Kids used computers to make things in 1983! There was complete gender parity.

“the computer being used to program the child.”

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all,” Cage wrote.

“4’33” ” reframes the ambient sound around us as beautiful music that’s worthy of attention, whatever it is, even the sound of people grumbling or the leaves rustling overhead.

If linking were truly at the heart of the web’s design, a user (not just a developer) could supply their own preferred editor easily, but such a feat is almost always impossible.

class Program { public static void Main()

Concatenative languages have a much simpler basis—there are only functions and compositions, and evaluation is just the simplification of functions.

you, too, have structures on one side of your head representing what you know about, say, Neil Armstrong, and a smaller structure on the other side of your brain encoding the name “Neil Armstrong,” and cognitive mechanisms allowing you to fetch the former given the latter.

For any given problem, PL has its own powerful solution that can’t be replicated in other disciplines.

I wouldn’t bother wasting time with lexer or parser generators and other so-called compiler compilers. They’re a waste of time. Writing a lexer and parser is a tiny percentage of the job of writing a compiler. Using a generator will take up about as much time as writing one by hand, and it will marry you to the generator (which matters when porting the compiler to a new platform). Generators also have the unfortunate reputation of emitting lousy error messages.

Prefixes in Frink are just multipliers. I can write kilofeet and it automatically knows that means “1000 feet”. Frink also knows common terms like half and square.

That’s a good design choice for F#’s goals. It adds boilerplate but keeps your software from going haywire. This is appropriate for industrial software where a lot of people could be affected by a bug.

Shel wrote Mailman in C, and Customer Service wrapped it in Lisp. Emacs-Lisp.

it's so easy to write a C compiler that you can build tools on top of C that act like introspection

you choose a language for day-to-day programming based on its libraries, documentation, tools support, OS integration, resources, and a host of other things that have very little to do with how computers work, and a whole lot to do with how people work.

'90s personal webpage (complete with ~).

Compiler error messages are an important tool that a language offers its programmers, and for novices their feedback is particularly critical. It is not possible to continue development until a program compiles, and these messages are often the primary source of feedback on the errors students make.

A number of experiments have been performed that show a positive impact of static type systems over dynamic type systems. This benefit was found in situations where developers had to use an API that was new to them.

Heap allocations are much slower than stack allocations

I hand letter everything.

had to be accompanied by opportunities for consumers to network and participate in experiences. So, we developed mindstorms.com, LEGO Mindstorms Centers and FIRST LEGO League.

MIT Media Lab who had been working closely with LEGO Dacta for several years, worked on a concept they called the “intelligent LEGO brick”

Final, that is, until I discovered Webster:

seeing this awful difference, evidence of a crime that kept piling up in my mind, the guilt building: so many people were getting this wrong impression about words, every day, so many times a day.

To become a leader in the Black King organization, you had to go to college.

Maybe Elizabeth Holmes pushing her vision was just like one of those management techniques where you tell an engineer “I bet you can make that code 10x faster” even though you have no clue if it's possible

Holmes wanted it to be awesome, so she declared to the world that it was awesome and told her employees that it was awesome. If people dissented, they were done.

The downside to Animal Crossing is that there are still barriers to entry.

existential types

learning how to translate problems and solutions into type theory should be a core skill of any senior developer. Instead of looking at the industry and seeing a churning sea of novelty, one sees but a polishing of old wisdom. Learning type theory, more than any other subfield of programming languages, fulfills the spirit of the Gian-Carlo Rota quote above, that one should pick a theorizer for a good education.

“work” makes you wait to reap the rewards of your labor until the end, where “play” simply comes with much tighter, often immediate feedback loops

The people who wrote this are morons. They just wrote a simple linear search here. This thing's ordered, so they could have done a binary search. They could have used a hash table here. Why are they doing a linear search?" Well, because a linear search worked. And when the other programmer looked at the linear search, she understood it in a minute.

the Lisp Curse still holds.

the C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement.

Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp.

I know Forth is the best language so far.

The file holding the interpreter was labeled FORTH, for 4th (next) generation software - but the operating system restricted file names to 5 characters.

I left Stanford in 1965 to become a free-lance programmer in the New York City area. This was not unusual, and I found work programming in Fortran, Algol, Jovial, PL/I and various assemblers. I literally carried my card deck about and recoded it as necessary.

