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quotes4

"Most of us never became the kind of hackers depicted in “Hackers.” To “hack,” in the parlance of a programmer, is just to tinker—to express ingenuity through code." -- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft by James Somers

"...programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles." -- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft by James Somers

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -- Richard Feynman

"I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned." -- Richard Feynman

"What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." -- Andy Warhol

"if you don’t do your moral thinking in advance, the big, high-impact decisions don’t feel like big decisions at all, they feel like one more work item to get through on a Friday afternoon before going home for the weekend." -- https://lobste.rs/s/jmuflw/fraud_was_code#c_jjpyoh

"large organizations are inherently dysfunctional" -- https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/your-organization-probably-doesnt-want-to-improve-things/

"Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback." -- Dutch proverb

" whartung: I’ll share this anecdote told by a friend of mine. He was on a team building a Modula-2 compiler for OS/2, and his group was working on the debugger. At some point a debugger becomes feature complete enough that you can use the debugger to ... debug the debugger. But this was OS/2 which has true multiple processes (unlike it’s contemporary Windows 3.1). So you could, naturally, run the debugger in one process and attached it to another process which, just so happens to be another instance of the debugger. As with all things, while doing this they encountered bugs in the debugger that, well, needed to be debugged. He said there was a certain epiphany when they realized, because of the multi process nature of OS/2, that they could debug the debugger debugging the debugger. ... timmisiak: I think my record when I was on the WinDbg? team was 5 debuggers deep. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37674960

"If you're not five minutes early, you're late"

"A GOP lawmaker in the room said McCarthy? told House lawmakers: “You guys think I’m scared of a motion to vacate? Go ahead and f—-ing do it.”" -- https://www.wsj.com/politics/kevin-mccarthy-dares-gop-critics-to-try-to-oust-him-c4ac1c89

"Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating"

"But as you might or might not know, the name 'WUBE' is an abbreviation of Wszystko będzie, which means something like "Everything will be done eventually"." -- https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die..." -- https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1686052283333926912

"young tech companies innovate, whereas old ones litigate" -- https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/02/googles-plan-to-drm-the-web-goes-against-everything-google-once-stood-for/

"Look after yourself, and, if you can, someone else too" -- https://godbolt.org/

"...the following rule: as soon anyone notices that a debate is happening, the debate is paused, and each side explains the position the other side is arguing for" -- https://matklad.github.io/2020/08/11/things-I-have-learned-about-life.html

"Welcome to my article about Pratt parsing — the monad tutorial of syntactic analysis." -- https://matklad.github.io/2020/04/13/simple-but-powerful-pratt-parsing.html

"It's hilarious that big players in this space seem to think these are consistent views:

“What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.” —Rodney Brooks

"O(n^2) is the sweet spot of badly scaling algorithms: fast enough to make it into production, but slow enough to make things fall down once it gets there." -- Dawson's law

"At last Almanzo’s plate was filled. The first taste made a pleasant feeling inside him, and it grew and grew, while he ate and ate and ate. He ate till he could eat no more, and he felt very good inside. For a while he slowly nibbled bits from his second piece of fruitcake. Then he put the fruity slice in his pocket and went out to play." -- Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Chapter 26, Christmas

gfodor (Paul Bohm?)'s conjecture: "the most interesting qualia is the most likely"

“Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.” -- Bagehot

“science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” -- Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p. 187

"...hard work can make up for lesser talent or bad luck, great talent can make up for a lack of effort, and being lucky is sometimes better than either." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025181

"All that is visible must grow beyond itself and extend into the realm of the invisible." -- I Ching, Hexagram 50, copied by the tower guardian Dumont in the movie Tron (1982)

"This author makes an argument for hanging out, the chillest of human interactions." -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/style/sheila-liming-hanging-out-interview.html

"Knowledge isn't free. You have to pay attention" -- Richard Feynman

"The human experience is filled with rituals of mundanity that kill the mind and crush the soul. The word "spirit" becomes an obscenity; the word "myth" becomes a lie; the word "dream" becomes synonymous with false hope. The word word "mundane," which once meant "worldly," is twisted into a hateful utterance." -- https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Autumn_People

" As long as we're posting somewhat-crackpot ideas about predictive processing, here's one:

The way you get a predictive processing agent to take goal-directed action, is to make it optimistically predict that it will get a lot of reward in the near future, so it will be driven to act to minimize prediction error. You can shoehorn this into Freud's concept of the libido.

It's also often observed that the other way to minimize prediction error is to sit completely still in a dark room. You can shoehorn this into Freud's concept of the death drive. " -- Michael, in a comment

"Even if you don’t ask it to simulate an agent, it might come up with agents anyway. For example, if you ask it “What is the best way to obtain paperclips?”, and it takes “best way” literally, it would have to simulate a paperclip maximizer to answer that question. Can the paperclip maximizer do mischief from inside GPT’s simulation of it? Probably the sort of people who come up with extreme AI risk scenarios think yes. This post gives the example of it answering with “The best way to get paperclips is to run this code” (which will turn the AI into a paperclip maximizer)." -- [1]

"The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds. " -- http://paulgraham.com/getideas.html (note: this is surprisingly similar to something that a mentor of mine, Chuck Stevens, said once)

