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]

"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975)

"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." -Linus Torvalds

"Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity." - Andrew Wilkinson

" WHEN SHE GOT back to her room she turned her handheld on, placed it on the small desk, kicked her boots off and lay down on the small single bed. She put her hands behind her head and stared up at the featureless ceiling. Her heartbeat slowed while she prepared for what was to come, her conversation with the being who was, in experiential time, the oldest in the System; a creature that experienced time, that lived, at twenty thousand times the rate of a human being. She envi- sioned her fear as dots of light, dancing across the surface of her skin. Slowly the dots of light coalesced, crawled across the surface of her skin and collected in a single glowing ball of light, hovering just above her solar plexus. She let it sit there a moment, and then imagined the ball of light moving away from her, further and fur- ther away until it was no more. When her heartbeat had reached a steady forty beats per min- ute, she said in a tranquil voice, “Command, access Ring.” The voice that issued from her handheld was that of a thing not human; smooth and completely uninflected. “Denice Castanaveras. It is a pleasure to speak to you.” “Does the leadership here know who I am?” “They do not.” “Will you tell them?” “I see no reason.” “Eldest, if I had known you were working with the Claw, I would not have come here.” “Indeed? I find no logic in that statement.” “You helped free Trent once. You saved Ralf the Wise and Pow- erful, gave him the replicant code he lacked, when the PKF came to take his hardware. You extracted promises from both of them that, when you needed it, they would repay your aid.” “It was good business.” “That’s what the Old Ones say about what they do.” “It is a comparison that has been made before,” Ring observed. “The Mafia is among the models of human organizations I have studied.” “What business would you like to transact with me, Ring?” “I am interested in ’Sieur Obodi, the new head of the Johnny Rebs. It is often difficult for me to deal with humans; your informa- tional structures are wildly different from my own. ’Sieur Obodi is so different that I am, in large measure, at a loss to understand him.” “Ah. And you think I might be of service to you in that regard.” “I would be interested in knowing what ’Sieur Obodi’s plans are; I think they have little to do with the restoration of freedom to America, or any other place. I was coded, Denice Castanaveras, with the stricture: Protect America. Unfortunately my creators were incompetent; my libraries were incomplete, and I was given no definition of America. I have had to make my own. I do not know if it accurately reflects the desires of my programmers; given that they are long dead, I must work with my own definitions.” “They are?” “The salient feature of America—the ways in which the original American Republic was unique in human history to that point—lies in the assumption that humans are wise enough to control their own lives. I am not certain this is an accurate assumption; none- theless it is a distinct one. Everything the Founding Fathers wrote reflects this underlying assumption. They were without exception, even those with religious leanings, strongly anti-Church, because the Church tended to desire the control of the populace’s lives in ways the Founding Fathers found abhorrent. They were strongly pro-gun; guns made it possible for a citizen to protect himself from encroachments upon his liberty, even by his own government. They desired a free press because they believed that, in an intellectually free environment, humans were wise enough to make decisions that would, ultimately, be beneficial to the larger community. “It is clear that this was the original intent of the United States; to provide an environment in which citizens were allowed to make free decisions about the details of their own lives.” “What does this have to do with me?” “’Sieur Obodi, when he should speak of liberty, speaks of loy- alty. When he should speak of the need for self-determination, he speaks of the need for wisdom; the implication being that he is wise, and his listeners are not. Where he should instill self-respect, he instills respect for himself. I confess,” said the smooth, inhuman voice, “I do not understand his effect upon human beings, his charm; he seems to me a dangerous charlatan.” “And you think that I might be immune to his charm?” “He works better with men than with women; he has sur- rounded himself with men. ’Selle Lovely is the only human who has caused him much trouble since he came to my attention, and even she is disturbed by his presence. I think, Denice Castanaveras, that if there is a human in the System to whom ’Sieur Obodi cannot lie, it would be the telepath daughter of Carl Castanaveras and Jany McConnell?.” “What deal are you offering me?” “I will protect your identity. I will bring you to Obodi, reunite you with Jimmy Ramirez. I will share with you everything I have learned about ’Sieur Obodi, from the moment a woman named Candice Groening discovered a slowtime bubble in the Val d’Entremont in 2072. In return, you will tell me everything you learn from the thoughts of ’Sieur Obodi, when you do meet him.” “And if I don’t deal?” “I will notify Nicole Eris Lovely, leader of the Erisian Claw, that you are Denice Castanaveras. Nicole’s husband died in the Trou- bles, and she has no love for your people. I will notify Mohammed Vance, Commissioner of the PKF Elite, that Douglass Ripper’s per- sonal assistant was Denice Castanaveras, Trent the Uncatchable’s lover, the last remnant of the Castanaveras telepaths.” “Last remnant?” Denice sat up in bed slowly. She opened her mouth to speak twice before the words came out: “Do you know what happened to my brother?” Ring’s voice did not change. “No. Forgive the imprecision of my language. I have not searched for him, but I think it likely David Castanaveras died in the Troubles. Had he survived, it is probable to the ninetieth percentile that one of the parties searching for him would have encountered him in the intervening years. I know that you have looked for him; I know Trent looked for him; I know Ralf the Wise and Powerful has looked for him. He is nowhere to be found, and I think him dead. Shall I pause while you order your emotions?” Denice stared at the handheld. “Go to hell.” “I shall pause,” Ring said. Silence descended upon the room. Denice sat at the edge of the bed, head in her hands, trying to think. “Ring.” “Yes.” “If I do this for you, you will release Ralf the Wise and Powerful from his obligation to you. You will release Trent the Uncatchable from his obligation. You will never threaten me again in this fash- ion. Do you agree to my terms?” “No.” “No deal.” “If you intend to bluff, be advised that I do not bluff, ’Selle Cas- tanaveras.” “I will not be threatened. Not by you, not by a human, not by anybody.” “If you do not agree to my terms as I have outlined them to you, I will notify the parties I have listed. I will do this within thirty seconds.” “I suppose you think that telling Lovely who I am will cause my death. Maybe. But maybe not. Maybe I’ll make it out of here alive. Want to bet I don’t? And if I do, you’re going to have not one but three enemies you don’t have today; me, and Ralf the Wise and Powerful, and Trent the Uncatchable. Even if I die, if either of them ever learn what happened here, they will never rest until you are dead.” At the end of thirty seconds Ring said, “Do you wish to change your mind before I notify Lovely and Vance?” Denice stared at the empty wall before her. A moment later, Ring said, “Very well. I agree to your terms.” Denice said quietly, “Wise of you.” “You bargain well for a human.” " -- excerpt from The Last Dancer by Daniel Keys Moran

