innovation culture

Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox). In the end, all the technologies got out in useful ways. ARPA was non-profit, but had many commercial spin-offs, and this was regarded as "the way things should be"... See more

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

To these three, I’ll add my favorite new idea as a fourth: contraptionism. So that’s the 4Cs of the imperative: Courage, Clarity, Creativity, Contraptionism.

The aesthetic and ethos that we need to guide the construction of a new machine is contraptionism . Because any new societal machine will inevitably be a janky affair, not just at inception,... See more

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change,... See more

the emerging technologies of today should be analogized to events like Genghis Khan’s rise in the 12th and 13th centuries or the proliferation of personal ranged weapons like longbows and muskets. While the technologies themselves are interesting enough, it’s their obvious capacity for triggering entirely new evolutionary arcs for humanity that are... See more

What’s going on here is, fairly obviously, some combination of simple old-guy aesthetic NIMBYism (“those massive solar fields”) and right-wing culture wars. The latter has been caused by decades of Americans seeing energy technology as being fundamentally about climate , rather than about energy itself . In a post back in December, I wrote the... See more

Web developer's oath

Before the exercises, let me remind what you promised at the end of the previous part.

Programming is hard, that is why I will use all the possible means to make it easier

• I will have my browser developer console open all the time


• I progress with small steps


• I will write lots of console.log statements to make sure I understand how

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Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is

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