Although Stanford was building its computer science department, I was interested in real computing. I was impressed that they could (dared?) write their own Algol compiler.

Compile took 30 minutes (just like C) but limited computer time meant one run per day, except maybe 3rd shift.

October, 1957 was Sputnik - a most exciting time. I was a sophmore at MIT and got a part-time job with SAO (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 14 syllables) at Harvard.

The programmers with the WhyLine were 4 times more successful than those without, and worked twice as fast. A couple years ago, I tried to use the Java Whyline. It crashed when faced with modern Java bytecode.

In graduate school, I developed an online online-news-reading addiction.

all optimizations performed by the compiler can be limited (e.g. by limiting the fuel), so when we suspect the optimizer is misbehaving, we binary search to find the maximum amount of fuel we can give the compiler before it introduces the bug. We can then inspect the offending optimization and fix the bug. Optimization fuel is a feature of the new code generator, and is only available if you pass -fuse-new-codegen to GHC.

I have, in developing my argument, characterized programmers as an elite, and have stressed the very special nature of programming and the far-reaching demands it makes upon limited human ability. In winding up I would like to return to this issue and to view it differently. When I was last in the United States, in 1970, I was very much impressed by the new ideas in the education of children developed by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of M.I.T. Minsky and Papert threw overboard the cliché that children learn subconsciously by imitation. They proved that men learn best when they form flow-charts of action in their heads, when subroutines are separated out and informational connections traced. Using the problem of juggling with two balls, and appealing to my abilities as a programmer, Professor Pap- forces is impossible without taking myself wouldn't be able to learn in several hours, thus converting me to his faith forever. This shows that man can greatly strengthen his intellect, if he is able to integrate into his nature the habit of planning his actions, of working out general rules, and of applying them to concrete situations: to organize rules; to express them in a structured way; in other words, to program.

Some say that only a tiny part of presently working programs are of lasting value; others say that OS/360 is already an immortal system of programs.

A programmer's personal push-down stack must exceed the depth of 5-6 positions, which psychologists have discovered to characterize the average man, his stack must be as deep as is needed for the problem which faces him, plus at least 2-3 positions deeper.

I begin with the following remark: the present is a time of difficulty for programmers. The volume of work to be done is increasing; wages less so. The romantic aura surrounding this inscrutable occupation is, if it ever really existed, beginning to fade. Software houses are melting like snow in spring.

Antifennel takes Lua code and parses[1] it, then walks the abstract syntax tree of Lua and builds up an abstract syntax tree of Fennel code based on it.

That’s how we think about our philanthropy, too.

So one aspect of the struggle is motivational: I have to pay the upfront cost of learning language complexity, but can only take on faith that this complexity ultimately serves me.

This example is bitterly sad: The code is absolutely beautiful, but it adds matrices slowly. Therefore it is excellent prototype code and lousy production code. You know, you cannot write production code as bad as this in C.

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface

Today there is Common Lisp (CL), which runs on all major machines, all major operating systems, and virtually in every country. Common Lisp is about to be standardized by ANSI, has good performance, is surrounded with good environments, and has good integration with other languages and software.

parallel computation as something imminent for at least 20 years, and it hasn't affected programming practice much so far.

popcount has become so pervasive that both GCC and Clang will detect an implementation of popcount and replace it with the built-in instruction.

the disappearance of the public web in favor of mobile and web apps, walled gardens (Facebook pages), just-in-time WebSockets loading, and AMP decreases the proportion of the web on the world wide web

Follow us on Instagram for digital accessibility tips and event announcements.

Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. So it's only when you have your code in your head that you really understand the problem.

Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in.

“How do we keep the master branch stable?” The answer is: you don't.

running through drills

When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Reading them may be enjoyable, but it’s an enjoyable waste of time.

These are echoes of the same voices in a positive feedback loop, growing louder and less coherent with each cycle—garbage in, garbage out, a thousand times over.

Go takes away so much “individuality” of code. On most teams I’ve been on with Python and Java I can open up a file and immediate tell who wrote the library based on various style and other such. It’s a lot harder with Go and that’s a very good thing.

“programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute” (Abelson et al. 1996). We do not write code for our computers, but rather we write it for humans to read and use.

minute with a synth, wit

Why wouldn't everyone pay a ton more money to hire the most senior engineers?

cost as function of productivity seems to be a sub-linear function

Once we learn how to create abstractions, it is tempting to get high on that ability, and pull abstractions out of thin air whenever we see repetitive code.