" Lastly, don't ask me about a plan. Never had a plan for Binance. Entrepreneurs don't plan. We execute and adjust. " -- CZ, founder of Binance

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with the Rust compiler. You get dirty, and besides, the compiler likes it. -- noted Rust programmer and author George Bernard Shaw, via https://127.io/2019/02/22/rust-six-months-later/

"The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent. The Rust compiler is a smarter opponent."

-- Fundamentals of Rust Programming 1883, via https://127.io/2019/02/22/rust-six-months-later/

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"...the value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of" -- dang

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"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."

Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943, via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang

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"I’m sure you know this great medieval story about how a man goes to the devil and asks him to give him everything he wants except for death. The devil is obliged to do it and when the man asks, the devil says: ‘Okay I will give you everything you want, but you will be stuck in a lake of honey forever.’ And then the man says ‘What is this? You didn't give me what I wanted — I wanted not to die! ' And the devil answers, ‘You idiot! If you knew that one day you would be stuck in a lake of honey forever wouldn’t you have asked for death? So I gave you what you wanted.' " -- [4]

"A mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master" -- ??

"...advice is expertise with all the most important bits removed" -- [5]

"The primary function of a compiler is to take malformed code and emit diagnostics to help the programmer turn it into well-formed code. A compiler is an error reporting tool with a code generation side-gig." -- Esteban Kuber

"As I like to put it, a nerd’s got to do what a nerd’s got to do." -- Craig Newmark

"On a final note, if anyone is looking for a government regulator with a proven track record of resigning when things go wrong, know that I’m available." -- bert hubert

"I estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards." -- Rob Pike, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000 or utah2k)"

"A prevailing undercurrent in programming languages research is that any worthy programming language must be general purpose. It must be, at a minimum, sufficiently expressive to express its own compiler. And then, adherents to the language are viewed as traitors if they succumb to the use of another language. Language wars are religious wars, and few of these religions are polytheistic." -- The Problem with Threads by Edward A. Lee (2006), section 7 "Challenges and Opportunities", page 13

"Kindness, Beauty, and Truth" -- Albert Einstein, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32762810

"...there is something extraordinary to see the British PM bow to the Queen, and do that (I think?) every week...But my point wasn't about power but about humility. I think it's good and desirable that the ruler has to bow to someone else, and that that person, in turn, has no power whatsoever." -- [6] and [7]

""you can't trust anything you don't see with your own eyes" ... People lived like that for literally millennia before photography, audio, and video recording." -- [8]

"One strain of Unix thinking emphasizes small sharp tools, starting designs from zero, and interfaces that are simple and consistent. This point of view has been most famously championed by Doug McIlroy?. Another strain emphasizes doing simple implementations that work, and that ship quickly, even if the methods are brute-force and some edge cases have to be punted. Ken Thompson’s code and his maxims about programming have often seemed to lean in this direction." -- Tradeoffs between Interface and Implementation Complexity in The Art of Unix Programming, by Eric S. Raymond

"A simile that just struck me: A fascination with 6502 assembly or CP/M is akin to building your own suit of armor and re-enacting medieval jousts (a la the SCA.) Designing your own “clean-slate” virtual machine and applications, or building atop someone else’s, is more like escaping into medieval fantasy worlds (a la Lord Of The Rings.)

Neither of those are bad, of course! I love me some escapism. But neither has anything to do with the world today or the future, or has any real purpose other than fun. The future, even post-apocalyptic, is not going to be like the Middle Ages nor Middle Earth, and your homemade plate armor will not save you from a survivalist toting a rifle. Nor is Rivendell or Narnia a guideline for a better tomorrow. " -- snej

"Gerald Jay Sussman claims that edge cases in mathematical notation (and corner-cutting of sorts in what is written) makes physics quite hard to grasp in "The role of programming" [9]; hence the Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics book, which includes many Scheme programs which explicate everything." -- hayley-patton

"In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." -- Hugo Rossi, Mathematics Is an Edifice, Not a Toolbox, Notices of the AMS, v. 43, no. 10, October 1996.

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Be explicit, polite but firm." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32368628

"But Tom Bombadil is just as he is. Just an odd ‘fact’ of that world. He won’t be explained, because as long as you are (as in this tale you are meant to be) concentrated on the Ring, he is inexplicable. But he’s there – a reminder of the truth (as I see it) that the world is so large and manifold that if you take one facet and fix your mind and heart on it, there is always something that does not come in to that story/argument/approach, and seems to belong to a larger story. But of course in another way, not that of pure story-making, Bombadil is a deliberate contrast to the Elves who are artists. But B. does not want to make, alter, devise, or control anything: just to observe and take joy in the contemplating the things that are not himself. The spirit of the [deleted: world > this earth] made aware of itself. He is more like science (utterly free from technological blemish) and history than art. He represents the complete fearlessness of that spirit when we can catch a little of it. But I do suggest that it is possible to fear (as I do) that the making artistic sub-creative spirit (of Men and Elves) is actually more potent, and can ‘fall’, and that it could in the eventual triumph of its own evil destroy the whole earth, and Bombadil and all." -- http://www.hammondandscull.com/addenda/bombadil.html

" Tolkien on Tom in Letter 144:

