Five Decades of Access to Tools

I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. For years I worked within the Artificial Intelligence Lab to resist such tendencies and other inhospitalities, but eventually they had gone too far: I could not remain in an institution where such things are done for me against my will. So that I can...

Let's say I'm ordering burritos for my two friends while they quar up in Jersey City, and want to calculate the total price of my order: It's a little confusing to follow the flow of data in a spreadsheet when it's written like that, so I hope you don't mind this equivalent diagram that represents it as a graph: We're rounding the cost of an El...

Some of you may know I quit my job to work on a little text editor for fun. Unfortunately, in the process of doing that, I got distracted by the challenging problem of self-adjusting computation. And unfortunately, to solve that problem in a performant way, you need really fast graphs, a notorious problem in Rust. And to get really fast graphs,...

In 2018, I skipped my own college graduation. Two days before, at dawn, I instead flew to the Bay Area to spend that weekend attending a retreat for young people in the technology industry. It was a three day long extravaganza, half conference, half party, funded by charging venture capitalists for the right to come in and chat about artificial...

In 2006, Robert Andersen sent the first tweet that @mentioned another user, and an internet convention was born. In a world without smartphones, Twitter's primary interface was SMS. There were no threads, no @username autocomplete. If a user said something and you wanted to reply, your only option was to compose a new text to 40404, manually...