Your career path is planned from the top. If something is not within your title responsibilities you won’t get the opportunity to pursue it. Or if you are, you won’t get much credit for it.

Around 7-10 ICs can communicate and work together without needing much coordination.

focused on making sure the team is building what their boss thinks should be built.

Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.

MFA programs create a context in which you're creating while reflecting on it. For example, you write poetry while reading and critiquing other poetry, and while working with mentors who are looking at what you're doing, helping you think about what you're doing and working with you on your revisions. Then you go into writers' workshops and continue the whole process, and write many, many poems under supervision in a critical context, and with mentorship. We don't do that with software.

We've only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we're creating something new.

reasoning of all kinds should take place in a lab, not a church.

adjusts each component’s conclusions as new information comes in.

For the theologian puzzlers, the starting rules of the game were, “Fact: the Earth began 6,000 years ago and there was at one point an Earth-sweeping flood,” and their puzzling took place strictly within that context. But the scientists started the game with no rules at all. The puzzle was a blank slate where any observations and measurements they found were welcome.

After emerging from the 1990s dotcom party with $180 million, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 900-pound sumo wrestlers—the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry, the military-industrial complex, the energy utilities—and he might actually be winning.

When it is summer (like now) and the sun sets here around 10 pm, my son can put his head on the pillow for 5 mins, get up, see there is light outside (by leaving his room, as his rooms is dark) and exclaim: "It is now morning!". He is not always convinced that we are not lying to him when saying that is still evening / night.

When Alex ran into this phenomenon, his response was ingenious. He doesn't use the motor to make anything "turn," but to make his robot (greatly stabilized by its flat "wheel shoes") vibrate and thus "travel." When Alex programs, he likes to keep things similarly concrete.

. Robin explains that she masters her music by perfecting the smallest "little bits of pieces" and then building up. She cannot progress until she understands the details of each small part. Robin is happiest when she uses this tried and true method with the computer, playing with small computational elements as though they were notes or musical phrases.

Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product. Whether you drink Corona or Heineken or Budweiser "says" something about you.

Like Pavlov's dogs, who learned to associate the ringing of a bell with subsequent food delivery, humans too can be trained to make more-or-less arbitrary associations.

our three housemates, who all have JD degrees, work 90 hours a week, eat only Blue Apron meals and Whole Foods hot-bar boxes, and always leave the granite kitchen counter dirty and covered in IPA empties.

Using lambda in Python is a good idea because it shows others you have a CS degree and understand the "Lambda Calculus".

Steve Jobs was successful because, not in spite of being a jerk.

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it.

Over the last 1096 days, it has tracked 797h19m (859 logs) of productive work, of which 394h13m (481 logs) were spent on project specific tasks.

Just how to design the interface abstraction boundaries is a hard problem

he biggest motivation to use the compositor extensively is stitching together diverse visual sources, particularly video, 3D, and various UI embeddings including web and “native” controls. If you want a video playback window to scroll seamlessly and other UI elements to blend with it, there is essentially no other game in town.

we might be tempted to think of mess and disorder as the mere absence of order. But we will see that mess cannot be present without the visual implication of a legible order.

hire some people to build amazing infrastructure. Why not just buy it? Well, it simply didn't exist for purchase in the first place

The defining characteristics of this hot new trend sweeping across Silicon Valley are: Bigger, bolder headlines Simpler more universal icons Extraction of color The result? The user interfaces of some of our favorite apps are starting to look more and more like they could all be housed under the same brand.

Harrison’s Monday residency (before he got promoted to Thursdays) was the only thing that made me feel ok about starting the week.

He said that work should feel “like drinking from a firehose.”I soon found out that I was not reporting on cancer research at all. “I have no interest in medical studies,” the CEO liked to say. He just wanted clickbait.

trustless, decentralized expertise that often equals or outperforms official sources.

Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted.  I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp (Garnet had just gone West then).  No problem, there were 9 different offerings.  The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine.   This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it.   It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.

He ends on a soda fountain or doing yard work, but all the time reading and studying because a good mind is always hungry.

his low threshold of boredom. He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its properly finished.  He'll do nothing but strum his guitar and lie around in bed for several days after. That's also part of the pattern too; periods of frenetic activity followed by periods of melancholia, withdrawal and inactivity.   This is a bipolar personality.

poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would detect open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message. While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just waiting for a text message.

