"An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety
of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements
are speculative."

-Ben Graham, from chapter 1 of The Intelligent Investor


"you can scare most people most of the time, but you can't scare all of the people all of the time -- some will always use Common Lisp." ~Erik Naggum


Repeat after me: Profit is not determined by how much value you create, it is determined by how much of that value you can capture.

Some value isn't easily captured and that's a perfectly legitimate reason for nonprofits to exist.~Eliezer


"Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy" - Tim O'Reilly.


"I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out. The kick in the discovery. The observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me."~Feynman


When you point your finger at someone in judgment, just remember there are 3 fingers pointing back at you.~IT


La théorie des probabilités n'est que le bon sens reduit au calcul. -Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace


"So in conclusion, I'm not gonna vote for anybody just 'cause they're black or Latino. They have to truly represent the community and represent what's good for all of us proletariat." - Immortal Technique


If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.
    -- Bertrand Russell



Learn to pause -- or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.


Every Excel spreadsheet which has ever been emailed is a startup waiting to be born.


From http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html Larry Wall says: "Modernism is also a
Cult of Originality. It didn’t matter if the sculpture was hideous, as long as
it was original. It didn’t matter if there was no music in the music.
Plagiarism was the greatest sin. … The Cult of Originality shows up in computer
science as well. For some reason, many languages that came out of academia
suffer from this. Everything is reinvented from first principles (or in some
cases, zeroeth principles), and nothing in the language resembles anything in
any other language you’ve ever seen. And then the language designer wonders why
the language never catches on. … In case you hadn’t noticed, Perl is not big on
originality."

Jessica Livingston wrote in the introduction to *Founders at Work*: "People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

"Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle. It's curious to think that the technology we take for granted now, like web-based email, was once dismissed as unpromising. As Howard Aiken said, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.""

C. S. Lewis says: "No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought."

Twyla Tharp (I can't remember who this is, but this is also in my quotes file..): "Honey, it’s <i>all</i> been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself."

'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'

Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html


Pour la canaille(masses), il faut la mitraille.(shotgun-canon) ~Duke of Wellington (la mitrailleuse = machine gun)

They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when
not actually threatened.  How very nice for authority.  I decided not to
learn this particular lesson.
    -- Richard Stallman

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no
longer believe you.
		-- Nietzsche

There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to allow giving it away to imaginary beings. - Nietzsche

He who was my companion through adventure and hardship is gone forever. ~Gilgamesh

If a test in no way distinguishes between knowledge gained by different methods it has no right to call one method 'cheating', no matter what it may claim. ~wedrifid

It's not so much that people don't value the programs after they
have them--they do value them.  But they're not the sort of thing
that would ever catch on if they had to overcome the marketing
barrier.  (I don't yet know if perl will catch on at all--I'm
worried enough about it that I specifically included an awk-to-perl
translator just to help it catch on.)  Maybe it's all just an
inferiority complex.  Or maybe I don't like to be mercenary.

So I guess I'd say that the reason some software comes free is that
the mechanism for selling it is missing, either from the work
environment, or from the heart of the programmer.

-- Larry Wall, January 12, 1988 <992@devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>


We say, “I can make a change because I have tests.” Who does that? Who drives their car around banging into the guard rails!? - Rich Hickey

What type of runner can run full speed from the very start of the race? That's right. Someone who runs very short distances. But as programmers, we are smarter than that. We just fire the starter pistol again every 100 yards.  I don’t know why runners haven’t figured that out. - Rich Hickey


"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." ~Charles Darwin

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." ~Bertrand Russell

"But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective.  I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way.  At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change."
        -- John K Clark

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
        -- Philip K. Dick

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
        -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"You can only compromise your principles once.  After then you don't have any."
        -- Smug Lisp Weeny

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
        -- Black Belt Bayesian

"Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid."
        -- Spider Robinson, Distraction

"People want to think there is some huge conspiracy run by evil geniuses.  The reality is actually much more horrifying.  The people running the show aren't evil geniuses.  They are just as stupid as the rest of us."
        -- Vaksel

"Rule of thumb:  Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read.  E.g., religion."
        -- Ben Casnocha

"I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own.  It seems rather like
wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting
to be a writer, rather than wanting to write.  It should be a by-product, not a
thing in itself.  Otherwise, it's just an ego trip."
--Roger Zelazny, Prince of Chaos

"We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts.  Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them."
        -- John K Clark

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance."
        -- Edward Flaherty

"Perfection is our goal. Excellence will be tolerated."
-- J. Yahl

"Beware 'We should', extend a hand to 'How do I'... --Alan Cox, from http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/10/13/1423253/featurecathedrals-bazaars-and-the-town-council

"An open mind is a great place for other people to dump their garbage."
        -- Rev. Rock, Church of the Subgenius

"The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even
an ounce of responsibility.  If you were dating the mind, all your friends
would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being
alone isn't all that bad, anyway.  If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you
would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and
the remaining one crowned 'King of the Pit'."
-- Lore Sjoberg

<silverpower> Is humanity even worth saving?
<starglider> As opposed to what?
<silverpower> ...hmm.
-- #sl4

"Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the
suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and
they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the
line at things that are really wrong."
-- Paul Graham

"The popular media can only handle ideas expressible in proto-language, not ideas requiring nested phrase-structure syntax for their exposition."
        -- Ben Goertzel

"The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut
the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch
the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is
essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or
touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than
anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting
him."
-- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

"You can win with a long weapon, and yet you can also win with a short weapon. In short, the Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size."
-- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

"We don't do science for the general public. We do it for each other. Good day."
        -- Renato Dalbecco, complete text of interview with H F Judson
(good counter rebuttal to 'but public funding!' is: the public gets their reasonable
explanation and value back when the research is published, one shouldn't have to take time out
of research to pander in the interim.)

"Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman."
        -- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

"NORMAL is a setting on a washing-machine."
        -- Nikolai Kingsley

"As for the little green men... they don't want us to know about them, so they refrain from making contact... then they do silly aerobatics displays within radar range of military bases... with their exterior lights on... if that's extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not sure I want to know what extraterrestrial stupidity looks like."
        -- Russell Wallace

The problem is, that's a one-shot prisoner's dilemma [trying to trade good course evaluations for good final exam grades], and a microecon professor ranks just below a literal sociopath in terms of how likely he is to defect on the one-shot prisoner's dilemma. ~Nominull

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon    'Russell was speaking of logical constructions in this memorable passage from his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy: “The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. Let us leave them to others and proceed with our honest toil.” (1919, p. 71) '

"Welcome to your new careers. If you can’t deal with this sort of change on a regular basis … there’s the door. Go get a refund and go drive a beer truck." -Tom Green

"Be Ashamed to Die, Until You Have Scored Some Victory for Humanity" --Horace Mann

"The reader who has read the book but cannot do the exercises has learned nothing." --J.J. Sakurai

"What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It's overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball." -Jerry Cleaver

"Remember, entrepreneurs: this is how academics think. And this is the attitude that makes begging for money via grants a lot more appealing than entrepreneurship. It's "give me money to do this because I'm an expert in it" instead of "make something people want and they will give you money.""--ghc

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side." --Orwell

"The lineage of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Jefferson infects only a few nerds, stoners and other freaks. (And the world, of course, has gone to hell in a handbasket.) Is this just a coincidence?" --Moldbug

"If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results." --Isaac Newton
(no source for this?)

Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason
that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it
English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish
a sufficiently broad range of tasks.
        -- Bill Garrett

I can't find an efficient algorithm, but neither can all these famous people.

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.
--Ira Glass


Take as your life's objective the goal of getting money for doing
your own thing. You were born to do this. Never lose sight of
this and settle for second best because this is one compromise
that will guarantee unhappiness. Leave that kind of compromise
to others - they were born for it. You are not.
-- Mark Tarver
http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006-05/msg00080.html

http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=54912

"When picking fruit, an excellent first choice is the low-hanging ladderfruit. It is especially delicious."
--Frank Adamek

"Don't ask whether predictions are made, ask whether predictions are implied."
--Steven Kaas

dpatru 337 days ago | link

One of the first cases in a law school tort class is Katko v Briney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney). Briney was a farmer fed up with a break-ins of an abandoned house that he owned. He set up a shotgun to shoot at an intruder's knees if and when the intruder forced the door. Katko, a trespasser, broke in and was shot and injured, sued and won. The quote I remember is (I had to look it up):

‘The value of human life and limb, not only to the individual concerned but also to society, so outweights the interest of a possessor of land in excluding from it those whom he is not willing to admit thereto that a possessor of land has . . . no privilege to use force intended or likely to cause death or serious harm against another whom the possessor sees about to enter his premises or meddle with his chattel, unless the intrusion threatens death or serious bodily harm to the occupiers or users of the premises.

"... if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." - Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel coding style (partly justifying why the Linux kernel style uses 8-space indentation)
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html


"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people).  But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."

  -- Richard Stallman (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)

"A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies."

--Stefan Banach

"Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong--and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to." --Eric S. Raymond

“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”- Frank Zappa

Lowery's Law:
  If it jams -- force it.  If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.

"The escapism we choose reflects on our real ambitions, were we able or bold enough to pursue them." -- jandrog

"Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand." --Tom Bissell

"The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I'd rather use them to mimic something better." E.W. Dijkstra

20:20 <dash> well that confirms my impression that arch was invented by a bunch of guys who thought gentoo was too stable and easy to use

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious. --Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month

His promises were, as he then was, mighty;
But his performance, as he is now, nothing.
Shakespeare, King Henry VIII

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer . . . is marriageableness.”

4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

You are monsters. Irredeemable in the extreme. And I would be grimly satisfied to see you burn to death. -- Richard Kulisz

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ~ William James

I came just for you, because in all my understanding of love it's true that I love you, and all of you, both your great qualities and your bad ones. ~Me

"In class - in my English class - you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call "Standard White English" because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES at this point vary too widely to standardize.] I'm respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is just How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it's racist and unfair and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I'll tell you something - if you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you're going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our nation uses to talk to itself... And [STUDENT'S NAME], you're going to learn to use it... because I am going to make you."

- David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage

Richard Carrier: Supernatural models contain ontologically basic mental elements.

Erik: My objection to the KONY stuff is that the suggestion is roughly "Let us meddle some more in Africa". There is a case to be made for bringing back colonialism, and there is a case for leaving Africa alone, but I am really not convinced by the argument to prune Africa like it's a bonsai tree of a continent that will grow into a good shape if snipped intermittently.
Erik: Especially not if the pruning schedule is to be set by viral videos (read: the mob).

The legitimate purpose of formalization lies in the reduction of the tacit coefficient to more limited and obvious informal operations; but it is nonsensical to aim at the total elimination of our personal participation. -- Michael Polanyi

"Perhaps seven small black spaceships can become one big white one? -
Perhaps I would like something to drink? -
Yes, that seems more likely."

- The Ruler of the Galaxy, in the original The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a radioplay, by the BBC radiophonic workshop

It's not the strongest nor most intelligent of the species that survive; it is the one most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin, p.111

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
Sir Antony Hoare, 1980

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.
Thinking is hard work. One can't bear burdens and ideas at the same time.
Remy de Gourmont

True dissent doesn't feel like going to school wearing black;
it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008

Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes Rule.
William B Vogt, 2010

"Source code has only 2 purposes: Being understandable by humans, and by machines."
Kim Øyhus, Mar 2003

The happiness of stupidity is closed to you.  You will never have it short of actual brain damage, and maybe not even then.  You should wonder, I think, whether the happiness of stupidity is optimal—if it is the most happiness that a human can aspire to—but it matters not.  That way is closed to you, if it was ever open. -- Eliezer

"Hack ones and zeros and earn our respect. But hack us and earn our contempt." -- edw519

I conclude that dynamic stochastic general equilibrium theory has proven itself an intellectually bankrupt enterprise. -- Axel Leijonhufvud

"The clues might differ over time. The clues that told you which monkey was Bruce ten years ago might be quite different from the ones that tell you that now. Yet you will do best to steadfastly believe in a continuing Bruceness inside all those creatures. Which is because even if he changes from an idealistic young monkey to a cynical old monkey, he still remembers that he is your friend, and all the nuances of your relationship, which is what you want keep track of. So you think of his identity as stretching through an entire life, and of not getting stronger or weaker according to his physical details."
-Katja Grace

"Seriously I am mildly uncomfortable with even referring to myself as 'I' these days because I try to keep very careful record of which factors influence my mind and how they influence me and after I add all this up it seems pretty clear to me that I do not exist."
-Cassandra2

"Very often it will be faster for you to try something out on the computer than to look it up in the manual. Besides, the computer is always right, and the manual could be wrong." --Apple II Basic Programming Manual

"We really hope you *have* been trying all the examples. Learning to program is very much like learning to ride a bicycle, play the piano, or throw a baseball. You can read all the books in the world on the subject of bicycle riding, and be a great 'paper expert.' But all this book-learning is of little help when you actually get on a bicycle for the first time. Once you have learned to ride *through experience* (which can be a bit painful), you can go almost anywhere. The same is true of programming. You can read this manual and think you understand it. But you won't be able to program. Only if you do *each example*, as it is given, will you learn to program. That's the truth." --Apple II Basic Programming Manual

"This manual's usefulness to you will self-destruct in five seconds if you don't experiment with these commands. Pfffsssss." -- Apple II Basic Programming Manual

"Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to."--Paul Graham.

