[This is a working paper.] People talk about Swift as if Apple’s great achievement was the language itself — the features, the syntax, the type system. Closures. Optionals. Value types. Protocols....

Download this essay as PDF Here’s something that has been bugging me for a while. Everyone talks about AI as if there were one kind. There’s “old AI” — the symbolic, rule-based, Lisp-powered kind...

Maybe one of the most consequential decisions in modern data engineering isn’t which database to choose — it’s which wire protocol to standardize on. PostgreSQL’s wire protocol has become the lingu...

Download this essay as PDF When a private equity firm is about to spend serious money acquiring a company, they hire consultants to spend time examining that company’s technology — its architectu...

[This is a working paper! I’ve learned much from John Seely Brown, and his influence here is felt, especially vis-a-vis learning in action or in situ, and abduction.] I’ve been learning Lisp. Not ...

Download this essay as PDF We spend a lot of our effort describing how something works, and much less describing what it’s supposed to do. Then we’re surprised when it doesn’t do what we wanted. ...

The legend of Paul Bunyan starts where ordinary human capability stops. He was born in Maine — some versions say it took five storks to deliver him — and together with his blue ox Babe he rearrange...

Download this essay as PDF The odd thing about Agile is that the people who wrote the Manifesto spent the next twenty years apologizing for it. Dave Thomas, one of the original signatories, gave ...

There’s a paradox in the AI energy story that almost nobody mentions. We’re told we don’t have enough electricity to train AI. We’re told we need to build a parallel grid of hyperscale data centers...

[This is a working paper.] Download this essay as PDF When Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” he wasn’t making a claim about theater or geography. He was doing something more intere...