If the world is increasingly software and advertising and online social networking and, good Lord, the metaverse, then the crypto financial system doesn’t have to build all the way back down to the real world to be valuable. The world can come to crypto.

That’s just a comment that he wrote on Reddit; later a whole business model grew out of it.

I plan to go to my grave not knowing what “the metaverse” is

Not very much of it, though. Most of it is going to me, haha, thanks!

The 12 of you all know one another and built the system, so your consensus is good enough without any further proof. You can just vote on it.

The problem is that houses can’t live on the blockchain. They live in the real world. They can burn down and stuff.

Why would you want to do this? One reason we already talked about: You can make up an arbitrary token that trades electronically. If you do that, people might pay a nonzero amount of money for it. Worth a shot, no?

"Information Processing Language" of Shaw, Newell, Simon, and Ellis [24

Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so.

Newell, Simon, and Shaw's [20] "general problem solver"

Man-computer symbiosis is probably not the ultimate paradigm for complex technological systems. It seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical "machines" will outdo the human brain in most of the functions we now consider exclusively within its province. Even now, Gelernter's IBM-704 program for proving theorems in plane geometry proceeds at about the same pace as Brooklyn high school students, and makes similar errors.

starting college with personal writing makes far less sense for the technologies and culture of the 21st century. We’re no longer bucking a man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit conformist culture. The U.S. is oversaturated with personal narrative. We swim in selfies.

Provide daily feedback showing the programmer more or less exactly what he or she has accomplished, plus a graph for the preceding few months showing the trend.

The first few that they build, during the course of the problem sets, are not necessarily elegant or optimal, but by the end of the semester they've become remarkably proficient, especially when you consider that each student is taking three or four other classes.

Programmers don't have the same need for wood-paneled expensive plushness that, say, corporate lawyers or investment bankers might. However, the office has to be aesthetically satisfying or it will be tough for anyone to take seriously the idea that the company values aesthetic internal design of computer programs.

Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.

the easiest way to divide the work was to give a programmer total responsibility for one project. The programmer owned that customer. If the project went well and the customer wrote us a big check, we gave nearly all of the money directly to the programmer.

If the student finishes a PhD thesis, he or she is positively reinforced by being given a 3-7X pay raise.

that a deadline just gives someone an excuse to procrastinate and do nothing until the very end.

Once you give Joe MBA a title and ask him to coordinate eventually he will be making decisions that have engineering implications. Thus many of the best programmers are eventually forced at least to assume project leadership and mentoring responsibilites.

As killing buffalo (a man’s job) takes much less time than skinning and tanning (women’s work), rates of polygamy skyrocket, with successful men taking on multiple wives, essentially as at-home laborers.

One of the things I do professionally is teach the C programming language to Caltech undergraduates.

These days I'd rather write programs and teach programming languages than write opinion pieces.

if you aren’t in meetings, everything you do can be reproduced as a series of clicks and drags and keystrokes. what are those up to?

when i meet someone who does something completely foreign to me, im usually interested in the mechanics of their work. what are you physically doing during the day and looking at?

They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

a large part of me also wanted the approval of my peers and parents by getting into a school like MIT

the protocol can be encoded as remote procedure calls

These streaming dis-services are malicious technology designed to make people antisocial. (If you don't have a copy, you can't share copies.)

no FAT table, just an allocation bitmap

Profit Sharing - Bet On Us Succeeding This is very much a work in progress, but as an alternative to a bounty, you may instead opt to invest in a “profit sharing” model of our total net income.

Your bounty will be paid in the following installments, via check, wire, and/or crypto, based on a typical VC vesting schedule.

Both Mati and I are loving and empathetic people, who highly value open communication, generosity, and sharing.

Mati and I are both part of rationalist communities, and are quite aligned on our approaches towards life, growth, partnerships and relationships.

I consider myself a theorist in the broad sense: I like to consider compelling-but-vaguely-specified problems, find formal statements that carry some of their essence, and then attack the formal questions with the tools of mathematics, computer science, physics, philosophy, etc.

When the real world failed to diagnose his talents, he went looking for a second opinion. The Internet offered him as many opinions as he needed to find one he liked. It created the opportunity for new sorts of self-perceptions, which then took on a reality all their own.

