alt Hacker NewsI read The World-Ending Fire (Wendell Berry), Hackers (Steven Levy), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) around the same time. I was struck by how similar Berry, Pirsig, and the early MIT hackers thought about Quality work. I gave a talk about it at an images & algorithms class I took in undergrad. It's reassuring to see Wendell Berry was an influential figure to many others in this space. RIP.
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kulahan • today at 1:13 AM
I’m not sure I’m quite ready to take on 3 books to figure this out - can you explain a little bit what you mean about quality work? Consider my interest piqued!
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MithrilTuxedo • today at 1:11 AM
Stephen Levy's Artificial Life ended up being my first and only religious experience.
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I haven’t read Berry, but he just went up on my priority list based on this.
Another link to Quality in the Pirsig sense I haven’t seen discussed much is Christopher Alexander’s work. Specifically A Timeless Way of Building which gives similar frustratingly inexact descriptions. I guess Jane Jacobs fits in with this as well but with a bit more concreteness.