Pinboard (robertogreco) https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/ recent bookmarks from robertogreco Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review 2026-06-07T00:41:06+00:00 https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/twenty-five-years-after-imagined-worlds-what-world-are-we-living-in robertogreco eriklarson freemandyson 1995 2022 web internet online computers computing centralization decentralization bigtech thomaskuhn siliconvalley neuroscience bigdata napoleon google facebook instagram twitter freedom creativity liberty carlotaperez tolstoy anarchism openweb anarchy innovation society liberation kevinkelly 1998 coldwar rand maxplank alberteinstein ai artificialintelligence henryford quantummechanics quantumtheory quantumphysics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:567a8595579a/ “The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing.” - Alan Jacobs 2026-06-07T00:34:17+00:00 https://social.ayjay.org/2026/06/06/freeman-dyson-it-often-happens.html robertogrecoIt often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedom represented by Tolstoy. In the world of computers, Napoleon is the massive IBM main-frame; Tolstoy is the humble Macintosh. The computer revolution was an escape from the Napoleonic ambitions of von Neumann to the Tolstoyan anarchy of the Internet. Future revolutions will bring more such escapes. The big AI companies are the apotheosis — literally, in the view of many who work for them — of Napoleonic science. The open web and the world of hobbyist and small-scale devices (often built on the Raspberry Pi) are our remaining refuges of Tolstoyan computing. See also: Erik Larson reflecting on Dyson in 2022 [https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/twenty-five-years-after-imagined-worlds-what-world-are-we-living-in ]."]]> alanjacobs freemandyson 1997 computers computing centralization decentralization anarchism tolstoy raspberrypi internet web online ai artificialintelligence llms eriklarson 2022 mac apple ibm openweb hobbyists hobbies tinkering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8434ae3425ab/ Book review: Maintenance: Of Everything (Part One) – Unsung 2026-04-02T00:18:52+00:00 https://unsung.aresluna.org/book-review-maintenance-of-everything-part-one/ robertogrecoThe apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills. What to do? Here’s a suggestion: Soften the paradox, and the misbehavior it encourages, by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair—brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. Ultimately, alas, the book doesn’t really expand on this suggestion. While the volume feels rich and dense in some ways – illustrations, extra commentary, highlights – its surface area ultimately appears to be rather shallow. Ironically, given the subject matter, it feels like Brand fell prey to a bunch of “sexy” stories, some of them only tangentially related to maintenance. I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.) We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet – and I wish I was joking – the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty. That aside, before opening the book, I hoped it would provide me some vocabulary and evolved thinking about maintenance that I could put to use, and there are some moments where it almost approaches what I wanted from it. Here’s a passage:
Powell credits the Israeli military with a mindset that naturally viewed damaged tanks as soon-to-be-repaired tanks, rather than the irredeemable flotsam of battle. The fact that [Israeli] commanders thought in these terms gave purpose and direction to the maintenance-related technical and tactical skill their crews possessed.
This is fascinating. Tell me how? Tell me what was needed to make it happen? But, unfortunately, outside of some basic tenets of “give the rank and file more freedom to do things” and “embrace improvisation,” the book doesn’t seem to offer more. Elsewhere, there is this quote:
In almost every plant I worked at, QA was seen as a hindrance to hitting productivity metrics. We never got credit for a well-maintained manufacturing capability, but QA almost always got blamed when things went wrong.
…which, again, felt like a fascinating thread to pull on. But instead of digging deeper, this is left hanging without investigation. The book doesn’t really have a proper ending with synthesis of what came before, and generally meanders a lot – to a point that the table of contents has more “digressions” than actual subjects. It also feels occasionally rambling and occasionally showing off (name-dropping people like Kevin Kelly and Freeman Dyson, or quotes from “beta-tester” readers that mostly serve to paint Brand in a positive light), which takes away from otherwise brisk writing and at times truly excellent storytelling. (The first chapter in particular is fantastic.) If you want an easy-to-read, breezy, well-typeset book filled with historical anecdotes, and the above caveats do not bother you, this might be a fun read! But I expected more from it. The one place where the book shines is pointing people toward other books – there are pages that feel more like literature review (done really well!), and the end matter has bibliography and recommended reading with notes. So in that way, while disappointing in and of itself, it could also become an interesting starting off point for more research." [See also: https://kottke.org/26/04/stewart-brand-maintenance "I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wichary writes:
I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.) We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet — and I wish I was joking — the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.
