January 2010
4 posts
Wall Street Morality
In the hour after Google’s New Approach to China, Google stock falls 10 points, Baidu stock gains 30 points. Seems easy to deduce where Wall Street stands on this “defining moral issue of our time”.
1 tag
Measuring Abstractions, Part 0
Reality is complicated. We use metaphors to organize that complexity into understandable models. When we combine metaphors using common patterns, we call those patterns “abstractions”.
Metaphor -> Abstraction -> Model
If a metaphor is a step, an abstraction is a cross-body lead, and a model is the rumba.
In computing, we use abstractions in an effort to make complicated...
The Black Box Disease
“The smartest people I know disdain abstractions, preferring to speak in concrete specifics. Take Paul Buchheit, the genius behind Gmail. When he talks about building web applications, he doesn’t think about high-level things like the underlying semantic structure of the data — instead he talks about the little “heads” that read data off of the hard disk and how fast they can move.”...