"Still worse is the subjection of science to ignorant prejudices in countries controlled by dictators. Such control has extended particularly to books dealing with the subject matter of race and culture. Since nothing is permitted to be printed that runs counter to the ignorant whims and prejudices of the governing clique, there can be no trustworthy science. When a publisher whose pride used to be the number and value of his scientific books announces in his calendar a book trying to show that race mixture is not harmful, withdraws the same book after a dictator comes into power, when great encyclopedias are rewritten according to prescribed tenets, when scientists either do not dare or are not allowed to publish results contradicting the prescribed doctrines, when others, in order to advance their own material interests, or blinded by uncontrolled emotion, follow blindly the prescribed road, no confidence can be placed in their statements. The suppression of intellectual freedom rings the death knell of science." --Franz Boas

"The problem with offering “God did it” as an explanation is that such an explanation has low plausibility, is not testable, has poor consistency with background knowledge, comes from a tradition (supernaturalism) with extreme explanatory failure, lacks simplicity, offers no predictive novelty, and has poor explanatory scope. It fails to provide almost everything philosophers and scientists look for in a successful explanation. That is why “God did it” is generally a horrible explanation, not because it leaves the explanation itself (God) unexplained." --lukeprog

"One objective reality is that our government doesn't work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters" -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

"I object to teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of whatever kind they may be." ~Franz Boas

"Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism." --George Fitzhugh

"America's bright young people get squat for being Asian, 150 SAT points for being white, 300 for being "Hispanic", and 450 for being black."

Bit space in a floating point representation is almost as expensive as housing in Silicon Valley. --Fish

(06:21:43 PM) Burninate_: If you remove the selection bias, my impression is that autism today defines being in the bottom half of social and empathic capabilities, while ADD defines being in the bottom quarter of classroom suitability and compliance

"And do you think that unto such as you;
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew:
God gave the secret, and denied it me?--
Well, well, what matters it! Believe that, too."
--Omar Khayyám, translated by Richard Le Gallienne

"The single most important kind of intelligence is the ability to see past your own strongly-held preconceptions and your tribe's conventional wisdom and engage reality as it actually is and facts as they actually are." --esr

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. --Stephen F. Roberts

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." -- I.J. Good

Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
--Relayed by Nick Metropolis
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormous.html

"Look, I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you have difficulty with any programming concept, you must not be a supergenius. You're just an ordinary genius at best.

The sad truth is that there are some people for whom programming comes as naturally as thinking, with code formed as easily as thoughts; and if it takes an effort to understand any aspect of programming, you have just learned that you are not one of those people. Alas." --Eliezer

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)


"The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1." --Daniel Dvorkin

"If we compare the natural rights of a father with those of a king, we find them all one, without any difference at all but only in the latitude or extent of them: as the father over one family, so the king, as father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and defend the whole commonwealth. His war, his peace, his courts of justice, and all his acts of sovereignty, tend only to preserve and distribute to every subordinate and inferior father, and to their children, their rights and privileges, so that all the duties of a king are summed up in an universal fatherly care of his people." --Robert Filmer

"What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. ...  this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions." --Paul Graham

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3284160

"In the creative arts, demanding products to be given away leads to a situation where the creative habitat is destroyed and nothing remains for a next generation. When the creative habitat is destroyed, when nothing remains but to copy the work of an earlier generation, then what was desired has been destroyed in the act of seizing it. This is the nature of the desiring mind, which finally devours even itself after nothing else is left." --Mark Tarver

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a "DestroyBaghdad" procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a "DestroyCity" procedure, to which "Baghdad" could be given as a parameter." --Nathaniel Borenstein

St. Chrysostom: "God made all mankind of one man, that he might teach the world to be governed by a king, and not by a multitude."

"The law of nature is unchangeable, and howsoever one man may hinder another in the use or exercise of his natural right, yet thereby no man loseth the right of itself; for the right and the use of the right may be distinguished, as right and possession are oft distinct. Therefore, unless it can be proved by the law of nature that the major or some other part have power to overrule the rest of the multitude, it must follow that the acts of multitudes not entire are not binding to all but only to such as consent unto them." --Robert Filmer

Many say that DOS is the dark side, but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke. - Lore Sjoberg

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is one who says he's found it. - Brent Wade

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." --Mark Twain

"Lady Luck brings added income today.  Lady friend takes it away tonight." --fortune

"I sincerely believe that if women study male lessons on concepts of assertion, courage, destiny, purpose, honor, dreams, endeavor, perseverance, goal orientation, etc., they would have a more fulfilling life, pick better men with whom to be intimate, and have better relationships with them."
- from Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, a book by Laura C. Schlessinger

Slums in the Edwardian era: "However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote 'Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.'" http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html

Slums today: "It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times..." http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-green.html


"The reason you might want to do direct unsigned 64-bit bit-twiddling on packed bit string structures is blinding speed. It fully utilizes your CPU's ALUs. The equivalent code when limited to signed integers injects branches, extra operations, and/or requires working in 32-bit chunks, all of which slow down the code significantly and makes it uglier to boot.

For most apps it doesn't matter. For some algorithms that work on large bit strings it makes implementation in Java more painful than it needs to be." --J. Andrew Rogers

"Leave a little probability for the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese will leave you unmoved." --Dennis Lindley

"In spite of incompleteness and uncomputability and even algorithmic randomness, mathematicians don't want to give up absolute certainty. Why? Well, absolute certainty is like God." --Gregory Chaitin

"It is preferable to consider communication not with a  distant friend but with a digital computer. The friend might have the wit to make inferences about numbers or to construct a series from partial information or from vague instructions. The computer does not have that capacity, and for our purposes that deficiency is an advantage. Instructions given the computer must be complete and explicit, and they must enable it to proceed step by step." --Gregory Chaitin

"A nonrandom whole can have random parts. This is the most counterintuitive part of quantum mechanics, yet it follows from the superposition principle and is the way nature works, as far as we know. People may not like it at first, but after a while you get used to it, and the alternatives are far worse." --Charles Bennett


As a general rule of thumb, never trust anybody who's been in therapy
for more than 15 percent of their life span.  The words "I am sorry" and "I
am wrong" will have totally disappeared from their vocabulary.  They will stab
you, shoot you, break things in your apartment, say horrible things to your
friends and family, and then justify this abhorrent behavior by saying:
"Sure, I put your dog in the microwave.  But I feel *better* for doing it."
    -- Bruce Feirstein, "Nice Guys Sleep Alone"

"Let it cease to rain angry sparks on them: enough now, and more than enough. To cure that unfortunate department by philosophical criticism--the attempt is most vain. Who will dismount on a hasty journey, with the day declining, to attack mosquito-swarms with the horsewhip? Spur swiftly through them; breathing perhaps some pious prayer to heaven. By the horsewhip they cannot be killed. Drain out the swaps where they are bred,--Ah, couldst thou do something towards that!" --Thomas Carlyle

"Par Dios, ye shall not conspire against me; I will not allow it. The career of freedom, be it know to all men, and Guachos, is not yet begun in this country; I am still only casting out the Seven Devils. My lease of Paraguay, a harder one than your stupidities suppose, is for life; the contract is, Thou must die if thy lease be taken from thee. Aim not at my life, ye constitutional Guachos,--or let it be a diviner man than Don Fulgencio, the horse-subduer, that does it. By heaven, if you aim at my life, I will bid you have a care of your own!" --Dr. Francia

Confucius said: "If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame."

"Modern man is so committed to empirical knowledge, that he sets the standard for evidence higher than either side in his disputes can attain, thus suffering his disputes to be settled by philosophical arguments as to which party must be crushed under the burden of proof."
        -- Alan Crowe

"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really." --James D. Watson

"If there is one premise on which the entire Exeter Hall narrative is and always has been based, it is the assumption that Africans are, to put it crudely, Europeans with black skins. Or to put it more technically, that the human species is neurologically uniform. There has never been a speck of evidence to support this assumption, which in the light of our 21st-century understanding of human genetic diversity is almost comical. It is entirely religious in origin – a product of Christianity, not science.

"The result is that you’re designing political systems for populations with mean IQs in the 70s, based on the fact that they work (barely – like Carlyle, I am no fan of democracy) for populations with mean IQs in triple digits. And then, when these designs fail, you either are shocked and amazed, or invent some way to blame it on your enemies." --Moldbug

The man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically
The most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals
Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall
And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones
Reach the life in that hide? They danced around the pit, shrieking
With ape excitement, flinging sharp flints in vain, and the stench of their bodies
Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them
Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating fire
That guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others
Gathered sticks at the wood's edge; they made a blaze
And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired sides
Of their huge prey. They watched the long hairy trunk
Waver over the stifle trumpeting pain,
And they were happy.
--Robinson Jeffers

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
--Hamlet

-----


"And yet truly a man does tend, and must under frightful penalties perpetually tend, to be king of this world; to stand in his world as what he is, a centre of light and order, not of darkness and confusion. A man loves power: yes, if he sees disorder his eternal enemy rampant about him, he does love to see said enemy in the way of being conquered; he can have no rest till that come to pass!" --Thomas Carlyle

Reverend Manuel Perez on Dr. Francia: "What evils do not the people suffer from highwaymen! Violence, plunder, murder, are crimes familiar to these malefactors. The inaccessible mountains and wide deserts in this Republic seemed to offer impunity to such men. Our Dictator succeeded in striking such a terror into them that they entirely disappeared, seeking safety in a change of life. His Excellency saw that the manner of inflicting the punishment was more efficacious than even the punishment itself; and on this principle he acted. Whenever a robber could be seized, he was led to the nearest guardhouse; a summary trial took place; and, straightaway, so soon as he had made confession, he was shot. These means proved effectual. Ere long the Republic was in such security, that, we may say, a child might have travelled from the Uruguay to the Parana without other protection than the dread which the Supreme Dictator inspired."

"With a community of quack workmen, it is by the law of Nature impossible that other than a quack government can be got to exist. Constitutional or other, with ballot-boxes or none, your society in all its phases, administration, legislation, teaching, preaching, praying, and writing periodicals per sheet, will be a quack society; terrible to live in, disastrous to look upon." --Thomas Carlyle

Histogram bars: ▁ ▂ ▃ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness; I love only that which they defend." --Faramir, Lord of the Rings

"The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." --Daniel J. Boorstin

"It's a common estimate that out of every 10 people, 9 are fools." --Thomas Carlyle

The main thing I disagree with Moldbug on is his assertion that deduction beats induction every time.

"If X doesn't exist, I still want to know how X works and why it seems to be so highly ordered."

The following are merged from the recently deceased luriel.

The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who have not got it.
— George Bernard Shaw

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.
— Pablo Picasso

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
— Daniel Dennett

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
— Frank Zappa

Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.
— Catherine O'Hara

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Committees do harm merely by existing.
— Freeman Dyson

To keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the exploit of that gallant man who sought to keep out crows by shutting his park gate.
— John Milton

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
— Thomas Sowell

Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.
— Erik Naggum

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it's conformity.
— John Perry Barlow

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
— Marcus Aurelius

The ultimate result of shielding men from the results of folly is to fill the world with fools.
— Herbert Spencer

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
— Thomas Jefferson

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
— Somerset Maugham

Doctor No said, in the same soft resonant voice, "You are right. Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through - these are the vices of the herd." Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. "I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac"
— Dr. No

Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building.
— Rob Pike

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
-- Daniel Kahneman

Offending people is a necessary and healthy act. Every time you say something that's offensive to another person you just caused a discussion. You just forced them to have to think.
--Louis C.K

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
— Steve Jobs

I like offending people because I think people who get offended should be offended.
— Linus Torvalds

'The Internet is not for sissies.'
-- Paul Vixie

The biggest secret to winning in the marketplace is choosing very incompetent competitors.
— Bram Cohen

Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics. Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy.
— Thomas Sowell

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
— Alan Greenspan

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
— Milton Friedman

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.
— Milton Friedman

The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.
— Joan Violet Robinson

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.
— Moliere


What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

It is the responsibility of every citizen to ignore dumb laws.
— Ian Clarke

Politics on the internet, it's like jupiter's great red spot, except made of feces.
— cutsDwnSudoIntelects

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe-- "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
— Henry David Thoreau

It's illegal to say to a voter “Here's $100, vote for me.” So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs.
— Don Farrar

Cryptography shifts the balance of power from those with a monopoly on violence to those who comprehend mathematics and security design.
— Jacob Appelbaum

It is sort of interesting that in our society this days we are very quick to apply the term 'war' to places where there are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term 'war' when we are actually fighting wars.
— Bruce Schneier

The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty.
— Lord Chief Justice Hailsham

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
— C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

Threads [and] signals [are] a platform-dependant trail of misery, despair, horror and madness.
— Anthony Baxter

All software sucks, be it open-source [or] proprietary. The only question is what can be done with particular instance of suckage, and that's where having the source matters.
— viro

Ethernet always wins.
— Andy Bechtolsheim

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.
— Edsger W. Dtra

You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It's worked for many people, and it can work for you.
— Ron Minnich

"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."

Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP.
— Autrijus Tang

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling---the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
— Niklaus Wirth

Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.
— David Wheeler

Comparing a computer language to a human language is like comparing an operating system kernel to a popcorn kernel.
— kryptkpr

Once a new technology starts rolling, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
— Stewart Brand

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
— Henry Petroski

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers.
— Martin Fowler

"design patterns" are concepts used by people who can't learn by any method except memorization, so in place of actual programming ability, they memorize "patterns" and throw each one in sequence at a problem until it works
— Dark_Shikari

And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what
you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle.
That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.
--Linus

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
— Carl Sagan.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
— Alan Kay

Copying an idea from an author is plagiarism. Copying many ideas from many authors is... research!!
— Phelson's Law

Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks. -- Thant Tessman
Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. -- Thant Tessman

C++ has its place in the history of programming languages. Just as Caligula has his place in the history of the Roman Empire. -- Robert Firth

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. -- Paul Graham

If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one? -- Tom Cargill

If you like C++, you don't know C++. There's a mutual exclusion going on here, and I've yet to see a counter-example other than possibly a few of the members of the standards committee. -- ssylvan

I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human. -- Erik Naggum

"It took 69 single steps to get past a BOOST_FOREACH() statement. Madness." -- John Carmack

"Saw comment // NEW BOOST CODE, and had a moment of panic before realizing it was vehicle boost, not C++ boost." -- John Carmack

Suicide is the sincerest form of self-criticism.
-- Donald Kaul

Permanence, perseverance, and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.
--Thomas Carlyle

God knows I'm not perfect, either. I've made tons of stupid mistakes, and later I regretted them. And I've done it over and over again, thousands of times; a cycle of hollow joy and vicious self-hatred. But even so, every time I learned something about myself.
-- Misato Katsuragi

Try to prove formally what is seen intuitively and see intuitively what is proved formally. --Polya

"I don't speak", Bijaz said. "I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own." --Dune Messiah

"When circular inference takes place and the circle is large enough, it's called coherence." --Pei Wang

My mood is like a frequency very close to Omega_c on a high-order Butterworth filter. --Me

====

"If you seek to aid everyone that suffers in the galaxy, you will only weaken yourself… and weaken them. It is the internal struggles, when fought and won on their own, that yield the strongest rewards. You stole that struggle from them, cheapened it. If you care for others, then dispense with pity and sacrifice and recognize the value in letting them fight their own battles. And when they triumph, they will be even stronger for the victory."
―Kreia

"The most essential thing in the art of government is to screen personnel. If people have the talent and conduct to harmonize a village, let them govern a village. If people have the talent and conduct to harmonize a county, let them govern a county. If people have the talent and conduct to harmonize a province, let them govern a province. If people have the talent and conduct to harmonize a state, let them govern a state. Only then is it possible to eliminate disaffection among the educated class.

"When people do wrong in their villages, then they are to be admonished by their villages. If they do not reform, and deliberately do wrong, then they are to be beaten by county authorities. If they still do not reform, and deliberately do wrong, then they are to be exiled by the provincial authorities. If they do not reform, and deliberately do wrong, then they are to be executed by state authorities. Only thus is it possible to eliminate disruptive behavior."
--The Master of the Hidden Storehouse

"The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. Let us leave them to others and proceed with our honest toil." --Bertrand Russell

I'm kinda out of shit. Not in this set, I mean I have some stuff I put on paper. But in the long term, I think I'm outta shit. [I'm] fucking cannibalizing my own— seventeen years, how much more do you have to say? If I die soon, don't ever say I died too young. [...] Every time an artist dies young- Kurt Cobain, or whatever, there's always the people "It's so sad, he had so much more to give." — How do you know? Maybe he was out of shit. How do you know? He's done. He got all the money, he did all the drugs, he fucked all your holes. And that's the American Dream, and when you're done with that you go "Oh, that's why they call it a dream. — It's bullshit, I'm still empty." And he cashed out. How do you know what any artist had left? How do you know if Jimi Hendrix hadn't had died he wouldn't have wound up doing Superbowl half-time duets with Elton John right now? --Doug Stanhope

Nationalism does nothing but teach you how to hate people that you never met. And all of a sudden you take pride in accomplishments you had no part in whatsoever, and you brag about- and the Americans'll go "Fuck the French! Fuck the French, if we hadn't had saved their ass in two World Wars, they'd be speakin' German right now!" And you go, "Oh, was that us?" Was that me and you, Tommy, we saved the French? Jesus! I know I blacked out a little bit after that fourth shot of Jägermeister last night, but I don't remember... I know we went through the Wendy's drive-thru to get one of them "Freschetta" sandwiches that looked so alluring on the commercial, but then we ordered it and realized we had no money, and we had to ditch out before the second window, and those douchebags in line behind us with the bass music probably got our order and we laughed about that. But I don't remember savin' the French. At all! I went through the last ten calls on my cell phone and there's nothin' incoming or outgoing to the French, lookin' for muscle on a project! I checked my pants, there's no mud stains on the knees from where we were garroting Krauts in the trenches at Verdun. I think "we" didn't do anything but watch sports bloopers while we got hammered. I think "we" should shut the fuck up! --Doug Stanhope

"Hackers desire knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being through the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself." --McKenzieWark

Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules,
it's THEIR problem.  I want people to know that in their bones, and I
want it shouted out from the rooftops.  I want people to wake up in a
cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules.
-- Linus Torvalds

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. -Henry Ford

To be sure, mathematics can be extended to any branch of
knowledge, including economics, provided the concepts are so
clearly defined as to permit accurate symbolic representation.
That is only another way of saying that in some branches of
discourse it is desirable to know what you are talking about.
--James R. Newman

As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good
theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of
predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified
by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to
agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence
in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is
found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
At least that is what is supposed to happen, but you can always
question the competence of the person who carried out the
observation.
--Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

An apparent paradox is that chaos is deterministic, generated
by fixed rules which do not themselves involve any elements
of change.We even speak of deterministic chaos. In principle,
the future is completely determined by the past; but in practice
small uncertainties, much like minute errors of measurement
which enter into calculations, are amplified, with the effect that
even though the behavior is predictable in the short term, it is
unpredictable over the long run.
--Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science


"If I am superior to others, if I am above others, then I do not need others. When I say that I am above others, it does not mean that I feel better than them, it means that I am at a distance from them, a safe distance."  --SPD person

The computing scientist's main challenge is
not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
— E. W. Dijkstra

"In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, 'Here begins a new life'."
--Star Trek: Voyager, Latent Image, paraphrased from Dante's La Vita Nuova

"Dead corpses, the rotting body of a brother man, whom fate or unjust men have killed, this is not a pleasant spectacle; but what say you to the dead soul of a man, -- in a body which still pretends to be vigorously alive, and can drink rum?" -- Thomas Carlyle

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane." - Nikola Tesla.

I recommend thinking vaguely of the Future's hopes, thinking specifically of the Past's horrors, and spending most of your time in the Present.  This strategy has certain epistemic virtues beyond its use in cheering yourself up. --Eliezer

"Real efficiency comes from elegant solutions, not optimized programs. Optimization is always just a few correctness-preserving transformations away." - Jonathan Sobel

What has to go before Common Lisp will conquer the world is the belief
that passing unadorned machine words around is safe just because some
external force has «approved» the exchange of those machine words.
-- Erik Naggum

In the real world, there
are no winners, only temporary advantages.  The myth of the «winner»
is probably the second most destructive myth that Western civilization
has hoisted upon its population.  (The most destructive myth is that
of people being either «good» or «evil», which is the root cause of
all injustice ever perpetrated by humans.)
-- Naggum

"Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."
--Kent Pitman
(Not to mention entire video games and mars rovers.)
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9510945

The word 'democracy' is one that I have only very rarely, and with great reluctance, employed. I do not know what it is and I have never yet met anyone who could explain its meaning to me in terms that I am capable of understanding. But I fear that Hitler's assertion - that his ideological concept was the democratic concept - will prove a hard one to refute. The enlightenment of the world from a single, central position, the winning of mass support through convincing arguments, the legitimate road to power by way of the ballot-box, the legitimisation by the people itself of power achieved - I fear it is hard to deny that these are democratic stigmata, revelatory perhaps of democracy in a decadent and feverish form, but democratic none the less. I further fear that the contrary assertion - that the totalitarian system as set up by Hitler was not democratic - will prove a hard one to justify. The totalitarian state is the exact opposite of the authoritarian state, which latter, of course, bears no democratic stigmata but hierarchical ones instead. Some people seem to believe that forms of government are estimable in accordance with their progressive development; since totalitarianism is certainly more modern than the authoritarian state system, they must logically give Hitler the advantage in the political field.
--Ernst von Salamon

Timothy Ferris wrote (Elie Wiesel originally?):  "What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness... The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is - here's the clincher - boredom... The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'... Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things."

Words are <em>(jargon warning)</em> <a href="/lw/ng/words_as_hidden_inferences/">hidden inferences</a>, which form a <a href="/lw/lc/leaky_generalizations/">leaky generalization</a> over a set of cases that <a href="/lw/nj/similarity_clusters/">cluster</a> along <a href="/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/">certain dimensions</a> but may <a href="/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/">vary widely in their other characteristics</a>. Because people <a href="/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/">feel like</a> words are a single monolithic whole, arguments about the world tend to devolve into <a href="/lw/np/disputing_definitions/">arguments about definitions of words</a> (like "murder"), as if those definitions <a href="/lw/nf/the_parable_of_hemlock/">determined reality</a>. To escape such arguments, the participants need to <a href="/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/">taboo</a> that particular word and <a href="/lw/nv/replace_the_symbol_with_the_substance/">replace the symbol with the substance</a>, which often means <a href="/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/">dissolving a term</a> into its component inferences and reasoning about each one individually. The Sequence on Words mentions it's <a href="/lw/nr/the_argument_from_common_usage/">a huge warning sign</a> if "you pull out a dictionary in the middle of an empirical or moral argument"; this post explains what that sign is warning you <em>about</em>. --yvain
(All URLs root to lesswrong.com, without the HTML:
Words are (jargon warning) hidden inferences, which form a leaky generalization
over a set of cases that cluster along certain dimensions but may vary widely
in their other characteristics. Because people feel like words are a single
monolithic whole, arguments about the world tend to devolve into arguments
about definitions of words (like "murder"), as if those definitions determined
reality. To escape such arguments, the participants need to taboo that
particular word and replace the symbol with the substance, which often means
dissolving a term into its component inferences and reasoning about each one
individually. The Sequence on Words mentions it's a huge warning sign if "you
pull out a dictionary in the middle of an empirical or moral argument"; this
post explains what that sign is warning you about.)

Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
and say my glory was I had such a friend.
--Yeats

"Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian."
- George Orwell

When you don't create things, you become defined by
your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only
narrow & exclude people. So create.
--why the lucky stiff

you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same.
--Carlyle

Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage.
--Froude

"First, the King has no compunction whatsoever in creating economic distortions that produce employment for low-skilled humans. A good example of such a distortion in the modern world are laws prohibiting self-service gas stations, as in New Jersey or Oregon. These distortions have gotten a bad name among today's thinkers, because makework is typically the symptom of some corrupt political combination. As the King's will, it will have a different flavor.

"As both a good Carlylean and a good Misesian, the King condemns economism - the theory that any economic indicator can measure human happiness. His goal is a fulfilled and dignified society, not maximum production of widgets. Is it better that teenagers get work experience during the summer, or that gas costs five cents a gallon less? The question is not a function of any mathematical formula. It is a question of judgment and taste. All that free-market economics will tell you is that, if you prohibit self service, there will be more jobs for gas-station attendants, and gas will cost more. It cannot tell you whether this is a good thing or a bad thing."
--MM

Nero, Heliogabalus, Otho, Vitellius, and such other monsters of nature, were the minions of the multitude and set up by them. Pertinax, Alexander, Severus, Gordianus, Gallus, Emilianus, Quintilius, Aurelianus, Tacitus, Probus, and Numerianus, all of them good emperors in the judgment of all historians, yet murdered by the multitude. --Robert Filmer

Apparently there once was a kind of obsolete proto-blog that was called a "book." --MM

Once on #haskell, I was asked why I have no large programs to my credit; I replied, "My problem is that most programs I use already exist."
--gwern

Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an
enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one's self-respect.
--Arnold Bennett

People complain of the lack of power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if they choose.
--Arnold Bennett

One loses, in the study of cause and effect, that absurd air which so many people have of being always shocked and pained by the curiousness of life. Such people live amid human nature as if human nature were a foreign country full of awful foreign customs. But, having reached maturity, one ought surely to be ashamed of being a stranger in a strange land!
--Arnold Bennett

I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings. I understand that there is a residual sympathy for service members, perhaps engendered by support for troops in World War II, or perhaps from when there was a draft and people with few resources to resist were involuntarily sent to battle. That sympathy is not particularly rational in today's world, however. -- Michael Avery, Suffolk University Law School

"There are facts that were once known, sometimes generally known, that are now known to but a few."
--http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/

"Yes, and that is their strength. They do not seek conformity. They do not surrender. Out of their differences comes symmetry, the unique capacity to fight against impossible odds. Hurt them .. and they only come back stronger. The passions we deplore have taken them to their place in the stars and will propel them to a great destiny. Their only weakness is that they do not recognize their own greatness. They forget that they have come to this place through two million years of evolution, struggle and blood. That they are better than they think, and nobler than they know. They carry within them the capacity to walk among the stars, like giants. They are the future. And we have much to learn from them."
--Delenn

"There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. Then you accept it .. or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors. No, nothing can be changed."
--Londo

"It is simpler to make a statue to someone who you believe embodies all your better qualities than it is to actually improve yourself" - G'Kar

"Zathras is used to being beast of burden to other people's needs. Very sad life! Probably have very sad death, but at least there is symmetry"
--Zathras

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs." –Steven Kaas

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." - Marcus Aurelius

"On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right." - Martin Luther King, Jr
("WTF was that?" asked the Anus a minute later.)