Oof. Yeah. Writing a book with that title (and its attendant aspirations) while ignoring the expertise and experiences of the vast majority of the world’s population (and more than half of the US population) is just not good enough at this point. It’s lazy and incurious, especially for an author frequently lauded as the opposite of both. (Bit of a sharp turn perhaps, but a recent contrast to Brand’s approach is the PBS series The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Instead of yet another retelling of the Revolutionary War focused on battles, Founding Fathers, and heroic tales of the good guys, Burns and his team drew from a broader pool of participants (many voices of women, free & enslaved Black people, Native Americans, etc.) and emphasized the extent to which the Revolution was many different things to many different people: a fight for freedom, a campaign to continue the enslavement of Black people, a cover for raping & pillaging, and the birth of a new colonizing nation. The result was a balanced, truthful, and insightful look at the war, an event that should be reckoned with at least as much as it’s celebrated.)" and Take this as you will, but I asked Claude if Brand had written substantively about women during his career and it responded:
Based on my research, here's what I can tell you about when Stewart Brand has written substantively about women across his books and magazine work. The short answer is: remarkably rarely, and this absence has itself become a subject of scholarly attention.
Lol."]]]> marcinwichary stewartbrand maintenane 2026 billgates elonmusk technology gender cybertruck kevinkelly freemandyson superficiality women siliconvalley kenburns sarahbotstein davidschmidt diversity whitesupremacy patriarchy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:97c45150743e/ A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D. | Quanta Magazine 2024-08-13T15:56:35+00:00 https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/ robertogreco 2014 freemandyson academia math mathematics physics education highered highereducation thomaslin https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c33332d7c3b/ useful thinkers in three kinds – The Homebound Symphony 2024-08-08T19:41:48+00:00 https://blog.ayjay.org/useful-thinkers-in-three-kinds/ robertogreco alanjacobs explainers thinking thinkers charlestaylor marymidgely freemandyson mikhailbkhtin irismurdoch michaeloakeshott gregorybateson kennethburke simoneweil renégirard provocation illumination 2022 kierkegaard hegel virtues rousseau philosophy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cb6ade0157da/ The Dig Presents: Alien Jerky Sold Here · The Dig 2023-09-16T19:11:27+00:00 https://thedigradio.com/podcast/the-dig-presents-alien-jerky-sold-here/ robertogreco disinformation ufos aliens usmilitary military obfuscation misdirection 2023 extraterrestrials trevorpaglen valeriekuletz markpilkington danieldenvir thedig counterintelligence airforce usaf us paulbennewitz richarddoty imagination experience folklore manipulation exploitation power control narrative belief unknown notknowing newmexico chinalake manhattanproject weapons militaryindustrialcomplex navy deserts indigenous indigeneity destruction california science nevada highdesert waste contamination mojavedesert nuclearbombs aldoushuxley scientists rockets rocketry missiles cancer nativeamericans nuclearfallout downwinders freemandyson cia area51 tonopahtestrange photography art waronterror guantanamobay prisons blacksites disappearance place government history nevadatestsite basecamp warfare distance vision sight seeing documentation imagery understanding images howwesee clarity baker perception archaeology aviation aerospace drones senses allthesenses sound smell environment subtlety details attention nature https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e7fb1a09f37a/ Massimo on Twitter: "The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries." 2023-06-18T20:50:36+00:00 https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1637177203405344770 robertogreco freemandyson science truth truths mysteries curiosity education schools schooling children howwelearn knowledge knowing schooliness unschooling deschooling certainty uncertainty https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8789a152d830/ La Ville Morte | Benjamín Labatut | Granta 2022-07-18T19:05:09+00:00 https://granta.com/la-ville-morte/ robertogreco benjamínlabatut freemandyson 2020 pandemic covid-19 coronavirus death pandemics hummingbirds climatechange pumas mountainlions nature chile humans language memes williamburroughs mazamet humanity bodies animals morethanhuman multispecies santiago wildlife cougars https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b369458bb3b8/ Q&A;: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired's Kevin Kelly | Wired Magazine | Wired.com 2012-02-19T21:36:02+00:00 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/all/1 robertogreco artificialintelligence ai software nuclearbombs stanulam hackers hacking alanturing coding klarivanneumann nilsbarricelli MANIAC digitaluniverse biology computing freemandyson johnvanneumann interviews creation kevinkelly turing'smansion turing'scathedral turing wired history computers georgedyson digitalorganisms nuclearweapons atomicbomb atomicbombs wiredmagazine https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:540a147075a9/ How to Dispel Your Illusions by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books 2011-12-10T23:44:03+00:00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/?pagination=false robertogreco psychology books freemandyson danielkahneman williamjames literature science cognition decisionmaking humans emotions measurement experiments illusions illusionofvalidity cognitiveillusions https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2646e0b83b21/ Bless the toolmakers « Snarkmarket 2011-09-06T07:48:47+00:00 http://snarkmarket.com/2011/7320 