[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.