"Be careful of this sort of argument, any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility." - Eliezer Yudkowsky

"He who has a why to live can bear with any how" - Nietzsche

"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking." -Alfred Korzybski

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein

"If voodoo could predict how variations in doll manufacture affected performance of the curse; if a Fundamental Theorem Of Voodoo could determine the shape of the "needle penetration of doll versus distress of victim" plot, then voodoo would be as much a science as quantum mechanics. The important difference between magic and science is not that one deals in chants, incantations and crystal balls and the other deals in equations, computer code and electron microscopes. The difference is that one works and the other does not." - John K Clark

"If I handed you a list of every God, spirit, supernatural being, religion, supernatural claim, etc to have ever been proposed by humanity, and gave you the task of writing "legitimate" or "we made this shit up" next to each one, how far down the list would you get before spotting a trend?" - Unknown

"I am against religion because it forces us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." - Richard Dawkins

"It [criticizing atheism as 'Your belief is faith-based too!'] would be like the Pope attacking Islam on the basis that faith is not an adequate justification for asserting the existence of their deity." - Eliezer Yudkowsky

"Ethically, what is the correct thing to do when medicine encounters a difficult problem? Stabilize the patient until a solution can be found? Or throw people away like garbage? Centuries from now, historians may marvel at the shortsightedness and rationalizations used to sanction the unnecessary death of millions." - Brian G. Wowk Ph.D, 9th May 2006 (on the subject of Cryonics)

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~thomas/po/rational-anarchism.html In summarizing the
absolutist position, he makes it sound like a very good idea:
"I cannot go into the various ways that Locke and other minarchists tried to get around this logic of sovereignty argument, but I think the absolutists had the stronger philosophical case. Either a government has sovereign power, or it doesn't. Either a government has the final authority to render and execute legal decisions, or it doesn't. Sovereignty is an all-or-nothing affair. And if this is true, then no person has a right to resist the sovereign, however unjust his actions may appear. For who is to decide whether a law is unjust, if not the sovereign himself? Who is to decide whether a right has been violated, if not a sovereign government in its role as final arbiter?

In any dispute between a sovereign government and its subjects, the government itself must decide who is right; and, as Locke suggested, the sovereign, like everyone else, is likely to be biased in his own favor.. I would therefore like to know how those Objectivists who use the logic of sovereignty argument as a weapon against anarchism can avoid sliding down the slippery slope into absolutism.
...
The doctrine of natural rights, as foes of consent theory repeatedly pointed out, is inherently anarchistic. Burke called natural rights "a digest of anarchy," while Bentham castigated them as "anarchical fallacies."

If at any point Objectivists are willing to admit that individuals have the right to resist an unjust law or overthrow a despotic government, then they are conceding the basic premise of anarchism: namely, that true sovereignty resides in each individual, who has the right to assess the justice of a particular law, procedure or government.

There can be no (logically consistent) middle ground between state-sovereignty and self-sovereignty, between absolutism and anarchism.
...
 Moreover, as Voltaire, Lord Acton and other liberal historians have argued, the Western World owes its liberty to the conflict among these competing authorities. Neither the spiritual nor the temporal authorities had libertarian intentions, but the ongoing competition between these institutions gradually led to the development of "intermediate" institutions (such as municipalities), as Pope and Prince conceded various "liberties" and "immunities" in an effort to win allies to their side. And it was these intermediate institutions, not governments, which were largely responsible for the freedom that is unique to the Western World.
 "


Suppose a being exactly like me, with all the atoms in the same places, and possessed of all the same causal facts, and indeed also possessed of consciousness, except that it lacks the property of conceivability. Since this being is the same in all ways except for not being conceivable, we know that conceivability is a separate fact from consciousness. Thus, whether or not philosophical zombies are conceivable cannot tell us about consciousness.
--EY

"When I first heard about the setuid patent, I thought it was pretty cool. That was, I don't know, 1989.

I think it was 1992 or so before it was really clear that patents were the true and final nemesis of my chosen profession. By "clear," I mean "obvious to anyone not in denial." Of course there's a lot of denial." --Moldbug

"Look. If you're worried about groups proclaiming their vision to be gospel, it's best to start by figuring out which groups already have -- and have the power to back it up. After Summers, Wilson, Watson, Miller, Richwine, and Dickinson, this shouldn't be that hard. (I once got kicked out of college for saying I thought 'diversity day' was stupid.) As for power: is mass media a source of power? What about the school system? If these two things aren't sources of power, go tell the many governments that are still running their own radio stations, attempting to influence school curricula, etc. And if they are, that opens up three questions. First: which groups are more common there? Second: which groups are more prestigious? And third: what can you get away with saying, and what can you not?"
-- Wesley Morganston

"Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been." Theodore von Kármán

LW isn't elitist enough. It needs to develop the ability to say, "fuck you, you are nothing, your opinions don't matter." --Wesley Morganston

"my intelligence at hand, in fact, exceeded yours by an order that is as expected unimaginable" -- some crazy guy

Moldbug: If the [written] Constitution is identical to the [unwritten] constitution, it is superfluous. If the Constitution is not identical to the constitution, it is deceptive. There are no other choices.

"If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one such magnitude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavor to persuade me that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I, if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature; and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show flies in the swarm, with a few larger animals, for reasons to be given."
Augustus De Morgan (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm)

During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical. The question now is, not whether this or that hypothesis is better or worse to the pure thought, but whether it accords with observed phenomena in those consequences which can be shown necessarily to follow from it, if it be true. Even in those sciences which are not yet under the dominion of mathematics, and perhaps never will be, a working copy of the mathematical process has been made. This is not known to the followers of those sciences who are not themselves mathematicians and who very often exalt their horns against the mathematics in consequence. They might as well be squaring the circle, for any sense they show in this particular.
Augustus De Morgan

That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is one of the most fallacious of proverbs. A person of small knowledge is in danger of trying to make his little do the work of more; but a person without any is in more danger of making his no knowledge do the work of some.
Augustus De Morgan

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
--Henry Ford

"And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by."
--St. Augustine, Confessions

We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. --Larry Wall, Programming Perl

"This [programming treated as a creative role by business] will never, ever, ever happen. There is too much money, for both sides, in pretending this isn't true.

The business side has been entrusted with a lot of money, its own or someone else's. Success has already been achieved. As such, it approaches things from a mindset of risk reduction. And the absolute worst thing possible, from a risk-reduction standpoint, is creative work. It's unpredictable, you don't know when you've got an end product, and it involves dealing with workers who have egos, who often work on things you don't understand. It is unmanageable, which obviously troubles those whose job it is to manage.

The most common approach, so far, has been to ignore this scary possibility: Keep projects as low-level as possible, spread responsibility far and wide (to reduce risk, not for optimal efficiency), and keep everyone wearing business casual.

Developers are (often) in the weird position of Ozzy Osbourne and other rock stars: potheads whose potheadery became valuable. What the developers know, however, is that businesses don't really want what they have to offer. They don't want to see the full effect of a bad trip. For every Bieber who turns crappy branding to gold in the teen girl demographic, there's Joe Concept Artist who's experimenting with some new grooves, but will never catch on. For every Zuckerberg who can bang out a social network in PHP, there's some dedicated open-source hacker whose dream is to make Lisp accessible to the common man.

And yet: the money guys are offering money. Just swallow your pride, play "Stairway to Heaven"[1] at the wedding, and pretend you've never had crazy eyes when talking about homoiconicity, and the rent will be paid.

[1]Nothing against the song."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7423626

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

If I get used to envying others, those parts of myself that I am proud of will recede from me.
--Stellvia

It has been my observation that the dropout from hard science by girls in high
school is not primarily the fault of either parents or school. It is much more
the fault of the values of present teen-age-girl society. Both boys and girls
are affected more by the ideas of their peers than by the official policies of
the educational institutions. A disproportionate number of adults with
initiative come from separatist social groups where the parents prevent
children from taking their values from their peers or from the schools.
--John McCarthy

"It's easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?"
--Lorien

"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway." ~J.R.R. Tolkien

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." ~T.S. Eliot

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and
anything self-conscious is lousy. You cannot try to do things. You simply must
do things."
--Ray Bradbury

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when reading." ~Don Marquis
[ed: or write a college course book with new editions each year.]

Tolkien reviewed and described all Black Metal "poetry" before it was ever heard of: "Much of the same sort of talk [as that of the Orcs] can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." (LotR Appendix F)
http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/greven.htm

Ultimately I did the work. "Society" can set up all the opportunities it wants, the engine that is my brain will not churn and take advantage of those purely by virtue of them existing. This is captured with the ancient proverb about leading a horse to water (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water.html). Why does it seem so hard for certain people intent on "equalizing opportunity" and other such things to grasp?
~Me

Modafinil is illegal without a prescription, but everyone on the Internet sells it anyway. Adrafinil is a prodrug that turns into modafinil once in the body. It is perfectly legal without a prescription, because the medical licensing regime makes no sense. You might as well just get that – as far as I can tell the risk of liver damage is overhyped if your liver is otherwise healthy.
--Scott (Slate Star Codex)

The correct analysis (using standard nomenclature, which is somewhat misleading) is obviously moral cognitivism::strong cognitivism::moral realism::naturalist reductionism.
--Eliezer (on meta-ethics)

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of
the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but
it cannot govern the actual completion. An omelette, promised in
two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has
not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat
it raw. Software customers have had the same choices.
The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The
result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part,
raw in another.
--Brooks, Mythical Man Month

Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit.
[Add little to little and there will be a Ug pile.]
-Ovid

"Extraordinary claims are always extraordinary evidence but sometimes they are not extraordinary enough."
--EY

There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a ‘hottest part’ implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
— Richard Davisson

My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
–Letter from Galileo Galilei to Johannes Kepler

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
— Carl Sagan

What is Tragedy in Utopia?
  There is tragedy in Mr. Snowman's melting.
  Mass murders, we have found, are not required.
What is Weakness in Utopia?
  Weakness is spending a day gazing into your beloved's eyes.
What is Imperfection in Utopia?
  Imperfection is the measure of our love for things as they are.
What is Dignity in Utopia?
  Dignity is the affirming power of "No" said discriminately.
What is Suffering in Utopia?
  Suffering is the salt trace left on the cheeks
  of those who were around before.
What is Courage in Utopia?
  Courage is the monarchy of the self, here constrained by a constitution.
What is Solemnity in Utopia?
  Solemnity is the appreciation of the mystery of being.
What is Body in Utopia?
  Body is a pair of legs, a pair of arms, a trunk and a head, all made of flesh.
  Or not, as the case may be.
What is Society in Utopia?
  Society is a never-finished tapestry, its weavers equal to its threads;
  the parts and patterns an inexhaustible bourne of beauty.
What is Death in Utopia?
  Death is the darkness that enshrouds all life, and our guilt for not having
  created Utopia as soon as we could have.
--Nick Bostrom, http://www.nickbostrom.com/utopia.html

The universe has a surprising ability to stab you through the heart from somewhere you weren't looking.
--Eliezer Yudkowsky

Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience.  Medical science can extrapolate what would happen to a human unprotected in a vacuum.  Fiction can make you live through it.
--Eliezer Yudkowsky

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."
--George Orwell, 1946 (https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm)

Mira Furlan said: What we think is unbearable proves to be bearable. This is both disgusting and magnificent. Just like our species itself.

