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8 1/2
My favorite movie has long been Fellini’s 8 1/2. It’s a movie which seems designed to appeal to a computer programmer: it’s self-referential and recursive, a movie about the making of itself. It’s also about the difficulties of the creative process, and that is where it resonates most strongly with me. The director in the…
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Copying
It’s interesting that the U.S. economy has moved away from manufacturing at the same time as computers have made it very easy to copy digital goods. We see the U.S. pushing China hard to enforce their copyright laws, because much of what the U.S. has to sell is easily copied. The U.S. has developed great…
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Monetization of Public Space
The current rumors say that Facebook has a paper valuation of $50 billion and Twitter has one of $10 billion. Those numbers are certainly part of a mini-bubble today, but they may be supportable tomorrow. It’s interesting to note that the only service these companies do is provide a space for people to do things,…
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Race Conditions
The Go language is generally safe, in that errors in your program do not lead to unpredictable crashes (unless you use the facilities in the unsafe package). There is one classic cause of problems, however, which Go does not protect you from: race conditions. A race condition occurs when one goroutine modifies a variable and…
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Index Funds
It’s a general guideline that people who do not follow the market obsessively should invest in index funds. Compare to mutual funds, they are lower cost, and over time tend to perform about as well, particularly when costs are taken into account. Compared to investing in individual stocks, they are much lower risk, because they…