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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…
Ribbonfarm
Ribbonfarm is a long-running blog by Venkatesh Rao on technology, organizations, culture, and magical thinking. 2007–2024.
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- 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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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…
3
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…
4
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…
5
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…
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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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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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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…
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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…