You have to solve every hard problem in computer science, 60 times a second.
Brandon Bloom

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
-Damon Runyon

All the logical work (if not all the rhetorical work) in “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is being done by the decision about what aspects of liberty are essential, and how much safety is at stake. The slogan might work as a reminder not to make foolish tradeoffs, but the real difficulty is in deciding which tradeoffs are wise and which are foolish. Once we figure that out, we don’t need the slogan to remind us; before we figure it out, the slogan doesn’t really help us.
--Eugene Volokh, "Liberty, safety, and Benjamin Franklin"

There's nothing wrong with being incompetent, 'cause you got less to do.
--Charles Manson

Even if the stars should die in heaven,
Our sins can never be undone.
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
Then in the cold and silent black
As light and matter end,
We'll have ourselves a last look back
And toast an absent friend.
--Yudkowsky

(This should have been in here a long time ago...)
"Technology's greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger
range of things.  Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress."
http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."
(The Will to Power, p 481)

"You want, if possible - and there is no more insane "if possible" - to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible - that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?"
(Beyond Good and Evil, p 225 )

"I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been."
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)

"Backgammon represents man vs. fate, Chess man vs. man and Go man vs. himself."
--Proverb

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”
Marquis de Sade


We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile, and nothing can grow there. Too much, the best of us is washed away.
-G'kar

"We must teach children to read the way we should teach programming: Expose
them to Tolstoy until they understand the *concept* of reading. No alphabet. No
words. Just big books until they understand reading conceptually. It's concepts
that matter, not stupid letters and words. I mean, teaching the concepts before
the symbols used to express those concepts is why math is so successfully
taught today. Right? Obviously this "concepts first" educational strategy will
work the best with the poor. For every 1000 who fail we'll discover 1
Ramanujan! Now we just have to figure out what these reading concepts are
without using words and letters. I propose boxes, lines, and stick figures. All
students will learn the concepts of language by using a proxy language that is
visual so that it's not a language that teaches language. After learning this
BoxLineLang they'll just be able to read and write without ever studying the
alphabet. That's the power of concepts."
--Zed Shaw (joke)

You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ‘us’, but reality is your true — and fatal — enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair”.
http://www.xenosystems.net/horrorism/

I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.
--Scott Alexander

For anyone who says that math is never usable in real life, maybe you're just not doing anything.
-Jaimie

Just do it, hack! I approach code like games, rush deep into room, trigger all NPCs, die, after respawn I know where NPCs are.
--@bkaradzic

Open source benefits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11661195

C++ templates are to Commmon Lisp macros what IRS tax return forms are to poetry.
-Christian Schafmeister

"We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler." -- Paul Graham

"Before the Gang of Four got all academic on us, ``singleton'' (without the formal name) was just a simple idea that deserved a simple line of code, not a whole religion." -- Peter Norvig

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it." -- Jack Handey, Deepest Thoughts

"When you lack confidence about your intended way to implement something, a common pattern is to decide to hide the implementation under an API. That way you can always change the implementation later, right?" -- Tom Lord, http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/diagnosing

"Interfaces keep things tidy, but don't accelerate growth: Functions do." -- Alan J. Perlis

"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." -- Adlai Stevenson

"I believe it is time to explicitly state the long held secret of software, we do not need to do design; design is ineffective and costly." -- Wayne Mack

There is a widely-held, mistaken belief that the objects in mathematics are named after their discoverers, and that when this does not happen, it is akin to plagiarism or falsification of history. Using this standard, Euler has been wronged repeatedly, for many of his discoveries bear the names of others. (There is an oft-repeated quip that "objects in mathematics are named after the first person after Euler to discover them.")
-David Richeson, *Euler's Gem*



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Why do you bribe? It's not because your companies are inherently more corrupt. Nor is it because you are inherently less talented at technology. It is because your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith. In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances. You'd rather not go through the hassle of moving toward less *dirigisme*. It's so much easier to keep paying bribes.
R. James Woolsey http://cryptome.org/echelon-cia2.htm

"No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations, and of kings, sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them."
--Samuel Johnson

"The biggest problem facing software engineering is the one it will never solve - politics."

-- Gavin Baker, ca 1996, An unusually cynical moment inspired by working on a
large project beseiged by politics

“I would rather be ruled by people who think they will fry in Hell forever if they rule me poorly." — C.A. Coulombe

"Perfect combustion" is the translation of "完全燃焼" (kanzen nenshô) by Miss
Yui MIZUNO. It is a scientific word "complete combustion", but in this context,
it means to do something thoroughly so as not to regret like "I wish I had done
so-and-so then".
The thoroughness is extreme. For example, many ace pitchers
of Japanese high school baseball teams pitched three whole games (quarter,
semi, & final) in "Kôshien" tournament on three successive days. This overwork
has broken many pitchers' elbows, shoulders, & careers, so the situation has
been recently somewhat improved. Even now, however, not a few pitchers say "Let
me pitch! I will burn out myself in Kôshien." and not a few people praise it.
http://du-metal.blogspot.com/2016_03_01_archive.html

[Long overdue...:]
"There is no speed limit."
https://sivers.org/kimo

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
-Ian, Jurassic Park

"It's a good idea, but it's a new idea; therefore, I fear it and must reject it." -- Homer Simpson


                   ___====-_  _-====___
             _--~~~#####//      \\#####~~~--_
          _-~##########// (    ) \\##########~-_
         -############//  :\^^/:  \\############-
       _~############//   (@::@)   \\############~_
      ~#############((     \\//     ))#############~
     -###############\\    (^^)    //###############-
    -#################\\  / "" \  //#################-
   -###################\\/      \//###################-
  _#/:##########/\######(   /\   )######/\##########:\#_
  :/ :#/\#/\#/\/  \#/\##\  :  :  /##/\#/  \/\#/\#/\#: \:
  "  :/  V  V  "   V  \#\: :  : :/#/  V   "  V  V  \:  "
     "   "  "      "   \ : :  : : /   "      "  "   "


Et mon coeur s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme
Courant avec ferveur à l'abîme béant,
Et qui, soûl de son sang, préférerait en somme
La douleur à la mort et l'enfer au néant!
(From http://fleursdumal.org/poem/165)

"Prayers never bring anything... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot,
the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is
the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas"
[W. C. Fields]

"Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance [...] In such games the stake is commonly a trifle, and the whole pleasure of the game arises from playing well, from playing fairly, and playing skilfully. If notwithstanding all his skill, however, the good player should, by the influence of chance, happen to lose, the loss ought to be a matter, rather of merriment, than of serious sorrow. He has made no false stroke; he has done nothing which he ought to be ashamed of; he has enjoyed completely the whole pleasure of the game. [...]

"Our only anxious concern ought to be, not about the stake, but about the proper method of playing. If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed it in what depended upon causes beyond our power, and out of our direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments. If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely and skilfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed it in what, by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS7.html

"Boromir has many faces." -Moldbug

"Kill them. Kill them all." -Phillip

"If you think without writing, you only think you're thinking." -Leslie Lamport

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is."
-Guindon

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -Faulkner

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." -Hemingway

Potestne mutare somnia in veritatem?
(Is it possible to change dreams into reality?)

Quand il fait sombre, les plus beaux chats sont gris.
(Even the handsomest cats are grey in the dark...)

"Sometimes I just want to take a break, you know?
So when I get like that I set a goal like this one.
And that in turn creates a little leisure time.
The people who live just for the sake of living have no leisure time."
--Ginko

But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now, and there it would be made plain that in very truth the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled; so that every man of understanding would rather choose to be benefited by another than to be bothered with benefiting him.
-Plato

"There is no truth so obvious that experts cannot deny it" - Chesterton

One blinker is associated with the mouse: when you slide the mouse along a surface, that blinker moves in a corresponding direction. When the mouse is moved very rapidly, the mouse blinker gets big like Godzilla in order to maintain visibility. Small children should be taken out of the room before demonstrating this frightening feature.
--Operating the Lisp Machine

"There are those who tell us that any choice from among theoretically-equivalent alternatives is merely a question of taste. These are the people who bring up the Strong Church-Turing Thesis in discussions of programming languages meant for use by humans. They are malicious idiots. The only punishment which could stand a chance at reforming these miscreants into decent people would be a year or two at hard labor. And not just any kind of hard labor: specifically, carrying out long division using Roman numerals. A merciful tyrant would give these wretches the option of a firing squad. Those among these criminals against mathematics who prove unrepentant in their final hours would be asked to prove the Turing-equivalence of a spoon to a shovel as they dig their graves."
-- Stanislav Datskovskiy

* Pascal Costanza
| Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the
| world is stupid?
Because they are autodidacts.  The main purpose of higher education
and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with
all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every
smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that
no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything
even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore
always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than
they are smart at.  If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward
him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him
with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and
make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever
meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to
believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else.  Educate him properly
and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure
where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he
will gain a profound respect for other people.  Many programmers act
like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than
they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on
Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations.
To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of
control is actually a very good reason to panic.

–– Erik Naggum, 2004, https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3284144796180060KL2065E@naggum.no.html

"Clicking a filter button is not a philosophy." --Coworker

"Oracle is like the North Star of rage." --bcantrill

"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again." -- Gandalf


"Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Chapter 4, p. 173

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

"L'audace, l'audace, tojours l'audace."
(Always audacity.)
--Frederick the Great?
Napoleon,
George Patton

[
"A man does not come to the almshouse or the jail by the tyranny of fate of circumstance, but by the pathway of groveling thoughts and base desires."

"Here is a man who is wretchedly poor. He is extremely anxious that his surroundings and home comforts should be improved. Yet all the time he shirks his work, and considers he is justified in trying to deceive his employer on the ground of the insufficiency of his wages. Such a man does not understand the simplest rudiments of those principles which are the basis of true prosperity. He is not only totally unfitted to rise out of his wretchedness, but is actually attracting to himself a still deeper wretchedness by dwelling in, and acting out, indolent, deceptive, and unmanly thoughts.

Here is a rich man who is the victim of a painful and persistent disease as the result of gluttony. He is willing to give large sums of money to get rid of it, but he will not sacrifice his gluttonous desires. He wants to gratify his taste for rich and unnatural foods and have his health as well. Such a man is totally unfit to have health, because he has not yet learned the first principles of a healthy life.

Here is an employer of labor who adopts crooked measures to avoid paying the regulation wage, and, in the hope of making larger profits, reduces the wages of his workpeople. Such a man is altogether unfitted for prosperity. And when he finds himself bankrupt, both as regards reputation and riches, he blames circumstances, not knowing that he is the sole author of his condition."

"It has been usual for men to think and to say, "Many men are slaves because one is an oppressor; let us hate the oppressor." Now, however, there is among an increasing few a tendency to reverse this judgment, and to say, "One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves." The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance, and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves. A perfect Knowledge perceives the action of law in the weakness of the oppressed and the misapplied power of the oppressor. A perfect Love, seeing the suffering which both states entail, condemns neither. A perfect Compassion embraces both oppressor and oppressed."

"The thoughtless, the ignorant, and the indolent, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of luck, of fortune, and chance. See a man grow rich, they say, "How lucky he is!" Observing another become intellectual, they exclaim, "How highly favored he is!" And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, the remark, "How chance aids him at every turn!"

They do not see the trials and failures and struggles which these men have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience. They have no knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountable, and realize the Vision of their heart. They do not know the darkness and the heartaches; they only see the light and joy, and call it "luck"; do not see the long and arduous journey, but only behold the pleasant goal, and call it "good fortune"; do not understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it "chance.""
]

--James Allen, As a Man Thinketh

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

"For sheep don't throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk. Thus, therefore, do you likewise not show theorems to the unlearned, but the actions produced by them after they have been digested."
--Epictetus

"The condition and characteristic of a vulgar person, is, that he never expects either benefit or hurt from himself, but from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is, that he expects all hurt and benefit from himself."
--Epictetus

Just for the fun of getting his reactions, I asked an eminent scholar of
English Literature what educational benefits might lie in the study of
goliardic verse, Erse curses, and runic erotica. 'A working background of
goliardic verse would be more than helpful to anyone hoping to have some modest
facility in his own mother tongue', he declared; and with that he warmed to his
subject and to the poverties of unlettered science, so that it was some minutes
before I could steer him back to the Erse curses, about which he seemed a good
deal less enthusiastic. 'Really', he said, 'that sort of thing isn't my subject
at all. Of course, I applaud breadth of vocabulary; and you never know when
some seemingly useless piece of knowledge may not turn out to be of cardinal
practical importance. I could certainly envisage a situation in which they
might come in very handy indeed'. 'And runic erotica?' 'Not extant'. (Was it
only my fancy that heard a note of faint regret in his reply?) Certainly the
higher flights of scholarship can add savour; but does the man-in-the-street
have the time and the pertinacity and the intellectual digestion for them?
--John Hammersley, 1968

"The difference between a conviction and a prejudice is that you can explain a conviction without getting angry." - anon

David Diamond (Datamation, June 1976, pg 134):

The fellow who designed it is working far away.
The spec's not been updated for many a livelong day.
The guy who implemented it is promoted up the line.
And some of the enhancements didn't match to the design.
They haven't kept the flowcharts, the manual's a mess.
And most of what you need to know, you'll simply have to guess.

"The best mirror is an old friend."
-Proverb, from John Ray's 1670 book

"One hours sleep before midnight's worth two hours after."
-Proverb

"Drink wine and have the gout, and drink no wine and have the gout too."
-Proverb

"Better one house fill'd than two spill'd"
-Proverb

"He that marries a widow and three children, marries four thieves."
-Proverb

"My son's my son, till he hath got him a wife,
But my daughter's my daughter all days of her life."
-Proverb

"With a red man ready thy read;
With a brown man break thy bread;
At a pale man draw thy knife;
From a black man keep thy wife."
-Proverb

"A man of words and not of deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds."
-Proverb

"Quhen thy neighbours house is on fire, take heed to thy awn."
-Scot Proverb

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran

"With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map."
Daniel Worthington-Bodart

Yu Suzuki: "We made hardware and then created games to fit the hardware. The total span of making the hardware, creating the game, and then selling it was one year. We were constantly working on a new CPU. When you work on a brand new CPU, the debugger doesn't exist yet. The latest hardware doesn't work because it's full of bugs. And even if a debugger exists, the debugger itself is full of bugs. So, I had to debug the debugger. And of course with new hardware there's no library or system, so I had to create all that as well. It was a brutal cycle."

log log log x goes to infinity with great dignity. - Dan Shanks

My hands bleed when I get excited! ~Ultrachrist

"Growing up on the internet is like walking around for the rest of your life with your baby pictures stapled to your forehead" --I think Eliezer

"This cat is what we in the US would call a long-haired black-and-tan mackerel tabby. Cats of this phenotype can be found in almost every animal shelter at intervals. They represent a "wild type" agouti coloration with a tabby pattern arrangement of bands on the hairshaft: color and pattern being controlled by different genes commonly associated. This is a "landrace", or natural breed that emerges in randomly breeding feline populations as dominant wild type genes gain ascendency over generations. A white jaw is a common associated characteristic. It is likely the long double-layered coat of guard hairs which impart the pattern, and a dense fine gray wooly undercoat, originated in Siberia, and not in Persia as commonly believed--- though cats such as this may have first been prized a pets in ancient Persia--- from where they spread all over the world. These cats were particularly prized as ship's cats as they are active mousers (wild type) and impervious to cold and ocean spray. That is why their genes are common in recognized "breeds" like the Main Coon and Norwegian Forest Cats."

