Letter 1:

We complain a lot, but life for many of us is pretty OK. As Mark Rosenfelder (zompist.com) once said, the twentieth century was the first time that we saw a higher average standard of living than the pre-agricultural era. I hope things are going better for you—and let me know how all that gender politicking works out.

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Okay, big shot. You've collected a comprehensive list of everyone's favourite musicians, ever. You've even roughly clumped them by how popular they are, instead of using linear algebra to do it properly using a huge linear regression (a trick I'm still working on.) Now what?  […]

Questions to ask yourself when faced with an evil AI are as follows.  […]

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I know nothing of gesture recognition algorithms, but here is an idea:  […]

If it takes fewer than n lines to accomplish a given task in a given programming language, that language is too powerful and high-level for the purpose at hand. For the sake of convenience, we will ignore anomalously high program lengths caused by specialized and non-imperative languages, and strip out declarations and definitions from Java.  […]

One of the hardest challenges in designing an alien language is coming up with grammatical features that are genuinely alien in nature. It's easy to say something like "hey look RPN; that's extremely alien to my feeble linguist mind" (unless you are Dutch, in which case this is no surprise) and resort to grammars that are, in fact, all too human—after all, humans wrote the Java VM. […]

The strain exerted on the mind by having to remember two similar concepts or performing multiple sequential actions to accomplish one task. Overcome by the construction of a synecdoche or inventions to remove the extra steps. The driving force of convenience, both good and bad for civilization.  […]