> Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this.
PG, you got the Stephen Wolfram to read this? If so, perhaps you can have a conversation with him about making Mathematica open source :~)?
He gave a great talk on simplicity in nature's algorithms at MIT. I could see a lot of application to programming with his take on simplicity vs. complexity.
PG, you just got me wondering about feedback. When you let people you trust or respect read drafts of your essays, what kind of feedback do you expect? How does the feedback affect your essays?
I don't have any specific expectations. Usually I just say "please let me know if got anything wrong, or missed anything important." If I'm writing about something I don't understand well enough, I ask domain experts. I always ask Hutch Fishman about startup funding, for example.
I take responses pretty seriously. I've killed whole essays friends thought were bad. Usually I just have to rewrite a sentence or two.
PG, you got the Stephen Wolfram to read this? If so, perhaps you can have a conversation with him about making Mathematica open source :~)?