Kent Pitman from http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html
"Yet the design seemed mostly right to me, and my larger concern was that if we didn't at some point release it to a community of users to try, we'd be back at the same design table a few years later with the same questions and the same lack of community experience to answer them. A leap of faith seemed to be required to move ahead. So I and my committee nodded our collective heads and said we stood by the design. Personally, I had some doubts about some details, but I found it counterproductive to raise them because I believed the risk of not trying these things out was higher than the risk of trying them.

"In my experience, much of language design is like this. We think we know how it will all come out, but we don't always. Usage patterns are often surprising, as one learns if one is around long enough to design a language or two and then watch how expectations play out in reality over a course of years. So it's a gamble. But the only way not to gamble is not to move ahead.

"I once saw an interview on television with a font designer from Bitstream Inc. about how he conceptualized the process of font design. It is not about designing the shape of the letters, he explained, much to my initial surprise. Then he went on to explain that it was really about the shape of words. The font shapes play into that, but they are not, in themselves, the end goal. Programming language design is like that, too. It's not about the semantics of individual operators, but about how those operators fit together to form sentences in programs.

"Unlike the situation with fonts, where whole books can be viewed instantly in a new font to see how the design works, we don't know in advance what sentences will be made in a programming language. We have to wait and see what people choose to write. Common Lisp took a step forward, and while we can quibble endlessly over whether any given design decision was right, the one design decision I'm most certain was right was to offer the community a rich set of capabilities that would empower them not only to write programs, but also to have a stake in future designs. Never again will I fear sending out e-mail to a design group asking for advice about what the semantics of HANDLER-BIND should be and finding that no one has an opinion! To me, that kind of progress, the evolution of a whole community's understanding, is the best kind of progress of all."


"I have trouble with anyone who smiles after losing! It was not unfair to call me a "poor loser" when I played, but I think to be #1 you need to always expect to win and really hate to lose."
--Garry Kasparov

``If you have two bits of information to represent,
  use two bits to represent it.
  Neither coincidence nor convenience
  justifies overloading a single bit.''
-- Pitman's Two-Bit Rule

"People who are used to static languages expect languages to be static. ... Languages are a reflection of the community they serve. They become the way we express process, and so they inform our sense of what processes we expect. With static languages, one is encouraged to make early choices and to stand by them; with dynamic languages, to delay choices and to flexibly adapt."
--Kent Pitman

"I’m in the middle of my own research on psychiatric screening tools and quickly learning that *official, published research is the worst thing in the world*. I could do my study in about two hours if the only work involved were doing the study; instead it’s week after week of forms, IRB submissions, IRB revisions, required online courses where I learn the Nazis did unethical research and this was bad so I should try not to be a Nazi, selecting exactly which journals I’m aiming for, and figuring out which of my bosses and co-workers academic politics requires me make co-authors. It is a *crappy game*, and if you’ve been blessed with enough independence to avoid playing it, why *wouldn’t* you take advantage?"
--Scott

James Mickens:
"A person who can debug a device driver or a distributed system
is a person who can be trusted in a Hobbesian nightmare of breathtaking scope;
a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the
intrinsic horror of existence. The systems programmer has written drivers for
buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober
goldfish. The systems program- mer has traced a network problem across eight
machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the
problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance. The
systems program- mer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep
ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the
sched- uler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept
instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to
restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing
MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks
down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law."

"We didn't have spell checkers in our editors back then, and I always had poor spelling. The word "collumn" appears in the source code dozens of times. After I released the source code, one of the emails that stands out in memory read:

It's "COLUMN", you dumb FUCK!"
--John Carmack

"It may appear like a waste of time to read and write about "old" engines dedicated to extinct machines, compilers, and operating systems, but they carry tremendous value. Not only are they packed with clever tricks, they also remind us of the constraints programmers from the past had to overcome. They remind us of the spirit it once took to reach new frontiers.

Things have not changed much. These days we may deal with gigabytes, dedicated hardware accelerators, and multi-core CPUs but the spirit it takes to keep on moving forward remains the same. To those who struggle today, keep in mind you are not alone. Others have struggled before. Some have found fame and some have found fortune but in the grand scheme of things we all belong to a family of people who roll up their sleeves and try to make things better with hard work. Wherever it takes you, be proud of your labor. Be proud of your passion and keep on looking for The Right Thing to Do!"
--Fabien Sanglard

"Trusted third parties are security risks." -Nick Szabo

"The language Ada was designed to allow flexible generic functions, and a book
by Musser and Stepanov (1989) describes an Ada package that gives some of the
functionality of Common Lisp's sequence functions. But the Ada solution is less
than ideal: it takes a 264-page book to duplicate only part of the
functionality of the 20-page chapter 14 from Steele (1990), and Musser and
Stepanov went through five Ada compilers before they found one that would
correctly compile their package.  Also, their package is considerably less
powerful, since it does not handle vectors or optional keyword parameters."
-Peter Norvig, Paradigms of AI Programming

Certum quod factum.
(One is certain of only what one builds.)
-Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744)
Italian royal historiographer

Should I become a newspaper reporter? No, I can imagine myself becoming a thief some day, but I am not so inured to vice that I would treat justice and morality as merchandise the way such people do.
-Nagai Kafu, Behind the Prison

Unsurprisingly, your average PL researcher looks at a macro pretty much the same way your average Parisian chef looks at an Outback Steakhouse.
-Moldbug

Mistakes were maken.
--Chinese friend

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honour and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no – the right no –
undermines him all his life.
--Il Gran Rifiuto

You taught me how man makes himself eternal;
and while I live, my gratitude for that
must always be apparent in my words.
--Dante XV

If property be not unfair – if it is not the result of respecting past
accidents – it is not property at all, but something else.
--Moldbug

I don’t want to meet anyone
I don’t want to answer my cell phone (mainly it)
I don’t want to do anything
I don’t even want to live
But dying’s such a hassle.
--Sato, Welcome to the NHK

As long as there's someone who'll grieve, it's wrong to want to die.
--Hidehito Nomura, NHK

"People who neglect to make efforts or who don't take any actions at all are
always the ones who dream that someday they will suddenly become wildly
successful."
--Misaki Nakahara, NHK

"People like us aren't qualified to be involved in a dramatic incident such as
a suicide. No matter how depressed you are or how much pain you're in, you have
to return to your routine, daily life. Even if you don't come back, you'll just
end up dying in vain. A dramatic death isn't befitting of us."
--Yamazaki, NHK

"It's natural for a person to deny he's a failure as a human being. That's why
he searches for somebody who is more miserable than himself. That's why so much
animosity exists on the internet. Those who aren't able to find a more
miserable person, turn to the internet and call other people losers, even
though they've never met. Just to make themselves feel superior. Isn't that
pathetic? There's a sense of security that comes from speaking badly of someone
else. But that isn't true salvation."
--Sato, NHK

"Question: Why can one keep living as a hikikomori? Answer: Because one's food,
clothing and shelter are assured. It's because one is permitted a lukewarm bare
minimum of a life that one can keep living as a hikikomori indefinitely. Being
able to live as a hikikomori was in itself very much a luxury. Without the
assurance of food, clothing and shelter, unless you're prepared to die, there's
no other way but to work."
--Sato, NHK

Because of our broken instincts, we are in pain. We continue living in pain,
because our instincts have been twisted by reason. So, what are we supposed to
do? Should we abandon knowledge? Throw away reason? In any event, that wouldn't
be possible. For better or for worse, we ate the fruit of knowledge long, long
ago.
--Sato, NHK

(Merging fish's quotes I like.. http://fish.cx/quotes/misc_quotes.txt)

"People are only concerned about the next party, meeting up for casual sex,
finding a job as a Web page designer, or getting a new apartment."
-- John C. Dvorak describes the public's uses for Friendster etc. (Feb 2004) ##
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1523669,00.asp
# (He was also strongly suggesting social networks would flop).

Buying a Unix machine guarantees you a descent into Hell.  It starts when
you plug the computer in and it won't boot.  Yes, they really did sell you
a $10,000 computer with an unformatted disk drive.
-- Philip Greenspun

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
-- Linus Pauling
(I'm suspicious...)

"In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man
came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid."
-- Dave Barry

"...the open-source programs with the most impact will be those that are
the easiest to understand and adopt, not those with the most features."
-- http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html

"I will no longer confer, differ, refer, defer, prefer, or suffer.
I renounce the whole tribe of fero."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It seems to me that DocBook is falling in to the same trap as the rest of
the XML world, confusing tedious verbosity for semantic information."
-- Dave Thomas

"It's obvious that playing computer games is a far more intense
psychological experience than watching a film and therefore playing games
like Elite will /unquestionably/ turn your child into an intergalactic
mineral trader." -- thefridayproject.co.uk on Sky News journalism

"[..] but the delight and pride of Aule is in the deed of making, and in
the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery;
wherefore he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on
to some new work." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, Ainulindale (Silmarillion)

"To me, you understand something only if you can program it."
-- Gregory Chaitin

Proposed Swing slogan:
"Sure it looks like shit, but at least it does so consistently on all
operating systems."
-- http://www.zefhemel.com/archives/2004/08/16/why-java-sucks

"But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay:
for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
-- Matthew 5:37, on tri-state logic.

"Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be
discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator
on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is
even highly probable."  -- H. L. Mencken, 1930

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to
continue to fail in high spirits."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you.
Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure."

"It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired."

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of
a new system."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

"Any feature with so many names must be useful"
-- Peyton-Jones, Washburn and Weirich, 2004, "Wobbly types: [...]"

"Everybody and his brother has a spline function algorithm in his toolbox"
-- Jack W Crenshaw, http://www.embedded.com/story/OEG20020222S0023

"Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice"
-- Anon.
# Sometimes "incompetence" rather than "cluelessness", as here:
# http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/12/please-dont-steal-my-focus.html

"The interface between two programs consists of the set of assumptions
that each programmer needs to make about the other program in order to
demonstrate the correctness of his program."
-- http://research.microsoft.com/~lampson/33-hints/ (orig. Britton et al)

"I have yet to see an interesting piece of code
that comes from these OO people."
-- Alexander Stepanov

"Always start with algorithms." - Alexander Stepanov

"...the design of the data structures is the central decision [...].
Once the data structures are laid out, the algorithms tend to fall into
place, and the coding is comparatively easy." -- Kernighan and Pike

"Data dominates.  If you've chosen the right data structures and
organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be
self-evident.  Data structures, not algorithms, are central to
programming. (See Brooks p. 102.)" -- Rob Pike

Capture regularity with data, irregularity with code. (Kernighan)
## http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/style/slide33.html

"One commonly hears such phrases as `preventing the programmers from doing
their dirty tricks'.  It is as if language designers were invested with a
moral mission, and languages served as ramparts against the threat of the
developers' natural uncleanliness." -- Bertrand Meyer (The Bonzai and The Baobab)
## http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/meyer/publications/oxford-hoare/evolution.pdf

"I really want a license to do just two things: make the code available to
others, and make sure that improvements stay that way.  That's really it.
Nothing more, nothing less.  Everything else is fluff."
-- Linus Torvalds

"Reward contribution with praise."
(Eric S. Raymond's third rule of open-source development.)
## http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s01.html

"The vast majority of people are averse to learning, thinking, or
understanding."
-- Ruri's Law
## http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RurisLaw

"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create"
-- William Blake, "Jerusalem - The Emanation of the Giant Albion"
# Quote above the introduction in:
# http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/38/ftp:zSzzSzftp.cs.columbia.eduzSzreportszSzreports-1992zSzcucs-039-92.pdf/massalin92synthesi.pdf

"In my humble but correct opinion..."  -- jwz
## http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

"It's important to ruthlessly streamline your release process, so that you
can do frequent releases painlessly.  A setup where all other work must
stop during release preparation is a terrible mistake."
-- Henry Spencer
## http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch19s01.html

"Customer dependence is more profitable than customer education."
-- Wirth's Law (or at least, one of them)
## codespeak.net/svn/pypy/funding/wirth.lean.pdf

"A final note: he has a huge shower, in which he spends about twelve
hours a day.  I don't absolutely know that, but I deduce it from the time
I heard him say he only gets good ideas in the shower."
-- Brian Marick, of Guy Steele
## http://www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog/2005/03/26#guy-steele-tester

"Why is <emph>emph</emph> better than <i>i</i>?  When I'm publishing
content from 1901 and it's in italics, it's in italics, not emphasized.
Typography has a semantics that is subtle, changing, and deeply informed
by history."
-- Paul Ford
## http://www.ftrain.com/ProcessingProcessing.html

'In fact, the whole phrase "anonymous function" suggests limited thinking.
Would you call a hash table that wasn't the value of a variable an
"anonymous hash table?"'
-- Paul Graham
## http://www.paulgraham.com/icadmore.html

Java is C++ without the giant rotating knives.
-- "theonetruekeebler", Slashdot
## http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/1951203

`*academic* - a word that's typically used in business to mean that
something is irrelevant, as in "that's academic".'
-- Phillip J. Eby
## http://dirtsimple.org/2005/10/children-of-lesser-python.html

"Management was the single most important reason cited for neglecting the
design during development."
-- "The Coming of Software Architecture: A Historical View"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2787173_The_Coming_of_Software_Architecture_A_Historical_View

"Code deleted is code debugged."
-- Ian Bicking

"But making a logical error in a mortgage calculation that'll cause you
great misery is as easy in PAWN as in any other language... with or
without pointers."
-- Thiadmer Riemersma
## http://www.compuphase.com/pawn/pawnfeatures.htm

"Functional specs are often appeasement documents.  They're about making people
feel involved.  But, there's very little reality attached to anything you do
when the builders aren't building, the designers aren't designing, and the
people aren't using. We think reality builds better products than appeasement."
-- Jason Fried, 37 signals
## http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives/001050.php

"A commission of inquiry with perfect hindsight blamed the disaster upon
inadequate testing of the [Ariane 5] rocket's software.
What software failure could not be blamed upon inadequate testing?"
-- Kahan and Darcy, "How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere"
## http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/knepley/lang/JAVAhurt.pdf

"When I see a top-down description of a system or language that has infinite
libraries described by layers and layers, all I just see is a morass.  I can't
get a feel for it.  I can't understand how the pieces fit; I can't understand
something presented to me that's very complex."
-Ken Thompson

"Quotation confesses inferiority."
--  Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Some of the problem might be that we hire relatively unskilled labor to
write code.  But another part of the problem is that deep within our
souls we believe that we go faster when making messes."
-- "Uncle Bob"

1. Users don't have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn't read it.
2. In fact, users can't read anything, and if they could, they wouldn't want to.
-- Joel Spolsky's two principles of user interface design.

