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The Daredevil Camera
Once upon a time I was reading a Popular Mechanics article, the title of which eludes me. Something about playing different music for different parts of a…
Ribbonfarm
Ribbonfarm is a long-running blog by Venkatesh Rao on technology, organizations, culture, and magical thinking. 2007–2024.
- Popular posts
- 22
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- 5,191
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- #204 personal
Visit ribbonfarm.com → On Hacker News Nov 2009 – Mar 2026
Society, Policy & Culture 13Tech Industry & Business 13Life, Learning & Writing 7Science & Space 2History & Retro Computing 2Startups 1
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Artem vs. Predator
I'm not sure what it was. Might have been the Predator movies, might have been something else. Heat vision. The ability to see heat was something I wanted for…
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The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
4
The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I've watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I've watched the show…
5
How to Take a Walk
It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was…
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The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium…
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Immortality Begins at Forty
I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40. People between 40 and Ω (an…
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Ribbonfarm Is Retiring
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I've decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com…
9
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…
10
A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: Roam , a hypertext publishing platform best…
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Life After Language
In October 2013, I wrote a post arguing that computing was disrupting language and that this was the Mother of All Disruptions . My specific argument was that…
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A Big Little Idea Called Legibility (2010)
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
13
Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
14
The Locust Economy
Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here's how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon.…
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An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
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The Digital Maginot Line
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological…
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Anthropology of Mid-Sized Startups
In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the…
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The Essence of Peopling
Nouns for human beings - "people" or "person" - conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like "people" subtly encourages…
19
The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about the archetypes that inhabit organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless), what they do (the Gervais…
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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle ) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The…
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Morality, Compassion and the Sociopath
Again, the response to the Gervais Principle II seems to require a response to key themes that have emerged. There are several that I am going to touch upon in…
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The Gervais Principle
A fully realized theory of management through the lens of The Office