''Where do you find books about the law?'' I asked.''I don't,'' he said, tap-tap-tapping away on his keyboard. ''Books are boring. I don't like reading.''So you go on legal Web sites?''''No.''''Well, when you got one of these questions did you research your answer?''''No, never. I just know it.''

He now viewed school not so much as preparation for a future legal career as material for an active one.

Perris was one of those nonplaces that America specializes in creating. One day, it was a flat, hazy stretch of sand and white rock beneath an endless blue sky into which recreational skydivers routinely plunged; the next, some developer had laid out a tract of 10,000 identical homes; and the day after that, it was teeming with people who were there mainly because it was not someplace else.

Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja) films himself playing video games for people to watch fo

Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. According to Wikipedia's "about" page, it has only 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. alone.

Activism

users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet

In a novel-length text, Döpfner laid out his “#Gameplan” for the company, which started with the line item: “1.),, Solve Free Speech.” He alluded to vague ideas such as making Twitter censorship resistant via a “decentralized infrastructure” and “open APIs.” He’s similarly nonspecific with his suggestion that Twitter have a “marketplace” of algorithms. “If you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you pick another algorithm,” he wrote Musk.

. In painting and sculpture, in music, and in literature I am ever on the alert for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow. I feel the future of the arts is in the journey toward finding Beauty.

Location 672-674

The internet itself will load balance users to the nearest instance using BGP as the load balancing substrate.

Enter MrBeast. This youtuber has reached new levels of content purely by making capitalism itself the content. With his crew of people and their peculiar views on life, they do a good job at making some quality content for this hyper-capitalist world that they have found themselves in.

A lot of the problems are actually structural problems in how companies do the science part of computer science. Structural problems cannot be solved overnight. These things take time, effort and patience to truly figure out and in the process you will fail to invent a light bulb many times over. Devops is probably a necessary evil, but I really wish that situations weren't toxic enough in the first place to require that evil.

While the HolyC compiler builds things, it internally keeps a sourcemap (much like webapp sourcemaps or how gcc relates errors at runtime to lines of code for the developer) of all of the functions it compiles.

ll ram is identity-mapped too, so sharing memory between tasks is as easy as passing a pointer. There's a locking intrinsyc too. It has full documentation (with graphical diagrams) embedded directly in source code.

This page lists my salary for every job I've had in tech. I have had this data open to the public for years, but I feel this should be more prominently displayed on my website. Other people have copied my approach of having a list of every salary they have ever been payed on their websites, and I would like to set the example by making it prominent on my website.

Since Paper Mario: Sticker Star, it’s no longer possible to modify Mario characters or to create original characters that touch on the Mario universe. That means that if we aren’t using Mario characters for bosses, we need to create original characters with designs that don’t involve the Mario universe at all, like we’ve done with Olly and the stationery bosses.

If you don’t want to solve the puzzle, there’s always capitalism! Pay the toads you’ve saved up to 999 coins and they’ll solve the whole puzzle for you, heal you and sometimes give you an item too.

There's something obviously different about people in the Bible compared to people today -- God talked!

A busy Wednesday night. Grumpy at Sundown. Panik Flower at the Sultan Room. But you know me—I follow the money. And the only place offering me money was Baby’s All Right.

Got caught in the rain talking to Marcus, Avi, Joey, and Maraya

The most important thing is to know that rs exists.

Given that we spend most of our waking hours in an alienated, desperate grind to obtain or maintain a life-sustaining job, blaming ourselves for every snag along the way, gospels of reassurance and self-care are precious cargo.

Siegfried Kracauer, one of the eloquent theorists of pop-culture associated with the Frankfurt School, frowned upon the cinema with its velvet drapes and plush seats, calling it “distraction raised to the level of culture.” In his dour view of things, the urban working masses were lulled into sitting in the dark and gawping at mesmeric light projections while sinister forces shifted the world under their feet.

The average PhD student of the mid 2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue their passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it.

If Donald Trump has a chance in November, it is because the knowing will dictate our strategy.

These days it is difficult for anybody in a position of liberal power — whether in business, or government, or media — to avoid having openly gay colleagues, colleagues whom they like and whom they'd like to help.

It's a shame. They might be receptive to his concerns about poverty.

