langreiter.com plain, simple: 2007-08-25

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2007-08-25

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6302 days AGO

Scott Adams: "And it's clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid."

2007-08-25-stuPwr

Daniel Dennet: "Many people still cling [...] to a brittle vision of our minds as mysterious immaterial souls, or--just as romantic--as the products of brains composed of wonder tissue engaged in irreducible noncomputational (perhaps alchemical?) processes. They often seem to think that if our brains were in fact just protein machines, we couldn't be responsible, lovable, valuable persons."

2007-08-25-wonderTissue

Paul Graham: Holding a Program in One's Head — Avoid distractions [typical office environment is toxic; but so is The Web], work in long stretches, use succinct languages [i.e. K], keep rewriting, write rereadably [okay, rewrite in Python once, or JavaScript], keep it small. Bonus material: Why "software company" is an oxymoron. ~~Homework~~ Lab: Refute.

Philip Greenspun: Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education — Limit lectures to 20 minutes (as imposed by the FAA, presumably for good reason).^* Evaluation shouldn't be handled by teachers (interest conflicts). Don't do homework, do projects & labs.

^* How Google engEDU would benefit from that ...

2007-08-25-program

Brad Fitzpatrick: Thoughts on the Social Graph — Social graph centralized/silo'ed: bad. Every site needs to reimplement (or become a Facebook app): bad. Create neutral territory non-profit to aggregate/disseminate graphs. Provide API to developers (for easy graph-syncery &c.). Ignore private data (for now).

2007-08-25-ograh