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 144: To Naomi Mitchison. April 1954 " -- via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32265211

"Time is the best teacher, unfortunately, it kills all of its students" -- Robin Williams

"Imagine there was no such thing as a library, and that members of the current neoliberal policy consensus were to sit down today and invent it. They might create complicated tax expenditures to subsidize the poor purchasing and reselling books, like the wage support of the earned income tax credit. They might require people to rent books from approved private libraries, with penalties for those who don’t and vouchers for those who can’t afford it, like the individual mandate in the latest expansion of health care. They might come up with a program where they take on liability for books that go missing from private libraries and thereby boost profits for lenders themselves, like federally backed private student loans. Or maybe they’d create means-tested libraries only accessible to the poor, with a requirement that patrons document how impoverished they are month after month to keep their library card. Maybe they’d exempt the cost of private library cards from payroll taxes, or let anything calling itself a library pay nothing in taxes." -- [10]

"Programs are sequences of instructions executed in a predetermined order. A human writes these instructions and the computer carries them out without question." -- [11]

"The question of Silicon Valley’s existence borders upon the spiritual. It is a region that has birthed nearly every major technology development of the last 40 years. If you believe, as I do, that technology must jump radically forward for the human race to survive, then learning what powered the Valley’s output is worth serious study.The answer to the question, unfortunately, appears to be rich assholes." -- [12]

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." -- Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911), Ch 5, via [13]

"But if you look at the history of ideas that actually worked, they tend to only be simple from a distance. The closer you get, the more you notice that the working idea is surrounding by a huge number of almost identical ideas that don't work. Take bicycles, for example. They seem simple and obvious, but it took two centuries to figure out all the details and most people today can't actually locate the working idea amongst its neighbours."

"Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!" -- [14]

"It's time to get your pencils, not your pens, for updating your watchlists." -- https://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/dow-jones-futures-bitcoin-below-20000-beware-bear-market/

"My partner Charlie (Munger) says there is only three ways a smart person can go broke: liquor, ladies, and leverage. Now the truth is — the first two he just added because they started with L — it’s leverage." -- Warren Buffett

"You can't tell people anything" -- http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/

"`Foldable` is basically the FP equivalent of `Iterable` in Java if you're familiar with that. It's an abstraction you can write against if you want to support all sorts of data structures that can be iterated on (e.g. arrays, lists, trees, etc.)." -- dwohnitmok

"I think first and foremost is bringing yourself into a position that gets you enough runway (time and money) to be able to take things seriously — even if that sounds like the opposite of a side project. For me it was skipping university and having kids in favour of starting a web agency in the dotcom days. Also, I don't believe in working on something you love — you just need to hate it a little less than the other ideas and be positive that someone will find it useful. Like I mentioned below, luck and timing play an important role and these days I'd say you will also need one unfair advantage (contacts, cash, distribution, etc) to increase your chances." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426803

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.” -- H.L. Mencken

"You can't tell people anything" -- http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/

https://www.butajape.com/comic/a-silent-fool/

"in many situations, the best action is to do nothing" -- me

"The first principle is not to fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Feynman

“All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control.” -- John von Neumann paraphrased by Dyson

"The two principals of good (physical) organization: Everything has a home. And, everything need go to its home frequently, to relax." -- Douglas Rubino (paraphrased)

"I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400

"Some companies are good to invest in. Some are good to be a customer of. Some are good to work for. But very few companies are all three." -- [15]

"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands." -- [16]

"If there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned about the world, it’s that people do not want to run their own servers." -- https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

"The entire C separation of preprocessor, compiler, assembler, and linker exists because each one of those could fit independently in RAM on a PDP-11 (and the separate link step originates because Mary Allen Wilkes didn’t have enough core memory on an IBM 704 to fit a Fortran program and all of the library routines that it might use). Being able to fit an entire program in memory in an intermediate representation over which you could do whole-program analysis was unimaginable." -- David Chisnall

"diverge to take in new ideas, converge to rationalize and make consistent" -- Kurt Laitner, personal communication

Einstein's famous quote, "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." Einstein ([17] implicitly suggests that this may be the actual statement which gave rise to the famous quote).

"..even though some languages are spoken faster than others in terms of syllables per second, the amount of information communicated per second is roughly equal, no matter what language you’re speaking. There’s a tradeoff between complexity and speed. The higher the information density of a language, the slower it is spoken." -- https://perell.com/essay/against-3x-speed/ summarizing the research paper Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” -- Mark Twain

"When problems reached him in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between two bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution."" -- https://qz.com/work/1567301/barack-obamas-advice-for-handling-tough-decisions/

"Groups Never Admit Failure What happens is you get a schism instead" -- [18]

"Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to.

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Usually what happens in that case is a schism..." -- [19] " I think the essay is strongly written — never is a strong word — but it resonated with me because of a personal experience.

In that experience part of the problem was that those who disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or because they were driven away, or something in between. So there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "surviving" sort of meant staying with the group...when you have an entity that can change in composition, it affects what is involved in admitting to mistakes, because the people making the mistakes might be different from those who would admit to them. " -- [20]

"there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots" -- via [21]

"...the first Lisp interpreter was the result of a programmer ignoring his boss's advice" -- Norvig, PAIP p. 777 via [22]

"...to be “aesthetic” means that it cultivates attention to the sublime in everyday moments" -- "Ana Quiring"

“there are only two ways of telling the complete truth — anonymously and posthumously.” -- Thomas Sowell

"The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." -- Thomas Sowell

"Intellect is not wisdom." -- Thomas Sowell

"The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a programming language, is just another program." -- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman

”Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be.” -- Lyndon B. Johnson

"the local fighter always knows he will outlast the foreign occupier." -- [23] (speaking about Afghanistan)

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." [24]

"This idea that measurement and observation drive knowledge is Bacon’s legacy...Fun fact: Bacon is often considered the modern founder of the idea that knowledge can be used to create human-directed progress" [25] and [26] and

"Fortunately for Gmail, they've recently found a rather clever solution that enables the thousands of Google engineers to add new ui features: Gmail Labs. This is also where Google's "20% time" comes in -- if you want innovation, it's critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of "20%" is not the time, but rather the "license" it gives to work on things that "aren't important"....One of the best ways to enable prototyping and innovation on an established product is though an API. Twitter is possibly the best example of how well this can work. There are thousands of different Twitter clients, with new ones being written every day, and I believe a majority of Twitter messages are entered though one of these third-party clients.

