My laptop’s hard drive crashed in 2012. I was on campus walking by Evans Hall, when I took my recently-purchased Thinkpad x230 out of my backpack to look up a map (didn’t have a smartphone), only to realize it wouldn’t boot. This wasn’t a disaster by any means. It set me back $200 to rush-order a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD. But since I regularly backed up my data to an old desktop running at my parent’s house, I was able to restore almost everything once I received it1. I never figured out why my almost-new laptop’s hard drive stopped working out of the blue. The drive still spun up, yet the system didn’t detect it. But whether it was the connector or the circuit board, that isn’t the point. Hardware fails all the time for no reason2, and you should… more →

If you speak to enough software engineers, you’ll realize that many of them can’t understand some everyday ideas without using computer metaphors. They say “context switching” to explain why it’s hard to work with interruptions and distractions. Empathy is essentially machine virtualization, but applied to other people’s brains. Practicing a skill is basically feedback-directed optimization. Motion sickness is just your video processor overheating, and so on. A few years ago, I thought I was the only one whose brain used “computer” as its native language. And at the time, I considered this a major problem. I remember one summer afternoon, I was playing scrabble with some friends at my parents’ house. At that time, I had just finished an internship, where day-to-night I didn’t have much to think about other than computers. And as I stared at my scrabble tiles, I… more →