writing
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On generation, selection, and the choices that make a work of art A question at the villa A few days ago I was in Viareggio, the Tuscan town on the warm Tyrrhenian Sea where I grew up and where all of my ancestors were born (I was not born there myself, but that is a…
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What the people of New Jersey knew about Bell Labs that some of us had to learn from the inside. Why am I writing this? I am aware of the trap. I look back at the place where I was a long time ago and remember a golden age that, examined closely, turns out to…
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What happens when anyone can build software, and where the value goes once building is free. I happened to listen to a February 2026 interview with Mark Cuban on the Technology Brothers podcast and he stated very boldly: “Software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.” This is the kind…
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Why we expand information to compress it later. Many years ago I read a book called Hitchcock on Hitchcock, and one small passage in it has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about films, which is one of my passions. Surprisingly, I have come to think that the ideas expressed…