Rules of panic (in financial trading): "1. Don't panic 2. If you are going to panic, panic first"

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk" -- John von Neumann

"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose (’omnibus reactor’). (7) Very little development is required. It will use mostly off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated." -- Admiral Rickover

"every person you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, so be kind, always"

"If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

There are two ways this kind of thing gets into your life: it's either forced on you, or it tricks you. To some extent you have to put up with the bullshit forced on you by circumstances. You need to make money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Indeed, the law of supply and demand insures that: the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it. " -- http://paulgraham.com/vb.html

" I’m literally six months into my first corporate job, and I already want to quit

And it’s not the fact that I don’t like my job and the people suck and it’s just horrible. It’s actually a pretty nice job. Like, I love my coworkers, it’s all around great. If you look at it at face value, it’s great. My one thing that I hate most is the fact that it’s been six months and I literally feel like nothing has happened in the past six months.

I work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday

… actually, no, it’s more like 8 to 5 and sometimes it’s like 9 to 5. I’ll be going through my work week and then by the time it gets to Friday, I’m just so exhausted to the fact where, like, I can’t do anything on the weekend anymore.

Something needs to change in this work culture

This is not cutting it, because I’m not gonna go through my entire life working for, like, 40 years and then I wake up one day and I think about it and I’m like, ‘wow, it’s been 40 years and I’ve done literally nothing’. The only caveat with quitting this job is that I will not have any money so how am I supposed to live, like what am I supposed to do? I don’t understand. Anyway, that’s my rant for today. " -- Julia Huynh ( https://www.tiktok.com/@jigglyjulia ) via https://www.boredpanda.com/corporate-worker-complains-about-work-culture/

"I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived - and dying I will tend to later." -- Epictetus

"Marginally related (software?) rant: every time I want to learn how something specific works or I want to do something oddly specific I keep running in the same phenomenon. Google mostly returns vague abstract fluff and Stack Overflow tells me it really, really shouldn't be done because [reason]. It's like most of human written content caps out at about the level of description ChatGPT? could deliver. Like there's a "knowledge event horizon".

After that it always ends in hard to parse research papers, specifications, jumping around the source code of multiple libraries, debugging or reverse engineering. If I get lucky I might land on a 15 year old blog post that no man has seen since inception and it describes exactly what I wanted to know." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34082203

"The wise man … does not need to walk about timidly or cautiously: for he possesses such self-confidence that he does not hesitate to go to meet fortune nor will he ever yield his position to her: nor has he any reason to fear her, because he considers not only slaves, property, and positions of honor, but also his body, his eyes, his hands, — everything which can make life dearer, even his very self, as among uncertain things, and lives as if he had borrowed them for his own use and was prepared to return them without sadness whenever claimed. Nor does he appear worthless in his own eyes because he knows that he is not his own, but he will do everything as diligently and carefully as a conscientious and pious man is accustomed to guard that which is entrusted in his care. Yet whenever he is ordered to return them, he will not complain to fortune, but will say: “I thank you for this which I have had in my possession. I have indeed cared for your property, — even to my great disadvantage, — but, since you command it, I give it back to you and restore it thankfully and willingly…” If nature should demand of us that which she has previously entrusted to us, we will also say to her: “Take back a better mind than you gave: I seek no way of escape nor flee: I have voluntarily improved for you what you gave me without my knowledge; take it away.” What hardship is there in returning to the place whence one has come? That man lives badly who does not know how to die well." -- Seneca

"...there are many who must of necessity cling to their high position, from which they cannot descend except by falling: but they testify that … they are not raised to their high position, but chained to it..." -- Seneca

"the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life." -- Walt Whitman

"Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies." -- Walt Whitman

"The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.

    ...
    After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night." -- Walt Whitman

" Marly: "Are you—are you sad?" The Boxmaker: No. Marly: But your—your songs are sad. The Boxmaker: My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. " -- Count Zero by William Gibson (I added the names)

"...according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not’. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks." -- Alan M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Paraphrased by maweki as "while you never know whether somebody else actually thinks or not, it's still polite to assume."

i dont remember where but there was an article reporting on a session with Michael Dell and young entrepreneurs and Michael Dell said something like "The distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is that they are doers"

on power: "The difficulty, you see, isn't so much getting power as holding on to it. Because so many others want it, too. You'd be astonished, the lengths to which some will go." -- Orddu, The Foundling, Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander

on fame: "Memory can be so skimpy. It doesn't stretch very far; and, next thing you know, there's your fame gone all crumbly and mildewed." -- Orwen, The Foundling, Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander

on wisdom: "For the odd thing about wisdom is the more you use it, the more it grows; and the more you share, the more you gain." -- Orddu, The Foundling, Chronicles of Prydain, Lloyd Alexander

"humans are pretty good at judging character in general, but our facilities for doing so break down in the presence of sufficient charisma. in those cases, you cannot trust your gut, even if it’s usually right" -- https://twitter.com/nbouscal/status/1590649088055595008

"...part of being able to love surprise is not to always operate at max capacity. my therapist taught me that 80% of your full capacity *is* your max operating capacity. then 20% is left for when you get surprised." -- https://twitter.com/economeager/status/1592523787597418497

“a year in the library can save a day in the lab.” -- via [2]

“weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.” -- via [3]