I have a very conflicted relationship with airplane travel. On the one hand, my lifestyle — both personal and professional — depends on it and, in particular, on long-distance flights. On the other, I hate that airplanes are so damn bad for the environment, and that there are no signs of them getting any better any […]

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this incredible moment in history. In trying to wrap my head around it, I’m turning to what I know best: programs, programming, and software-intensive systems. And their flaws. This is a mini-essay on how the line between software systems and social systems is completely blurred, and how […]

As a computer scientist specializing in programming, the social consequences of software-for-business-efficiency are worrying me more and more. Here at home, we’ve been having a conversation about what post-capitalism would look like in the face of quasi-universal automation, in the best case scenario. It’s really hard to tie all the loose ends of such a vision. […]

Quote from an email I received from a prospective PhD student: I get the impression that if doing a PhD is really going to help push me forward on this, I’ll have to be working closely with people from that whole milieu surrounding the ’80s/’90s Common Lisp scene and the heyday of PARC. There seem to […]

I just came back from a week at Hacker School in New York — they invited me to join them as a resident. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and, before I forget, here are my impressions and a bit of a comparison with the more traditional educational programs that I’m used to.

Recently, a number of women in Tech have come out publicly describing horribly close encounters with misogyny and outright aggression on the Internet. I’m not talking about subtle attitudes of discrimination that don’t hurt immediately but that hurt women’s careers in the long run  — those are real discriminators, I’m afraid, and I’ll write about them […]

For the most part, activities on the Web are projections of activities that had been going on before it: banking, travel arrangements, publishing, document sharing, news, etc. But in some important ways, the resulting new whole is much more than the sum of the old parts. There is life on the Web that doesn’t exist […]

A lot has been written about Facebook’s and Google’s requirements for people to sign up with real world names. That requirement seems pretty silly to me, as the concepts of identity and personas seem to have a cognitive dimension that goes well beyond the tyranny of singular physicality — even in real life!

Once a year, during the summer, I get to travel back in time. It’s about 5,600 miles from California to Portugal, and about 60 years from the life style in Irvine (or Lisbon, for that matter) to the life style in my mother’s house in Mangualde. Give or take another 60. Time travel is not […]