a common idea that really annoys me:

that if something was developed with defense funding, then even if it has no obvious military application, it must have a non-obvious one

it’s sort of the same kind of mistake as “facebook is mind control”

here’s the thing:

to do anything new and interesting, you must have the freedom to fail. really interesting things don’t even map onto known categories of success or failure until they are digested by popular culture.

how do you get the resources to do interesting work, since interesting work can, by its very…