Public APIs enable everyone to experiment with new ideas and create new ways of using your product. This is incredibly powerful because no matter how brilliant you and your coworkers are, there are always going to be smarter people outside of your company. " [27]

"In essence, modern C and C++ compilers assume no programmer would dare attempt undefined behavior. A programmer writing a program with a bug? Inconceivable! " -- Russ Cox

"Perfection is our goal. Excellence will be tolerated." -- TQM Motto from the International Association of Business Communication via http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/words.html

"There is no a priori reason why a human being should not combine the qualities, say, of Einstein, Shakespeare, Mozart, Darwin, J.M.W. Turner, a nuthatch and a pocket calculator. Indeed, there is no a priori reason why such a paragon should not be considered ordinary." -- Colin Tudge via http://www.aleph.se/Nada/Game/BigIdeas/sol.html

“Everything should be built top-down, except the first time” -- Alan Perlis

“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.” -- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

"As an example, when you hear a politician say something outrages, insane, or crazy. Instead of thinking "oh my, what a fool this person is", consider that they may be performing, in a way agreed upon by his or her follow politicians. They know it isn't true, but that doesn't matter, because the audience doesn't care." [28]

"spot Kayfabe and realize that certain rivalries exist for the sole purpose of propping each other up" [29]

"If something seems fake to me, but I am not sure if _you_ believe it is fake or not (and vice versa), we both might pretend something is real for the sake of not offending one another...(originally from Timur Kuran) called "preference falsification": if no one has to falsify their beliefs, we might just _state_ things we don't actually believe in, since we don't know what other people actually believe, and we don't want to run the risk of being ostracized." alex petralia

"If you're searching for something important...find one good enough, then search a bit more" and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23020264

" > The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation.

This is very powerful. Reminds me of the "system 1 vs system 2" discussion, and some descriptions of e.g. ADHD and depression causing what could be described as "failure to terminate in self-negotiation". " [30]

"Don't get me wrong, I like humans. Some of my best friends are human. But if you repeatedly put a human in a position where they can cause a catastrophic failure, you'll eventually get a catastrophe." -- Dan Luu

"For reliable systems, error handling is more work than the happy path." -- Dan Luu

"When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years." -- Dan Luu

"they say the S in IoT? stands for Security" -- Jonnax

"if henry ford went asking his customers what they wanted, he would have been working on making horses faster."

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them." -- Steve Jobs

"I do not like that man. I must get to know him better". -- Abraham Lincoln. As quoted in Costs of Administering Reparation for Work Injuries in Illinois (1952) by Alfred Fletcher Conard; also in Residence Laws : Road Block to Human Welfare, a Symposium (1956), p. 28

" 1) ...Every person is inherently valuable independent of behavior and beliefs. Everyone matters. Treat people accordingly, without exception. ... 3) Meaningful = Hard: If something worthwhile appears easy, it means I got lucky. Or, I've never done it. ... 4) Base Rate: The average of how others do is the mostly likely indicator of my future performance. ... 5) Messy: Life is messy. People are messy. Business is messy. Relationships are messy. I’m messy. Messiness should never be surprising. Give myself and others grace. ... 6) Margin of Safety/Redundancy: Stuff happens. Expect it and be prepared... ... 7) Serving vs. Served: The great paradox of life is self-sacrificial service. More I ...give, with no expectation of reciprocity, the better life goes for others and me.... ... compounding, with unexpectedly positive and negative outcomes ... Living for fame and recognition is like chasing the wind. I try re-read Ecclesiastes monthly. ... " [31]

"Every person is inherently valuable independent of behavior and beliefs. Everyone matters. Treat people accordingly, without exception" [32]

"No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid." [33]

"Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions.

A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them.

An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why.

Imagine the responses to these two questions:

"I also find a similar technique useful when searching online. If you search "do Aliens exist?" or "does teflon cause cancer" you're guaranteed to find articles that match the bias of your question. Instead, search "extraterrestrial life" or "teflon health effects" or similar terms that are likely to match articles that both agree and disagree with the premise in question. You will end up significantly more informed from the results." [35]

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through." -- Ira Glass

“… the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

"Simple Systems Have Less Downtime" -- Greg Kogan

"Simple systems fail in boring ways. Complex systems fail in fascinating, unexpected ways." [36]

"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake." -- H. L. Mencken

"Sauron was 54,000 years old when he forged The One Ring. It's never too late to follow your dreams!" (random quote from https://dustri.org/b/my-favourite-c-footgun.html )

"... if someone (or the news) tells me what to think about someone, without telling (or far better SHOWING) me exactly what they did, I tend to just reserve judgement. Even then, it’s easy to make someone look like the jerk by omission of important information." -- [37]

"Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact."--Henri Poincaré

"When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same...sources...and were fed the same...story." -- [38]

"...distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't." -- [39]

"...the Roman concept of honor proceeding out of a capacity and a drive (that is, virtus) which is bound, restrained by prudence, a sense of justice, discipline and a sense of propriety deeply appealing. I’ve found comfort in Stoic thought (particularly the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a work that is due for a ‘Trip Through…’ essay sometime), profundity in St. Augustine, been challenged by Plato and Lucretius and so on. And to be clear, it is not only the Greek and Latin traditions that have this power (I give a number of examples of works outside of the Greek and Latin canon that have influenced me in my post on the humanities)." [40]

