Paul Ford

So you've acquired a new thing. And now you want accessories. Ask yourself: Will the potential experience be worth the cost to the supply chain?

Look, some of these tickets just have to be marked WONTFIX so everyone can move on. 

In the game, you start as a lowly atmospheric scientist and you have to click “write grant” and wait.

The free market has plenty of grandiose ideas about how to fix our broken planet. There's just one problem: We can't afford another bust.

Yes, yes, the dirt is horrifying. But it’s also how we make bitcoin apps.

And that’s why we will fight about it forever.

People tend to make predictions while looking through their own narrow lens. The real vision lies in seeing connections.

We don’t need the next big thing. We need countless next little things.

There’s no cool gear with my method, but it has other advantages.

A workplace has its own informal cardinal directions: elevatorward, kitchenward, bathroomward. It's a map we share.

It's a good time to salute infrastructure, from the postal system to the CDC. Their often invisible work still needs to be tended—and honored.

Welcome back! Among the many courses offered this semester, students may elect to study essential climate-mitigation skills like underwater basket weaving.

The software industry makes amazing tools for itself, while doctors and scientists are stuck with old code. Tech needs to quit hacking and start listening.

When people build a database to manage reading lists or feed their neighbors, that’s coding—and culture.

They aren't just petroleum and extruders and cargo ships. You and I are part of them too.

Software tools simulate work. They should really let us put on a show.

Tomorrow has no use for our monuments. It needs our data—and warnings.

Immense changes show us, year after year, that we are basically the same as ever, just reacting to the curves of life well out of our control.

Technology is just another human creation—like religion or government or sports or money. It's not perfect, and it never will be. But it's still a miracle.

We are now living in a history glut; the Internet has muddled the line between past and present. As our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves, we’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote.