird-in-2020.md) - Time is weird in 2020, wouldn't you agree?
- [Freediving into a Spreadsheet](https://davidnunez.com/freediving-into-a-spreadsheet.md) - How spreadsheets became cultural spaces for art, activism, and social action beyond business calculations.
- [Happy Upgrade Day](https://davidnunez.com/happy-upgrade-day.md) - You find it difficult to describe to your unlinked friends what it’s like to have an implant. It’s not like the movies, where you jack into a matrix and gain superpowers. You don’t suddenly have brain links to everyone else’s Wikipedia rabbit holes. It’s more subtle than that.
- [Study With Us](https://davidnunez.com/newsletter-study-with-us.md) - It was lovely sitting among strangers with their laptops open. Even as we were all lost in our socially distant headspaces, our minds and bodies were still chattering away with each other. Our study effort was contagious, entraining focus.
- [Touching a Heartbeat](https://davidnunez.com/touching-a-heartbeat.md) - I took the Apple Watch for a long walk last weekend. It did something unexpected and unattractive.
- [Hello, World](https://davidnunez.com/hello-world.md) - I do think we can have a symbiotic relationship with these creatures. They feed off of us, and in return, they perform magic on our behalf.
- [Horizon](https://davidnunez.com/horizon.md) - 2017 · Made for Cadillac with Gentex, shown at the Marfa Film Festival. 200 rear-camera mirrors in a ring you could put your hands on.

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