" Umberto Eco’s famous essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) which presented one of the most compelling classifications of the foundational DNA that all of the various, disparate forms of fascism share in common. I’d encourage everyone to find a copy of the essay (alas, it is not in the public domain), but in it Eco presents a 14-point definition of ‘Ur-Fascism’ the root substance of fascist ideology:

    The Cult of Tradition
    A Rejection of Modernism (and thus Enlightenment rationalism)
    The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake
    A Rejection of Disagreement
    A Fear of Difference (or rejection of diversity)
    An Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class
    Nationalism
    Conspiratorial Thinking
    Life as Permanent Warfare
    Contempt for the Weak
    The Cult of Death / Everybody of Educated to become a hero
    Hyper-masculinity / Machismo
    Selective Populism
    Newspeak (the ‘Big Lie’ is perhaps a more common phrasing these days)" -- [41]

"So while it is true that the state derives its power from violence (as in Mao’s famous quip that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”), the state is not the only center of authority within a society. And indeed, even the state cannot run entirely on violence; this is the point that Hannah Arendt makes in the famous dichotomy of violence and power. In many cases, what Heinlein’s premise does is mistake violence for power, assuming that the ability to violently compel action is the same as the power to coordinate or encourage action without violence. But in fact, successful organizations (including, but not limited to, states) are possessed not of lots of violence but of lots of power, with much of that power rooted in norms, social assumptions, unstated social contracts and personal relationships that exist entirely outside of the realm of violence.

And so in both theory and practice, Heinlein’s premise fails to actually describe human societies of any complexity. There are no doubt gangs and robber-bands that have functioned entirely according to Heinlein’s premise (and presumably some very committed anarchists who might want such a society), but the very march of complex social institutions suggests that such organizations were quite routinely out-competed by societies with complex centers of authority that existed beyond violence, which enabled specialization (notably something Heinlein disapproves of generally, ‘specialization is for insects’) and thus superior performance both in war and in peace. Kings and empires that try to rule purely with force, without any attention paid to legitimacy or other forms of power (instead of violence) fail, and typically fail rapidly. " [42]

"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world" Hannah Arendt, On Violence (80)

"They derive from the old notion of absolute power . . . coincide with the terms used since Greek antiquity to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man — of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy. Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called rule by Nobody. . . . rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done." Hannah Arendt, On Violence (39)

“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted” Hannah Arendt, On Violence (81)

"a bureaucracy is a “tyranny without a tyrant”" Hannah Arendt, On Violence (81) via https://medium.com/thrice-removed/hannah-arendts-on-violence-57c0af0bfeb1

"Power and violence are opposites. Where one rules absolutely, the other is absent" Hannah Arendt, On Violence

"Sparta had a formidable military reputation, but their actual battlefield performance hardly backed it up. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Sparta lost as often as it won" -- [43]

"...societies cannot help but replicate their own peacetime social order on the battlefield" -- [44] -- Bret Devereaux

"...tolerance is the price of principles, and they're only principles when they are hard to keep." -- [45]

"We’re surrounded by moving, energy-shifting self-directed hunks of insanely complex nanotechnology, performing functions we don’t completely understand in ways we don’t completely understand...the only reason that we can use the word “understand” (or any words at all) is because of even more insane emergent phenomena called “consciousness”, “intelligence”, and “language”. We wouldn’t believe that such creatures, such constructs, such staggering lurching heaps of molecular machinery were even possible if we weren’t ones ourselves. But since we are, we just don’t think about it much." -- Derek Lowe

"...evolution’s motto is “Hey man, whatever works”." -- Derek Lowe

"If you make something foolproof, they just build a better fool." -- [46]

"To be an epic, a work has to begin in media res, take place in multiple lands, contain a long catalog of objects, include a talking ship, feature divine intervention, et cetera. But most of all, it had to have a journey into Hell." -- [47]

"It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand" -- A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

"Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. ...Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived name of physics, chemistry and biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits of relativity theory, evolution theory and phlogiston theory, although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each...

In such a culture men would use expressions such as 'neutrino', 'mass', 'specific gravity', 'atomic weight' in systematic and often interrelated ways which would resemble in lesser or greater degrees the ways in which such expressions had been used in earlier times before scientific knowledge had been so largely lost. But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application...What would appear to be rival and competing premises for which no further argumentation could be given would abound. Subjectivist theories of science would appear and would be criticised by those who held that the notion of truth embodied in what they took to be science was incompatible with subjectivism." -- MacIntyre?'s After Virtue

“the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” -- Amos Tversky

" If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted.

In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary.

The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. " -- Attributed to J. J. Thompson by Lord Rayleigh, c. 1940

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html?repostindays=413

"The previous post on the blog has an observation that applies to languages as well

 "Software has a Peter Principle. If a piece of code is comprehensible, someone will extend it, so they can apply it to their own problem. If it’s incomprehensible, they’ll write their own code instead. Code tends to be extended to its level of incomprehensibility."" -- [48] commenting on a quote from Simon Morris via [49]

"...organizations need not and should not elevate spokespeople and leaders who speak regularly on unrelated issues that organizations find do not advance their mission, and/or that alienate important constituents." [50]

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." -Teller

"The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power." [51]

"If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.

If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing. " [52]

"... if you have an apple and I have an apple, and we swap apples — we each end up with only one apple. But if you and I have an idea and we swap ideas — we each end up with two ideas." --- Charles F. Brannan (1949)

“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” -- Lenard Nimoy's last tweet

"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." -- Samuel Johnson

"...I've also seen it arise as a simple "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation. Ironically, the one thing from Scrum that I like without reservation is also the first one to get thrown out the window: the idea that exactly one person gets to decide the development team's priorities. Because if you allow n people to collaboratively allocate a scarce resource, they will allocate it to n * 100%, every single time." -- mumblemumble

"...what I remember about journalism in the 80s was a common sense of confusion and dismay that the job of a journalist had mutated from "reporting facts" to "telling stories" -- specifically I remember polls of graduating journalism majors; for the first time the claimed motivation for choosing the field was "changing the world."" -- [53]

"The two fundamental ways in which distributed computing differs from single-server/machine computing are.