"To the best of my knowledge, Einstein didn't even know EJB, which
according to many Amazon folks makes him a retard."
-- Steve Yegge

"For some reason, programmers *love* to learn new stuff, as long as it's
not syntax."
-- Steve Yegge

"Thoreau says the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Not programmers, though. They lead lives of really loud desperation."
-- Steve Yegge

`From a user's perspective, LALR(1) really means "this thing doesn't parse
a lot of things that I quite reasonably would expect it to be able to parse".'
-- Laurence Tratt
## http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/text_is_dead_they_say

"I encourage people to go into functional programming because it stops a
lot of very clever, talented people from competing for my job opportunities."
-- Laurence Tratt
## http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/why_dont_we_use_functional_programming_languages_more


"When I tried to add [unit tests] yesterday, I realized my code, as it was,
simply wouldn't allow it. This means my code is bad[...] there really aren't
'units' to test, and that means the code is not well-enough thought out."
-- Duncan McGregor
## http://oubiwann.blogspot.com/2006/02/unit-tests-no-really-you-have-to-use.html

Including the demolition of the building on the site before,
the Empire State building was built in 11 months by 3000 people.

"Some young children constantly demand attention, and will do incredibly
annoying things until you stop and listen to them. ...  Dealing with
Adobe Acrobat is exactly like that, except it never grows up, makes you
proud or leaves home." -- Des Traynor
## http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/serendipity/index.php?/archives/74-The-screaming-child-of-software.html

"Programmers who subconsciously view themselves as artists will enjoy what
they do and will do it better."
  -- Donald E. Knuth voices the Great Lie of Computer Science
(Turing Award Speech, 1974)
### Such programmers will spend their lives in misery, surrounded by
### incompetents eager to destroy any order they create and caught up in
### systems designed for their more mediocre counterparts.

"Tutorials should be created with the attitude that any little setback is
going to cause some percentage of people to give up, or postpone it and
maybe not come back."
-- Bruce Eckels
## http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=170038

"...we did not (and still do not) believe in the standard multithreading
model, which is preemptive concurrency with shared memory: we still think
that no one can write correct programs in a language where 'a=a+1' is not
deterministic."  -- The Evolution of Lua
## http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1993

"I have never met someone who desperately wanted to be great but failed
to be at least decent."
-- Reg Braithwaite

"6. Tidy creatures, elves insist on the cleanest of bathrooms.
But don't mix bleach and ammonia.  Lohaton's skill with the longbow
is of no use to him now."
-- Igloowhite, "Fifteen Elvish ways to die"
## http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1260831&lastnode_id=1140332

"Do you have 20 years of experience,
or the same year of experience 20 times?"
-- Andy Hargadon

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with
judiciously placed print statements."
-- Brian Kernighan, 1979

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are
needed:  They must be fit for it.  They must not do too much of it.
And they must have a sense of success in it."
-- John Ruskin

"Thus spake the Lord: Thou shalt indent with four spaces. No more, no less.
Four shall be the number of spaces thou shalt indent, and the number of thy
indenting shall be four. Eight shalt thou not indent, nor either indent thou
two, excepting that thou then proceed to four. Tabs are right out." G.Brandl
## http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-November/094184.html

"I fully expected some people to voice rigorous complaints about the
language itself.  I was not disappointed.  One thing, however, that I
should have forseen and prepared for is the fact that a large number of
people would voice complaints about HLA in total ignorance." -- Randy Hyde
## http://web.mac.com/randyhyde/HighLevelAsm/HLADoc/HTMLDoc/WhatIsHLA.html

"Management says `I demand all of your creativity but trust none of your
judgement.'"
-- Zed Shaw
## http://vimeo.com/2723800

"Static analysis, /at best/, might catch 5-10% of your software quality
problems. [...] Overall, testing is far more valuable than static analysis."
-- William Pugh, lead developer of FindBugs
## http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/MistakesThatMatter.pdf

"All software should be relentless.  If you remove its legs, it should use
its arms.  Whatever errors it encounters, it should deal with them, and
keep going if it can."
-- Robert `r0ml' Lefkowitz

"It's silly.  The whole thing, right?  I mean, XML is better if you have
more text and fewer tags.  And JSON is better if you have more tags and
less text.  Argh! I mean, come on, it's that easy."
-- Steve Yegge

`Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use
threads," and then two they hav erpoblesms.`
-- Ned Batchelder
## https://twitter.com/nedbat/status/194452404794691584

"Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast
about your project or service, and that bring friends with them."
-- W. Edwards Deming

"20 years of abstinence-only cryptography education hasn't gotten
us anything but an endless supply of bad crypto in production systems."
-- David Reid
## https://twitter.com/dreid/statuses/422799924225273856

`Which makes it a case of "if all the webservers, browsers and web-client
toolkits jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"  To which the answer
is "since we have to interoperate with those toolkits, yes".'
-- Jon Hanna

(end fish quotes merge)

"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young
professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards
that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres,
she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, "Of course not, that isn't what
I am trying to do...I could never do that."

Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: "That standard must be our
standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile.""
--Christopher Alexander, May 1996 in (Patterns of Software, Gabriel)

Pickle's Law:
	If Congress must do a painful thing,
	the thing must be done in an odd-number year.

"What makes programming hard is the frustration."
-Tim Daly

It does not follow that because people of the same race and character are drawn
together by equality and liberty, people of different races and different
characters, who have quarrelled for centuries, will be similarly attracted to
one another.  -Froude

"Lord Tennyson's opinions and Mr. Gladstone's opinions reveal to us only the
nature and texture of their own minds, which have been affected in this way or
that way. The scale has not been made in which we can weigh the periods in a
nation's life, or measure them one against the other. The past is gone, and
nothing but the bones of it can be recalled. We but half understand the
present, for each age is a chrysalis, and we are ignorant into what it may
develop. We do not even try to understand it honestly, for we shut our eyes
against what we do not wish to see. I will not despond with Lord
Tennyson. To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them, and modern
enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store for us which will come
by-and-by. But I will not say that they have come as yet. I will not say that
public life is improved when party spirit has degenerated into an organised
civil war, and a civil war which can never end, for it renews its life like the
giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say that men are more honest
and more law-abiding when debts are repudiated and law is defied in half the
country, and Mr. Gladstone himself applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open
dishonesty. We are to congratulate ourselves that duelling has ceased, but I do
not know that men act more honourably because they can be called less sharply
to account. 'Smuggling,' we are told, has disappeared also, but the wrecker
scuttles his ship or runs it ashore to cheat the insurance office. The Church
may perhaps be improved in the arrangement of the services and in the
professional demonstrativeness of the clergy, but I am not sure that the clergy
have more influence over the minds of men than they had fifty years ago, or
that the doctrines which the Church teaches are more powerful over public
opinion. One would not gather that our morality was so superior from the
reports which we see in the newspapers, and girls now talk over novels which
the ladies' maids of their grandmothers might have read in secret but would
have blushed while reading. Each age would do better if it studied its own
faults and endeavoured to mend them, instead of comparing itself with others to
its own advantage.

"This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone was reported to
have said, and in thinking of his own achievements and career, that there are
two classes of men who have played and still play a prominent part in the
world—those who accomplish great things, and those who talk and make speeches
about them. The doers of things are for the most part silent. Those who build
up empires or discover secrets of science, those who paint great pictures or
write great poems, are not often to be found spouting upon platforms. The
silent men do the work. The talking men cry out at what is done because
it is not done as they would have had it, and afterwards take possession of it
as if it was their own property. Warren Hastings wins India for us; the
eloquent Burke desires and passionately tries to hang him for it. At the
supreme crisis in our history when America had revolted and Ireland was
defiant, when the great powers of Europe had coalesced to crush us, and we were
staggering under the disaster at York Town, Rodney struck a blow in the West
Indies which sounded over the world and saved for Britain her ocean sceptre.
Just in time, for the popular leaders had persuaded the House of Commons that
Rodney ought to be recalled and peace made on any terms. Even in politics the
names of oratorical statesmen are rarely associated with the organic growth of
enduring institutions. The most distinguished of them have been conspicuous
only as instruments of destruction. Institutions are the slow growths of
centuries. The orator cuts them down in a day. The tree falls, and the hand
that wields the axe is admired and applauded. The speeches of Demosthenes and
Cicero pass into literature, and are studied as models of language. But
Demosthenes and Cicero did not understand the facts of their time; their
language might be beautiful, and their sentiments noble, but with their fine
words and sentiments they only misled their countrymen. The periods where the
orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and disintegration. Goethe
could say of Luther that he had thrown back for centuries the spiritual
cultivation of mankind, by calling the passions of the multitude to judge of
matters which should have been left to the thinkers. We ourselves are just now
in one of those uneasy periods, and we have decided that orators are the
fittest people to rule over us. The constituencies choose their members
according to the fluency of their tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one
test of competency for a legislator, and the most persuasive of the whole we
make prime minister. We admire the man for his gifts, and we accept what he
says for the manner in which it is uttered. He may contradict to-day what he
asserted yesterday. No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is
persuaded himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince
himself of anything which it is his interest to believe. These are the persons
who are now regarded as our wisest. It was not always so. It is not so now with
nations who are in a sound state of health. The Americans, when they choose a
President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from whom they require
wise action, do not select these famous speech-makers. Such periods do not
last, for the condition which they bring about becomes always intolerable. I do
not believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the present generation of
Englishmen to be capable of all that their fathers were and possibly of more;
but we are just now in a moulting state, and are sick while the process is
going on. Or to take another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The
worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the
owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her
substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with a
common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord and master
can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is stretched once more
upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger with the sharp note of the
swallow; and the arrows fly to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders,
while Pallas Athene looks on approving from her coign of vantage."
--Froude, The Bow of Ulysses ch2, 1888

Plato says that to travel to any profit one should go between fifty and sixty;
not sooner because one has one's duties to attend to as a citizen; not after
because the mind becomes hebetated. The chief object of going abroad, in
Plato's opinion, is to converse with θειοι ἅνδρες inspired men, whom Providence
scatters about the globe, and from whom alone wisdom can be learnt.
--Froude

Receptions and public dinners and loyal speeches will not solve political
problems, but they create the feeling of good will which underlies the useful
consideration of them.
--Froude

Oratory is the spendthrift sister of the arts, which decks itself like a
strumpet with the tags and ornaments which it steals from real superiority. The
object of it is not truth, but anything which it can make appear truth;
anything which it can persuade people to believe by calling in their passions
to obscure their intelligence.
--Froude

It is only when one has seen any object with one's own eyes, that the accounts
given by others become recognisable and instructive.
--Froude

If there is no jealousy there is no friendship.
--Froude

She [Solomon's good woman] considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit
of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
--Proverbs 31:16

Litany of Jai: Almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken.

"There was only six Democrats in all of Hinsdale County and you, you son of
a bitch, you ate five of them."
-- Colorado judge, sentencing Alfred E. Packer for cannibalism in 1874.