The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing.

The continuing physicalization of the UI, which Matas helped along by designing iPhone OS 1.0 while at Apple, is important for making computers usable.

Steve Jobs’ remark that design was “how it works” had achieved what seemed like widespread comprehension, and recruiting wars for top designers rivaled those for top engineers.

How many of you use call/cc and continuation objects (rather than mimicing continuations with lambda's) in large programs? Do "we" really use it to implement coroutines and backtracking and threads and whatever?Is call/cc necessary for Scheme? [Don't shoot. I wrote many papers on all aspects of call/cc but now that we're building large systems we should revisit these questions. I'd love to be wrong here.]

The primitive call/cc is a bad abstraction -- in various meanings of `bad' shown below, -- and its capture of the continuation of the whole program is not practically useful. The only reward for the hard work to capture the whole continuation efficiently is more hard work to get around the capture of the whole continuation. Both the users and the implementors are better served with a set of well-chosen control primitives of various degrees of generality with well thought-out interactions.

Aggressive hiring is often counterproductive. I don’t mean this on a relative basis. I mean on an absolute basis. Your company might make less progress on your most important thing after your hiring spree.

Make a list of the best people in your company. Note whether they are a manager or individual contributor. Write down what they are working on. Confirm that those people are working on the most essential thing in your company and are overloaded with responsibility. Don’t worry about burning them out. Worry about depriving them of the joy of working on the most important thing and the steepest possible learning slope.1 Tell these people they are your stars.2 Pay them like it too. These first three points help ensure you are optimizing what you are getting from the current team before you look elsewhere for the solution.

every trace of the future seems to have been vanished from popular media.

s enthusiastic as I am about more tech wealth pouring into cultural initiatives, the regranting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms: they outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors.

hy I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief.

With its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area, EA even has an eschatology—a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion.

Julie Rice said “we realized that connection should be its own product. We are modern medicine for the loneliness epidemic.”

“The State”, he wrote, “has an interest in the primary school as a civilising agent.”

After the DTC era, brands have become present in every part of our lives, ambient, diffuse, meaning things to us. Sports, music, health, sleep, and person-to-person communication have become interpenetrated with brands.

Before Stripe, you had to forge relationships with payment networks. Before Alibaba and Shopify, you had to think about logistics. Now with these platforms, it was becoming easier than ever to start a brand.

If Uber could disrupt cabs and Twitter could disrupt the New York Times, why couldn’t Allbirds disrupt shoes?

Inevitably, codes get passed from one cluster of friends to another. One code traveled from an old friend to a tattooed and multiple- pierced crowd to the women's crew team at Mills College before it eventually fell into disuse.

Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough..The array of defenses works. System operations are generally successful. Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident.

after all of that, after everything, predator drones .-. _, .-. ,_ .-. '-._'--' \_| |_/ '--'_.-' '-._ \ | | / _.-' `-.^| |^.-' `\=/` ` run linux

i refused to use discord for years - but instead of furthering freedom, i hurt myself. the severence of many meaningful relationships. most of my old friends simply moved on without me. if you don't have vocal chords, people forget that you exist.

Why does the website still look the pretty much the same today as when you founded it? There’s even a new CEO. What’s going onBecause that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.

I don’t like banner ads. They slow things down, and they’re often kind of dumb. That’s a decision I made at the end of ‘97. 

I allow myself to buy as many books as I want. But I have no car.

“I don’t respect the stock market at all,” he said. “Once you’re public, you’ve lost control over the company, and you have to maximize profits for the shareholder, and then you become one of these irresponsible companies.”

As a pioneering rock climber in California’s Yosemite Valley in the 1960s, Mr. Chouinard lived out of his car and ate damaged cans of cat food that he bought for five cents apiece.Even today, he wears raggedy old clothes, drives a beat up Subaru and splits his time between modest homes in Ventura and Jackson, Wyo. Mr. Chouinard does not own a computer or a cellphone.

they didn’t get a charitable deduction for it. There is no tax benefit here whatsoever.

unconventional spin on capitalism

the most cohesive teams are not only the most prolific, but also the most satisfied. And all the work I was doing with teams laddered up to the same purpose–cultivating more of that “we’re all in this together feeling.”Because for ambitious organizations that pride themselves in cultures of autonomy and distributed ownership, that feeling is fuel.