1. No shared memory. 2. No shared clock. ... Added to this is the failure modes that are peculiar to distributed systems, be it transient/permanent link failures and transient/permaent server failures. " Vishnu Gupta

"Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."– Edward Lorenz

"Be careful, if you are killed in real life you die in VR too." - TD_4242

"The opening exposition of book 2 descends into the details of atoms’ behaviour and qualities. They are in perpetual motion at enormous speed, since in the void they get no resistance from the medium, and when they collide they can only be deflected, not halted. Their weight gives them an inherent tendency to move downwards, but collisions can divert those motions in other directions. The result is that, when in a cosmic arrangement, atoms build up complex and relatively stable patterns of motion, which at the macroscopic level appear to us as states of rest or relatively gentle motion. Lucretius compares a flock of sheep on a distant hillside, which appears as a stationary white patch, even though close up the constituent sheep prove to be in motion (2.317–22). The most celebrated part of this account, however, is at 2.216–93 (see extended textual discussion in Fowler 2002), where Lucretius maintains that not only to explain how atomic collisions can occur in the first place, but also to account for the evident fact of free will in the animal kingdom, it is necessary to postulate a minimal indeterminacy in the motions of atoms, an unpredictable ‘swerve’ (clinamen) ‘at no fixed place or time’. Otherwise we would all be automata, our motions determined by infinitely extended and unbreakable causal chains. A striking resemblance to the indeterminacy postulated by modern quantum physics—which has also often been invoked in debates about determinism—has helped make this passage the subject of particularly intense debate." -- [54] Lucretius's explanation of the Epicurean theory of atoms and atomic swerve (clinamen)

"In the late seventeenth century, the philosopher Epicurus and his garden made a comeback in England. Natural philosophers looked to his arguments about atomic swerve to understand the cosmos, and translations of Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, the primary classical source for dissemination of Epicurus’s ideas, went through multiple English translations by a diverse group of enthusiasts" -- [55]

"At the center of Epicurean philosophy lies the garden, a symbol for Epicurus’s philosophical ideal of ataraxia, or tranquil pleasure." -- [56]

"The idea of Epicureanism as a state of virtuous tranquility or simple living has not survived in popular understandings of the word “Epicurean.” It became associated with a pleasure ideal followed by Charles II’s court libertines, who misused the term in writing about their sensory pleasures. It was precisely these sorts of pleasures that Epicurus and Lucretius discouraged their followers from pursuing. They argued that it disrupted the mind and caused unhappiness, frustration, and depression. Lucretius spends an entire book (Book 4)–which Dryden translates in Sylvae–in On the Nature of the Universe in dissuading humans from sexual promiscuity along with other excesses, including gluttony. Ironically, a Google search of the term “Epicurean” will yield more results for food, wine, and kitchen products than it will for anything Epicurus or Lucretius valued–friendship, moderation, and gardening–all pursuits cultivating virtue and the life of the active body and mind. That is not to say that Epicurus or Lucretius disavow all sensory pleasures, and the garden Temple describes is abundant with procreative purpose. He genders certain plants as strong and masculine and describes the eroticism of the plants, redefining the idea of sensuous experience in an age when debauchery still ruled the court. " -- [57]

"The physical garden was to Temple and other Epicureans a reflection of one’s mental landscape, and in the best of all possible worlds, one would stay in the garden–a position that Voltaire would later and more famously endorse in Candide. That is, if duty–a Stoic ideal of virtue–didn’t intervene...Temple most admired Lucretius’s arguments for retreat into a natural space where even the poorest of humans might experience the noblest of tranquil virtues, thereby rivaling or surpassing kings in the simple acts of growing, weeding, planting, and reaping." -- [58]

"...all the authors of Benares and Siam agree that mankind lived an infinity of centuries before having the intelligence to make laws; and they prove it by an unanswerable reason, which is that even to-day when everyone plumes himself on his intelligence, no way has been found of making a score of passably good laws." [59]

"communication occurs only between equals" [60]

"Another approach is the differential technology development principle (Bostrom 2014, pp. pp.229–237): if potentially harmful technologies are developed more slowly than technologies reducing their risks, their benefits will become available with less risk. This can be achieved by focusing funding and research priorities on the harm reduction technologies." [61]

"I firmly believe the Internet, and what it stood for, peaked with RSS." [62]

"Plans that change constantly are failing plans. When your plans are constantly changing, it is a sign that you either are making plans that express a certainty you don’t have, or you haven’t done your research to get the right certainty in place." [63]

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

"There's no simple way to..." (a useful phrase)

"What changes would be helpful?" (a useful phrase)

“What do you think needs to happen here?” Or, “What would be your ideal scenario?” Another question leading to solutions is: “How could I support you?” (useful phrases)

"The definition of abstraction as “treating things which are different as if they were the same” comes from Liskov’s Abstraction and Specification in Program Development" via [64]

" “About 30 different primate species reconcile after fights, and that reconciliation is not limited to the primates. There is evidence for this mechanism in hyenas, dolphins, wolves, domestic goats. ... actively try to preserve harmony within their social network ... by reconciling after conflict, protesting against unequal divisions, and breaking up fights among others. They behave normatively in the sense of correcting, or trying to correct, deviations from an ideal state. They also show emotional self-control and anticipatory conflict resolution in order to prevent such deviations. This makes moving from primate behaviour to human moral norms less of a leap than commonly thought.” -- Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal

"...the Paperclip Principle states that an NLP model may be more powerful than it seems at first." -- GPT-3

