Technology

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I. The universality of computation and explanation So let’s go through The Fabric of Reality—the four theories. More

Android’s best weapon against iOS is that it’s a much more open platform. iOS’ elegant user experience comes at a cost – developers have to suffer through approval delays, rejections, private APIs, rules against advertising, and shutdowns. Android, on the other hand is open to carriers, users, and developers. Facebook developers face two major problems. More

All sorts of businesses are being built by violating assumptions about the privacy of data. Flickr violated the assumption that you wanted your photos private by default. Before Flickr came along, the default photo sharing model, espoused by Shutterfly, Snapfish etc., was that of private photo sharing. LinkedIn violates the assumption that your resumé is private. More

Perhaps not in this incarnation – remember the first iPod? But the concept is very, very important for two reasons: – It’s the first computing device that’s social in the real world. The iPhone is something that one person uses at a time. The Laptop screen faces you – two people using it at one time is awkward. More

Remember when mainframes did all of the computing? And workstations were dumb terminals docked to the mainframes? The terminals had less power, but were more “mobile.” Then everyone got a desktop. And the desktop is where you did most of your computing. And you carried around your underpowered laptop, which had to be synced with your desktop, or docked to a big screen, keyboard and mouse to be usable. More

When’s the last time that you had an accurate, timely, thorough, and polite response to an email to a free service? ——-Original Message——- Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:05:25 -0800 To: support@tumblr.com Subject: Migrating from squarespace >I’m abandoning my squarespace blog and moving to Tumblr. I have my own >custom domain. More

After looking at a lot of Facebook apps, I’ve sortof concluded that users: want sex. If they can’t have sex, they want food. If they can’t have food, they want fun. If they can’t have fun, they leave More

Puzzling Evidence, already one of the funnier and most interesting blogs out there, knocks it out of the park: “Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly heard about it and, not to be outdone, declared Web 4.0 over pizza last night at Il Fornio.” As they say, read the whole thing. More