Let me start by saying when I first heard the term “magic cauldron”, this is not the cauldron I thought of. Last semester in my “Travels to Otherworlds, New Worlds, and Medieval Holy Lands” class, we read the…
The first thing ESR reminds me of in his essays on The Cathedral and the Bazaar is René Descartes of “I think, therefore I am” fame. When I was younger (AKA ninth grade), I really liked Descartes. I did a project on him and read his Discourse on the Method and he had some…
I don’t know where to start with Paul Graham anymore.
Usually, when I describe a programming language, I compare it to a real language, like Spanish, French, or Italian. One of my favorite jokes I’ve ever heard (which I feel like I’ve mentioned in an ethics blog before) was when my friends and I…
In the 1980s, Apple Computer is described as “a company that symbolized how the products of hacking-computer programs which are works of art.” This seems wildly different from the Apple we all know today, AKA super fricking proprietary. Obviously, there’s a reason…
If I were asked to choose between the “true hackers” and the “hardware hackers” for my favorite type of hackers, I think I would have to go with “hardware hackers.”
I’m very conflicted when I think about the idea of a hacker or a “true hacker.” I’m even more conflicted when this “true hacker” is the one depicted by Steven Levy in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All week I’ve been pinballing between I like…