Software

It Certified Its Own Forgery

When I was a kid we played the telephone game at birthday parties. A dozen of us in a line, somebody whispers a sentence to the first kid, it travels ear to ear down the row, and the last kid says it out loud. Purple monkey dishwasher. The whole game is the gap between what went in and what came out, and the laugh is always proportional to how far the thing drifted. It was lossy transmission before I’d ever heard the term “lossy.”

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Standing on Surfaces That Move

The software engineering job has moved, seemingly overnight. Working engineers have not been deleted wholesale; the disappearance loudly predicted in recent years hasn’t happened. The work itself has moved, though, and the move is measurable. Line-by-line typing of code got cheap. The judgment about what’s worth typing, and whether what’s been typed will hold together at scale, got expensive. In fact the latter was always expensive, but the cheapening of coding itself has made the gap between the two meaningful.

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