robertogreco tools apple pixar arts art robinsloan snarkmarket creativity creation media freemandyson roolmaking liberalarts lasting building software design writing timcarmody https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8ddb1ab71fa5/ Caterina.net» Blog Archive » Make things 2011-09-03T20:41:24+00:00 http://caterina.net/wp-archives/98 robertogreco leadership caterinafake johnholt making doing entrepreneurship inspiration noise talk technology techindustry whatmatters cv freemandyson https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7acc908b177e/ The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books 2011-07-27T19:56:41+00:00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/dramatic-picture-richard-feynman/?pagination=false robertogreco richardfeynman freemandyson books humanity humanism unselfishness hierarchy leadership teaching learning science philosophy physics collectivism discovery collaboration 2011 https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:66bc4a1dd06f/ What is social information? « Snarkmarket 2011-02-27T07:27:20+00:00 http://snarkmarket.com/2011/6679 robertogreco timcarmody snarkmarket davidfosterwallace infinitejest language solitude loneliness human need information redundancy efficiency purity clarity communication infooverload connectedness connection freemandyson malcolmgladwell devinfriedman ycombinator dailybooth expression jamesgleick congo kele languages words pinging drums 2011 northafrica revolution revolutions media raymondcarver history cannon signaling https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:048cd53c6a14/ How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books 2011-02-23T10:42:30+00:00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/?pagination=false robertogreco freemandyson books language meaning science information history theory jamesgleick wikipedia borges libraryofbabel jimmywales mooreslaw claudeshannon infinitelibrary relationships pupose infooverload thelibraryofbabel https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:586f8e1bd814/ The Danger of Cosmic Genius - Magazine - The Atlantic 2010-11-12T21:17:09+00:00 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/ robertogreco climatechange environment physics science freemandyson georgedyson 2010 genius childhood alberteinstein concentration thinking parenting biography religion faith belief sustainability https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0d48772a602b/ Institute for Advanced Study - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2010-08-29T19:14:14+00:00 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study robertogreco education princeton science thinking ideas richardfeynman teaching explaining constraints freedom challenge motivation instituteforadvancedstudy freemandyson alberteinstein paulerdos https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f1ee7841f086/ Op-Ed Contributor - Four Sides to Every Story - NYTimes.com 2009-12-16T05:11:59+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opinion/15brand.html robertogreco stewartbrand climatechange freemandyson science politics https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:bc894fa87261/ Freeman Dyson, global warming, biotechnology, evolution, science and religion | Salon Books 2009-03-29T21:42:34+00:00 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/09/29/freeman_dyson/ robertogreco freemandyson religion christianity atheism richarddawkins evolution technology climatechange science belief community biotech physics ecology environment climate life philosophy future faith https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b0d11418739a/ The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson - Profile - NYTimes.com 2009-03-29T20:41:16+00:00 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=all robertogreco freemandyson skepticism science play curiosity diversity tcsnmy physics futurism future climate globalwarming time weather boredom creativity sandiego geneticengineering tinkering learning habitsofmind howwework richardfeynman generalists attention nuclearweapons algore optimism intellect genius interdisciplinary problemsolving ingenuity multidisciplinary crossdisciplinary orthodoxy heretics belief debate nuclearbombs atomicbomb atomicbombs https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e3c10cc2c7bb/ George Dyson (science historian) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2008-08-20T18:33:44+00:00 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dyson_(science_historian) robertogreco georgedyson freemandyson learning education freedom autodidacts passion immersion alternative autonomy unschooling deschooling autodidactism https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b3a766a98233/ Freeman Dyson says: let's look for life in the outer solar system | Video on TED.com 2008-07-15T05:42:52+00:00 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/freeman_dyson_says_let_s_look_for_life_in_the_outer_solar_system.html robertogreco freemandyson astrobiology biology biotechnology exploration future space life technology play gamechanging change diy make making https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5ae4c19c0445/ Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential 2008-07-05T20:40:57+00:00 http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/07/where_the_linea.php robertogreco kevinkelly economics future culture science environment religion freemandyson sustainability environmentalism https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1c6e1aeaa8b3/ The Question of Global Warming - The New York Review of Books 2008-06-02T22:12:27+00:00 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494 robertogreco environment globalwarming science climatechange politics climate economics carbon environmentalism skeptics socialism sustainability freemandyson earth religion belief https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ce456280e040/