Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
In 1985, the great technology critic Neil Postman wrote, “to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”17 The corollary is also true: to have no program t
... See moreEzra Klein • Abundance
Despite graduating with a degree in computer science, I was sorely lacking in the wisdom that I would eventually acquire, through experience, during my career as a programmer. And it’s not just me: essentially all programmers working today were self-taught. The people who designed the Internet were self-taught, those who architected Windows were se
... See moreAdam Barr • The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code (The MIT Press)
Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times
nytimes.comnytimes.com
Robert Wright predicted one of its most important consequences. In his essay “Voice of America,” which appeared in the September 13, 1993, issue of the magazine the New Republic, Wright reported on his forays into Usenet, a set of online discussion groups
Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson • Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves
... See moreNeal Stephenson • Snow Crash: A Novel
INFORMATION AND NOISE. One of the most helpful books I’ve read recently is Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life, by Jeremy Campbell.