The true self: preface

Moravec’s Paradox says that, in AI, the easy things are hard and the hard things are relatively easy. That is, it’s pretty straightforward……

Accepting imperfection

Yesterday I spent about two hours building the tool I said I would build to help me write more. It doesn’t do everything I wanted it to do……

Wanting and oughting

It can be really tricky to tell the difference between “I want to do a thing” and “I ought to do a thing”. For example: I want to learn a……

Commitment

I want to write something every day. I’ve tried this a couple of times before and haven’t been able to keep up with it for more than a few……

Type systems

I’ve been writing a lot of Ruby lately, and also a lot of Scala. One thing that’s struck me is the difficulty of confidently removing code……

Feeling of wrongness

Last week a co-worker described a design to me which just felt wrong. It wasn’t a bad solution for any reason I could point to, it just had……

The shape of thought

What is the topography of the mind? How can I express and encode a thought or group of thoughts in such a way that somebody else (or me at……