NB: I just published a piece in_ The Conversation _about a recent Pew Research report, "The Role of Alternative Social Media in the News and Information Environment". I argue that the authors get "alternative social media " wrong. I lay out some of my concerns in that Conversation piece, but I only had about 900...

The systems that can tolerate the faults are called fault-tolerant or resilient. Fully reliable systems are like a dream we can never reach. There will always be a possibility of failure. An earthquake can happen, and the earth might explode. So, full reliability is not possible and not feasible. Therefore, our goal...

This is a photograph I originally posted on Instagram

By which I mean there are deeply problematic assumptions in the very notion of scaling: Scaling changes the rules, and scaling problems exist in both directions. If what you are doing effortlessly scales up, it almost always means it’s egregiously sub-optimal given your present needs. These assertions are all very...