”And I have perhaps the world’s most magnificent tower of abstractions, starting with transistors and moving up through circuits, chips, processors, all kinds of hardware I know nothing about, operating systems, and a nice tall stack of increasingly abstract programming languages undergirding the famously friendly ones I use, Python and Ruby.” [source]

I wish more articles were written like this. So concise yet so profound.

”There is no doubt danger in all this abstraction--how easy it is nowadays to use a thing without knowing how it works--but it’s hard to complain when you’re playing in the clouds.”

This is such a tumblr-esque thing to do. There’s a major flaw in the process of sharing things you find interesting. Eventually, it just turns into a list of links that people may or may not go through. It’s very reminiscent of the early web. Maybe design principles alternate sinusoidally between two extremes. In the future, the fad will be recommendation sites where you can be on your smartphone and an endless wall of text is available for you to read. Everything will be “relevant,” of course. Laugh, cry, think. Of course it’s relevant, assuming these emotions are universal. The appeal of Facebook comes from their media design: they show you things that are you relevant to friends, and they show you things that appeal to your three positive emotions. Because everything seems so relevant, each person individually concludes that Facebook holds a permanent position of power because they alone hold the information that is uniquely relevant to you.

When does this stop happening? This I need to know. Haha, irony see yep?