Archive

Amdahl to Zipf: The Physics of Software

There are all of these won­der­ful laws that peo­ple have dis­cov­ered and refined and pro­posed and proved over the years. And some of these laws can apply to the soft­ware projects and the teams and the com­mu­ni­ties that we work in every day.

Institutions in the Age of Algorithms, and Why We Still Need Them

If you look at human his­to­ry all the way through, we orga­nize our­selves in dif­fer­ent ways. Tribes, reli­gions, guilds, states, more recent­ly com­pa­nies and net­works. And what these insti­tu­tions do is they sort of cod­i­fy val­ues and beliefs, and they they trans­port them across the gen­er­a­tions. So we see this phe­nom­e­non that when you cod­i­fy val­ues in insti­tu­tions, you give those val­ues longevity.