"Never compare your beginning to someone else's middle." via _phred

"Cain cites studies showing that introverts are better at leading proactive employees because they listen to and let them run with their ideas, while extroverts are better at leading passive employees because they have a knack for motivation and inspiration." -- Wikipedia on Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, citing Goudreau, Jenna, "The Secret Power Of Introverts", Forbes, January 26, 2012. "It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions. Another thing I notice about this list is that it sounds like a list of the ways people behave on Twitter. Whatever else social media is, it's a vivid catalogue of ways not to be earnest. " -- [http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html

"...people with limited understanding of business think that business is all about making profits. But those who actually run businesses know that running a business is all about managing cash flows." [65]

"The content you want to stay disappears. The content you want to disappear stays forever." -- zigzaggy's law

"Espirit de corps, more commonly called teamwork, is the most important factor in leadership and this can not be asserted. It must be earned. It is not high aim, or courage, knowledge, wisdom, nor even the fighting spirit that keeps enterprises of great pith from going astray in spite of treachery, treasons, stratagems and spoils. It is personal loyalty, not loyalty to abstract principals, but unshakeable personal, never-failing loyalty which gives support in the clinches. The greatest satisfaction is to find you have loyal friends. The others are not worth a tinker's damn." -- Robert Moses

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.... Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself... The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization." -- [66]

"I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already high enterprise value higher. The “maker:taker” opportunity ratio changes, and so does the type of personality the organization attracts." -- notSupplied

"I have a similar theory as to why rapidly growing companies become toxic environments (of which politics and turf wars are a symptom). When a company is small and has a low profile, its employees are in it for the company. They believe in the product or service that the company is creating, and but into its mission.

When the company becomes successful and starts to grow, it starts to attract people who don't really care about the company and its mission—they are in it only for themselves. They only want to improve their lot, and are willing to play politics and backstab as required to get ahead..

If the company is only growing slowly, they can weed these types out during the interview process. But if they are growing quickly, they don't have time to interview properly and slowly and surely the company is transformed from a cooperative, mission-driven organization to one where employees are fighting against themselves.

Unfortunately these politically minded types are the ones who quickly rise up the ranks, and once most of the top areas of the company are populated by assholes, there is no cure. " -- khendron

"The entire skillset involved with gaining power is so time-consuming, it's incredibly rare for someone to have it and an actual technical skill at the same time." -- seph-reed

"I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong." -- Frederick Douglass, Lecture, The Anti-Slavery Movement (1855)

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” -- Cardinal Richelieu (a/k/a Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac)

"...the credit for an invention doesn't go to the first person to create something, but to the first person to explain it well enough that no one else needs to invent it again afterwards." Robin Milner, as paraphrased by David Chisnall

"Move fast and break stuff! ...But maybe not that stuff over there because it's actually quite critical" (paraphrase of cjonas)

"The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else." - Melinda Varian

"GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24593616

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

"Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Lisper got to sit and wonder, (Y (Y Y))? Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Lisper got to tell himself he understand." -- Kurt Vonnegut, modified by Darius Bacon.

"I'm kind of the opinion that there is no such thing as optimizing your time, only the way you distribute your energy and focus." -- ksec

" ..."confused deputy", which is when a system was tricked into performing an action that the initiator of the action was not supposed to have the permission to do, but a middle-layer (deputy) did." -- Goran Weinholt

"Building trust is the first task of community." -- Lion Kimbro, [67]

"When I say a 'cultivating a visionary mindset'; I mean that the inhabitants are transforming their way of thinking from contemporary post-religious post-philosophical based thinking: that the sense-world is the only world that exists or matters, that there is nothing to be found outside of the survival of the human being or the survival of the society -- towards a world in which life happens on the screen of experience, including the experience of dreams and ideals and magic, and people are excited about transforming the world into the magical place that we intuively feel it to be in our spiritual imagination, that is everywhere evident in our movies and fantasies and dreams at night. The reason that this is a crucial first step, is because... ((otherwise)) ((otherwise is not an exact translation, i elided a lot here)) we will get a fate worse than total annihilation, nuclear bombs, and so on -- instead, what we will get are endless boxes of oreo cookies, dating apps, lonely people, yet another video game, yet another movie, just like the last movie, the silent disappointment that pervades everything, endless mediocrity and ordinariness." -- Lion Kimbro, [68]

"Never attack another man's motive, because you don't know his motive" -- Mike Mansfield [69]

"I used to love Perl until the world told me to stop because the syntax was too noisy. Now I'm embedding JavaScript? expressions in CSS in JSX in ES6 and being told this is an evolved state." -- tootie

"an uncontrolled, desire-fueled,over-indulged soul is turned from a king into that most feared & detested thing-a tyrant" -- Seneca

"None of us is as dumb as all of us" -- Unknown

"I asked my doctor when we'd be over Covid-19. He said, "How should I know? I'm a doctor, not a politician."" -- various

---

"Spending even a few minutes on public social media can expose us to dozens of people we know little about, talking about things we know little about. In such a public place, any individual's reputation, perspectives, and history are difficult to ascertain, and therefore their words must be taken at face value. Coupled with an almost complete lack of standards for participation in the community and a high degree of variance in knowledge among participants, and the environment naturally skews toward conflict and tribalism." -- https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

"A true rules is the wielder of names. By names she cuts the world as she pleases, and she cuts herself into greater forms still. She is not shaped by the world, but instead becomes the shaper" -- the character Zoss in the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons, https://killsixbilliondemons.com/comic/wielder-of-names-5-95/

" mc32 7 hours ago

unvote [–]

Historically speaking, when the world was small towns and rural, “surveillance” was a fact of life. Everyone knew someone who knew someone else.

The big difference is that surveillance was localized and didn’t follow the person.

If someone did a crime or did something against local mores and got ostracized they could skip town and settle somewhere else to begin anew. Now, of course being the new person in a new place you were under scrutiny, but as long as you followed local practices your old peccadilloes or even crimes didn’t follow you.

...

wongarsu 6 hours ago

unvote [–]

Not only did this locality allow people to recover from past mistakes, it also limited the power of any one actor. As soon as a town loses faith in a ruler (or other large actor) that ruler loses the ability to locate more radical dissidents in that town. That's how revolutions are possible.

