Posts filed under “Big Ideas”
My Best of 2012
Here are the best things I’ve discovered, learned, read, wrote, made, and accomplished in 2012. There’s no particular order and not everything on the list was conceived this year, even if they were a part of my life this year. Inspired by Fogus. My favorite blog posts Learnable Programming by Bret Victor – A fantastic look at […]
Epiphanies I Had While Teaching Myself to Code
It’s been about a year since I decided to teach myself to code. At the time, I had a bachelor’s degree in English, a job in retail, and zero knowledge about programming. I’d had minute brushes with coding in the past but hadn’t even thought about math or coding since high school. The impetus for learning to code […]
Living in Computers and Other Crotch Shots
Ben Makuch writing for Vice.com: According to Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, all of this will be theoretically possible in the future. Sooner or later, we’ll get to a place where simulating a few billion people—and making them believe they are sentient beings with the ability to control […]
App.net is Not the Answer, and Why I Gave Them Money
I do not think App.net is the answer. I do believe Dalton’s views on the detrimental nature of ad-supported services is spot-on. There are, however, fatal flaws with customer supported services, too. People do not want to pay for digital services or goods. It’s been like this since the invent of the Internet. Thanks to […]
Project Glass: Exactly How Powerful is Eye Contact?
Stephen King, On Writing (2000): Writing is not life, but i think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me. King’s prose recounting being hit by a car is one of the […]
Moving Beyond “but it works”
David Heinemeier Hansson on levels of aspiration: To help someone move up the hierarchies, they have to have an intrinsic desire to do so. Arguments like “but it works” or “it gets the job done” are tell-tale signs of someone happy at the lowest level of the technical hierarchy and your cue to just quietly […]