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Software for Your Mom

Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues. Seen in this light, the obsession with personalization of Web School software is an apology for the obvious t... See more

Most people stop at consumption. This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case forever and ever, Amen. This makes sense, as it requires the least amount of effort. But the evolution of algorithmic and hyperpersonal content makes moving beyond consumption even more challenging. If I already enjoy the content I’m being served, why w... See more

The biggest lie you’ll ever hear as an economics student is that markets are efficient. In the most basic terms, the price of an asset supposedly arises at the equilibrium of quantity demanded and quantity supplied. To reach this equilibrium, both sides of the trade need to know what the other is doing. If an efficient market is a machine, then inf... See more

Quality emerges from the complexity of the system in action ; it is in the how rather than the what. Thus, when Quality is broken down into parts and analyzed, its essence is lost. This explains why analysis alone has trouble discerning the authentic from the artific ial. Moreover, Quality frozen in a theory or process cannot be recognized in suffi... See more

For one, you get “multiplayer”, Google-docs-style collaboration for free. At Dynamicland computing is social like cooking is social. It’s also physical like cooking is physical. You’re not seated in front of a single-person screen, but walking around an open space, using a range of tools. It’s incredibly natural to walk up to someone “cooking” up s... See more

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more

Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B —that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built envi... See more

On what Nikki Jean sees in the kids who attend the camps

Nikki Jean: “The most beautiful thing to see is the ‘aha moment’ where they grasp the interconnectivity between something as intangible as the music they love and something as tangible as the places they live.

“Rap has structure. The way you put together a song has a structure. And it's very e... See more