With total surveillance any revolution movement can be efficiently destroyed before it gains any momentum. That removes an important check on any government's (or corporation's) power.

reply

" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23651050

"You can't tell people anything" -- http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/

"Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company," he said. "Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time...Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps." -- https://www.wired.com/2013/09/ev-williams-xoxo/

"The framework I’d propose is this: If you want to build high-performance systems, focus first on reducing performance variance (reducing the gap between the fastest and slowest runs of the same code), and only look at average latency once variance is at an acceptable level." -- [70]

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through." -- Ira Glass

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

"I think we keep collectively forgetting this isn't the kind of comic where ancient undead elves give powerful magic boons to the hero, it's a comic where a girl loses her hair clip and a zombie spends 50+ chapters trying to get it back to her." -- zbeeblebrox

"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 develop- ment is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." -- http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf Admiral Hyman Rickover

"While in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is."

"The trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot. And if people are yelling, 'Swing, you bum!,' ignore them." -- Warren Buffett (in "Becoming Warren Buffett")

"Deny, deny, deny — even if the truth is obvious" -- Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general, https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000006188102/what-is-pizzagate.html via https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html

"The unnerving thing about running a company is watching all of your personal flaws accidentally become codified in the culture of the organization and come to life three years later as actions of employees you've never really spoken to" -- Austen Allred

"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate." - Michael Leavitt, former HHS Secretary under President George W. Bush

"Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I’m happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion. Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others." --  William Thurston, Fields-medal winning mathematician

"Know your goal, know what just happened, know what to do next" -- Jeff Brown

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." -- Bill Gates

"You can’t hold someone accountable for critical information if you use a passive communication method to transmit it." -- Drew Steadman

"...effective executives start with their time, not their tasks..." -- Walter H. Gmelch, Beyond Stress to Effective Management (1982), via [71]

"If you're going through hell, keep going" -- Winston Churchill

W. V. Quine summed up a popular opinion among mathematical logicians by referring to second-order logic as “set theory in sheep’s clothing”." -- Resnik (1988: 75) via https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-higher-order/#SetTheoSheeClot

"The duty of the general is to ride by the ranks on horseback, show himself to those in danger, praise the brave, threaten the cowardly, encourage the lazy, fill up gaps, transpose a company if necessary, bring aid to wearied, anticipate the crisis, the hour, and the outcome." - Onasander

"You have to make a choice. Either everyone gets to spy, or no one gets to spy. You can't have 'We get to spy, you don't.' That's not the way the tech works," -- Bruce Schneier

 "The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." -- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, 

"People will take your idea and make it theirs if you don’t publish them (e-mail should suffice). It’s worse when they move up the corporate ladder on the basis of your idea." -- egberts1

"The amount of work to know anything in meatspace with any certainty is huge. And this is why everyone trusts their favourite anecdotes: the alternative is not getting anything done." -- l0b0

"...ask “How can this be better?” instead of “What do you think [of my work]?” Invite collaboration, not criticism, and you’ll get more useful feedback — and create better work..." -- https://twitter.com/BobPritchett/status/1216582233567318017

"...95% of the workforce is there just to collect their checks and they will do everything in their power to protect that privilege." -- bitxbit

"Do not fear large companies. They are inefficient and not necessarily well guided in their decision making processes. " -- rnernento

"Providing a service sucks way more than having a product if you value your work-life balance." -- jklinger410

"No one checks anything. Everyone just assumes everyone else is doing their job and doing it properly. Even if checking things is part of someone else's job, it's usually done half-assed. Actually verifying the important stuff (and sometimes the less-important stuff) opens up a world of potential where your business discovers all kinds of missed opportunities, incorrect work, etc." -- turc1656

"Most people are bad at math. And most people are also financially illiterate. Which by extension makes a huge majority of people really, really terrible at personal finance and financial planning (for themselves or their business). This also applies to a lot of smart and successful people." -- turc1656

"Every organizational structure that human beings create yields towards tyranny/abuse over time. Doesn't matter what you are talking about - government, business, anything. Over time nearly everything somehow seems to become these oligopolistic style structures where there are a few hugely powerful entities and then everyone else." -- turc1656

"Related to the previous point, far more things follow the pareto distribution than I could have imagined. In fact it seems to apply to anything that either has any creative aspect to it at all or to non-creative endeavors if they have any sort of scalability to them. There's a small group of people that are so insanely efficient and productive that it's almost impossible to comprehend. For example, I used to work with a guy who was working full time with me and started his own side business which was an online SaaS? that he paid someone to create for him after he wrote up all the requirements and he did all the testing. While this was going on he also spent every free second trading cryptocurrencies and made a small fortune doing that. When the product was ready he launched it and manually sought out retail (end consumer) clients one by one via things like Discord chat rooms where he would pump his software that was tailored to individuals. He spoke to literally thousands and thousands of people and convinced them to sign up. Then he had a recurring monthly revenue which dwarfed his (already high) salary so he quit to pursue it. He continued to get clients and now has north of 15,000, most manually acquired. He's working on launching a sister product now. It baffles me how he can even do like half of what he does." -- turc1656

"In business, managers are very hesitant to grant permission but much more likely to grant forgiveness for not following procedure. So in many cases it is usually better to just do whatever it is you think is best for the business and try to improves things however you can if the rules are (or will) prevent you. The personal boost here is also that your manager also thinks your plate is fully loaded with whatever it is they've already assigned to you. Then you shock them with this big thing you've also been working on and they're shocked you were able to take that on. Win/win." -- turc1656

"Rational thinking is computationally intractable." -- me

"Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible." -- http://paulgraham.com/useful.html

"People keep forging shackles and never pause to ask if the manacles might fit their wrists, as well." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22416121

"It's got the taste that can't be beat, Grandma's chicken feet!" -- [72]