Impromptus

Recently, in conversation with a friend about the concept of the Overton Window I proposed that the Overton window was not of constant width, and eventually got her to agree with me. (key insight – do you agree it can be shrunk? Then why not widened?)
The next question is whether the two sides [...]

Another Socratic dialog in the form of an IM cut and paste, that has been somewhat cut up and cleaned up and reordered:

Former Student

Hey, did you get the student evaluations from last term?

Peter

I did!

Former Student

Just wondered if you wanted more explanation from me on my comments. I thought you did a really [...]

Continuing on a theme, is there a limit to how fast computers can go? Is there a limit to how much can be computed in a given amount of time?
I don’t think anyone has looked at the consequences of saying that there is a limit to computation. Because if there IS a limit [...]

Is there any difference in kind, rather than of degree, between Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the now-defunct Google Answers, and Wikipedia? I contend that they are all doing the same thing – using people as computational objects in a larger system. The people are solving tasks that computers aren’t good at, but they are [...]

We need a better and different model. Everyone reads papers off the internet – people may use proceedings to discover what papers have been approved, but other than that everyone downloads their reading in .pdf form. So conferences and journals have become, instead of publishers, verifiers of quality.
This is even more frustrating because, [...]

What makes code good? Code is good when two things are true:

it works to solve the required problem in the given domain
it is clear

and that’s it. We can quibble about everything else, but I’m going to throw flexibility, commentedness, testedness, object-orientedness, and everything else out the window here except as they are required [...]