theorywatch

Ahh, a collection of older versions of popular software that will allow you to downgrade your current (all too often feature-bloated and buggy) version in the interests of efficiency. Clever!

And, speaking of thinking backward to move forward, I recently came across programmer/philosopher Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do Philosophy,” in which he revisits the history and philosophy of academic “theory” from Aristotle on, and offers the more bootstrapping approach of “Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?” (but also points out that thinking like that won’t get you tenure.) Heady stuff….