[neilk]

Even Maciej concedes that pg knows a lot about certain topics.

I've noticed that pg hasn't been writing a lot of expansive, philosophical essays lately, like attempting to explain national characteristics of architecture. That kind of speculation is just asking for satire. Perhaps he's gotten the message.

I think pg is interesting for being a kind of working philosopher. He had various theories about business, programming languages, and youth, and actually tested them by experiment (betting his own money, too), and by most measures has won the argument.

[philwelch]

I actually liked the expansive, philosophical essays. One of them was about the messages you get from cities and what kind of ambitions they arouse in you, and that probably explains the switch--when he lived in Cambridge (where being really smart was the ambition) he wrote wide ranging philosophical essays about what you can't say and how to predict presidential elections and how awesome dynamic languages are, and now that he lives in Silicon Valley, he only writes about startups.

At one time, PG was just an essayist and hacker who worked on interesting technical problems like writing a better Lisp and filtering spam, who occasionally wrote about startups. Now he's "just" the startup guru.