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Computer science has three lineages: engineering, math, and bicycles (of the mind). Engineering: C, Unix, buffers, bits Math: lisp, comparability, Haskell 🚲: engelbart, , etc
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All great info tech requires all 3: the math to figure out what can be done, the engineering to build it, and the 🚲 for how it fits and amplifies our minds. The math and engineering often forget about the 3rd leg of the stool, the bicycle design. This is what Apple got right.
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A theory is not useful if not predictive: great new waves of computation are built on math and engineering, with a blind spot for the bikes part. Find a great new tech platform that’s messy and cutting edge? The math and engineering comes first. The impact comes with the bikes.
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Let’s take the web: math and engineering built it out in the 90s. But it wasn’t until we discovered that what humanity wanted to do with it was not share academic papers but to ~gossip (social media). Exercise for the reader: where is ML today?
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Replying to and
The biggest advances come from realizing the hardware envelope has expanded in an interesting way, and learning to exploit it by wasting/conserving hardware resources differently. I mean, you basically innovate against Moore’s law, programming is a derivative layer
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