He[Labat] tried to make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as
often as he liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he
found that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded
charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and good sense
out of a woman.
--Froude

The chief complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks,
who they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake except
at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect anything else
from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to them are only
mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be, with whom they have
no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages are but twopence an hour
and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary pleasure of the overseer.
--Froude

Many thousands of pounds will have to be spent there before the troops can
return; but that is our way with the colonies—to change our minds every ten
years, to do and undo, and do again, according to parliamentary humours, while
John Bull pays the bill patiently for his own irresolution.
--Froude

The word 'impossible' was not known in those days. What Englishmen did once
they may do again perhaps if stormy days come back.
--Froude

I stayed on deck till midnight with a clever young American, who was among our
fellow-passengers, talking of many things. He was ardent, confident, self-
asserting, but not disagreeably either one or the other. It was rather a
pleasure to hear a man speak in these flabby uncertain days as if he were sure
of anything, and I had to notice again, as I had often noticed before, how well
informed casual American travellers are on public affairs, and how sensibly
they can talk of them. He had been much in the West Indies and seemed to know
them well. He said that all the whites in the islands wished at the bottom of
their hearts to be taken into the Union; but the Union Government was too wise
to meddle with them. The trade would fall to America of itself. The
responsibility and trouble might remain where it was.
--Froude

They flitted about silent on their shoeless feet, never stumbled, or upset
chairs or plates or dishes, but waited noiselessly like a pair of elves, and
were always in their place when wanted. One had heard much of the idleness and
carelessness of negro servants. In no part of the globe have I ever seen
household work done so well by two pairs of hands. Of their morals I know
nothing. It is usually said that negro girls have none. They appeared to me to
be perfectly modest and innocent.
--Froude

[Dominica,] Not to be confounded with St. Domingo [Dominican Republic], which
is called after St. Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now
divided into the two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in
the chain of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so named
by Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.
--Froude

I have known the fishing boys of the English Channel all my life; they are
generally skilful, ready, and daring beyond their years; but I never knew one
lad not more than thirteen or fourteen years old who, if woke out of his sleep
by a hurricane in a dark night and alone, would have understood so well what to
do, or have it done so effectually. There are plenty more of such black boys in
Dominica, and they deserve a better fate than to be sent drifting before
constitutional whirlwinds back into barbarism, because we, on whom their fate
depends, are too ignorant or too careless to provide them with a tolerable
government.
--Froude

In no country ought a government to exist for which respect is impossible, and
English rule as it exists in Dominica is a subject for a comedy.
--Froude

Ingenuity tries other tracks besides the beaten one.
--Froude

Industries so various and so active required labour, and I saw many of the
blacks at work on the grounds. In apparent contradiction to the general West
Indian experience, he told me that he had never found a difficulty about it. He
paid them fair wages, and paid them regularly without the overseer's fines and
drawbacks. He knew one from the other personally, could call each by his name,
remembered where he came from, where he lived, and how, and could joke with him
about his wife or mistress. They in consequence clung to him with an innocent
affection, stayed with him all the week without asking for holidays, and worked
with interest and goodwill. Four years only had elapsed since Dr.  Nicholls
commenced his undertakings, and he already saw his way to clearing a thousand
pounds a year on that one small patch of acres.
--Froude describing Dr. Nicholls

The possession of a vote never improved the character of any human being and
never will.
--Froude

There are many islands in the West Indies, and an experiment might be ventured
without any serious risk. Let the suffrage principle be applied in its fullness
where the condition of the people seems best to promise success. In some one of
them—Dominica would do as well as any other—let a man of ability and character
with an ambition to distinguish himself be sent to govern with a free hand. Let
him choose his own advisers, let him be untrammelled, unless he falls into
fatal and inexcusable errors, with interference from home.  Let him have time
to carry out any plans which he may form, without fear of recall at the end of
the normal period. After ten or fifteen years, let the results of the two
systems be compared side by side. I imagine the objection to such a trial would
be the same which was once made in my hearing by an Irish friend of mine, who
was urging on an English statesman the conversion of Ireland into a Crown
colony. 'You dare not try it,' he said, 'for if you did, in twenty years we
would be the most prosperous island of the two, and you would be wanting to
follow our example.'
--Froude

Am I asked what shall be done? I have answered already. Among the silent
thousands whose quiet work keeps the Empire alive, find a Rajah Brooke if you
can, or a Mr. Smith of Scilly. If none of these are attainable, even a Sancho
Panza would do. Send him out with no more instructions than the knight of La
Mancha gave Sancho—to fear God and do his duty.
--Froude

The leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of the many, is the
beginning and the end of all right action. Secure this, and you secure
everything. Fail to secure it, and be your liberties as wide as you can make
them, no success is possible.
--Froude

When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty and the Rights of Man became
the new gospel, slavery could not beallowed to continue in the French
dominions. The blacks of the colony were emancipated and were received into the
national brotherhood. In sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the
chateaux of the nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves
rose as soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man,
woman, and child.
--Froude

The poor women are content with the arrangement, which they prefer to what they
would regard as legal bondage. They earn at this coaling work seven or eight
shillings a day. If they were wives, their husbands would take it from them and
spend it in rum. The companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her
earnings for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in Jamaica, I
would take it away from the men and would give it to the superior sex. The
women are the working bees of the hive. They would make a tolerable nation of
black amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.
--Froude

René Descartes:
(AT 460 but https://net.cgu.edu/philosophy/descartes/passions/french/fr170.html
has crisper/modern text)
Et alors c'est un excès d'Irrésolution qui vient d'un trop grand désir de bien faire,
et d'une faiblesse de l'entendement, lequel, n'ayant point de notions claires et distinctes, en a seulement beaucoup de confuses.

(My translation:) This kind of indecision is an excess which comes from a too-great desire to do good,
and a weakness of the intellect, which, not having any clear and distinct notions at all, has only much confused ones.

(CSM pg 390 translation:) In this case an excess of irresolution results from too great a desire to do well
and from a weakness of the intellect, which contains only a lot of confused notions, and none that are clear and distinct.

(From Psychopass's Makishima, which I think is referencing this:)
Those who can't make a decision can't do so either because their passions are too great or because they lack the sufficient intellect.

Descartes, on Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680): "I had composed [the passions]
only to be read by a princess whose mental powers are so extraordinary that she
can easily understand matters which seem very difficult to our learned doctors.
So the only points I explained at length in it are those I thought to be
novel."

"Let us note that death never occurs through the absence of the soul, but only because one of the principal parts of the body decays."
--Descartes, Passions

"Having thus considered all the functions belonging solely to the body, it is easy to recognize that
there is nothing in us which we must attribute to our soul except our thoughts.
These are of two principal kinds, some being actions of the soul and others its passions."
("Après avoir ainsi considéré toutes les fonctions qui appartiennent au corps seul,
il est aisé de connaître qu'il ne reste rien en nous que nous devions attribuer à notre âme, sinon nos pensées,
lesquelles sont principalement de deux genres, à savoir : les unes sont les actions de l'âme, les autres sont ses passions")
--Descartes

"It must be observed that the principal effect of all the human passions
[emotions] is that they move and dispose the soul to want the things for which
they prepare the body. Thus the feeling of fear moves the soul to want to flee,
that of courage to want to fight, and similarly with the others."
--Descartes

This "brain-damaged" epithet is getting sorely overworked. When we can
speak of someone or something being flawed, impaired, marred, spoiled;
batty, bedlamite, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, demented,
deranged, loco, lunatic, mad, maniac, mindless, non compos mentis, nuts,
Reaganite, screwy, teched, unbalanced, unsound, witless, wrong; senseless,
spastic, spasmodic, convulsive; doped, spaced-out, stoned, zonked; {beef,
beetle,block,dung,thick}headed, dense, doltish, dull, duncical, numskulled,
pinhead; asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, lumbering, oafish;
half-assed, incompetent; backward, retarded, imbecilic, moronic; when we have
a whole precisely nuanced vocabulary of intellectual abuse to draw upon,
individually and in combination, isn't it a little <fill in the blank> to be
limited to a single, now quite trite, adjective?
--I'unno

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
--Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716)

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.
--Isaac Barrow (1630-1677)

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) Milton.

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
--Dave Barry

i try to tan my bottom so if people tell me to cram somethinsomethin where the sun don’t shine i can say “oh ho but it does shine! it does!”
--I'unno

what makes me such a lousy programmer is that i can excuse anything by saying
this isn't so bad— i myself am a much bigger hack than this.
--_why

There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of... There were loose threads. Untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my life.
--Picard, Tapestry

"These arguments were the lifeblood of the hacker community. Sometimes people
would literally scream at each other, insisting on a certain kind of coding
scheme for an assembler, or a specific type of interface, or a particular
feature in a computer language. These differences would have hackers banging on
the blackboard or throwing chalk across the room. It wasn't so much a battle of
egos as it was an attempt to figure out what "The Right Thing" was. The term
had special meaning to the hackers. The Right Thing implied that to any
problem, whether a programming dilemma, a hardware interface mismatch, or a
question of software architecture, a solution existed that was just...it. The
perfect algorithm. You'd have hacked right into the sweet spot, and anyone with
half a brain would see that the straight line between two points had been
drawn, and there was no sense trying to top it. "The Right Thing", Gosper would
later explain, "very specifically meant the unique, correct, elegant
solution...the thing that satisfied all the constraints at the same time, which
everyone seemed to believe existed for most problems."

"Gosper and Greenblatt both had strong opinions, but usually Greenblatt would
tire of corrosive human interfacing, and wander away to actually *implement*
something. Elegant or not. In his thinking, *things had to be done*. And if no
one else would be hacking them, he would."

--Steve Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Democracies are always extravagant. The majority, who have little property or
none, regulate the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who have to
find the money, and have no interest in sparing them.
--Froude

But, alas! it is with tobacco
as with most other things. Democracy is king; and the greatest happiness of the
greatest number is the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher
than it used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity is rare or is
non-existent.
--Froude

Don't go to stupid places.
Don't associate with stupid people.
Don't do stupid things.
--John Farnam

"You can run hundreds of languages on the JVM and .NET CLR, and you can freely
convert Nim to about 4, and the GCC uses an intermediate langauge to convert
between hundreds of languages and CPUs.

But sure, the Python project found this to be too much effort after 20 years of
development and decided that, nope, they aren't really the language experts
they thought so let's make a junk 2to3 converter and yell at people to hand
convert all their code like savages."
--Zed Shaw

"Skillfully written Forth code is like poetry, containing precise meaning that
both programmer and machine can easily read. Your *goal* should be to write
code that does not need commenting, even if you choose to comment it. Design
your application so that code, not the comments, conveys the meaning."
--Thinking Forth
[great except for the word 'poetry', which requires passing that herb...]

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
--Dijkstra

"I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of
another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." --Galt Gulch Pledge

「人間って脆いね」
(Humans are fragile.)
100万回死んでからが本当の勝負
(A true game after 1 million deaths.)
「そういう日もある」
(Days like that exist too...) [Said after accepting a bad mistake/luck]
「助けないで後悔するよりは、助けて後悔したほうがまだ…私、許せる自分を」
(It's still better to regret helping than to regret without helping... I can forgive myself.)
『死をも楽しむ、理不尽な死を楽しめ。』
(Q: How do you be careful not to lose even a difficult game?
A: "Enjoy death, enjoy unreasonable death.")
--Suzuhara Lulu

お前、弱い、あたし、強い (You，Weak，I，Strong)
--Minato Aqua

"Programming is a craft, and programmers must attain a standard of
craftsmanship. Much programming is done in *cottage shops* -- that is, in small
shops with meager tools, much work done by hand, and learning attained from
other laborers, by chance, and often not at all. ... the academics have also
discovered that a craft cannot be taught well by teachers alone; the guild
apprenticeships had considerable merit. In a classic apprenticeship the
candidate spent many years doing menial tasks while absorbing fundamental
techniques of the trade from more experienced workers in the shop. Gradually
the apprentice was given more technical responsibility and, after a formal test
of skills, eventually became a journeyman certified competent for all ordinary
jobs in the trade. The journeyman traveled the world and, if the muses allowed,
one day presented a masterpiece to the guild and became a craftsman of the
highest rank -- a master of the guild."
--Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

"The difficulty with teaching programming is that it cannot be taught. The
difficulty with learning programming is that it is so much work. A teacher can
help, lecture, criticize, guide, smooth the path. A student can take notes,
memorize, read, pass tests, discuss until two in the morning. All this effort
will be meaningless if the student does not practice by actually writing
programs, because programming, like other skills, can be acquired only by
practice. Furthermore, the practice must be on 'real' programs and not on the
simplistic material found in most programming language manuals."
--Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

"The abilities of a programmer closely resemble those of an essayist. ... Here
is a list of talents vital to programmers (and essayists) ... [see pg 1-2]"
--Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

"All too often the problems in programming books are mere finger exercises. ...
All of this suggests that we draw problems from the real world. But real-world
problems are filled with niggling detail, require mounds of input, produce
reams of output, and are changed every other day because management cannot make
up its mind. A student who could learn in a production shop would emerge a more
saintly person, but too many programming trainees end up broken, bitter, and
despondent. An etude must lie in the middle ground between real practice and
triviality."
--Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

"[Games and computer science] seem to require the most complex algorithms and
data structures so that no demand from an application program is likely to
shock the student later."
--Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

"Complexity is the business we are in, and complexity is what limits us."
--Fred Brooks

As you point out, static typing is tied to the notion of designing up front. It
is also connected with fear. I have to say that I really like types, in
general. But I don’t like them when the prevent me from expressing myself. Or,
as is more likely but much more subtle, when they cause a language designer to
distort a language to suit the needs of the type system.
–William Cook

What the static types are trying to do is to make sure that a program cannot
fail at runtime. Yet, for living systems to be created, they must be able to
sustain a failure and repair itself. This is part of a doomed attempt to
eliminate errors and write perfect systems. OO people understood this but
allowed—though how could they have stopped it?—the static types to take over
their languages, starting with C++, Eiffel, and Java.
-Richard Gabriel

Edward Glaeser quips, “A country that cannot provide clean water for its citizens should not be in the business of regulating film dialogue.”

Lancelot:  Your rage has unbalanced you. You, sir, would fight to the death, against a knight who is not your enemy. Over a stretch of road you could easily ride around.
Arthur:   So be it. To the death!
—Excalibur

"Compared to scientific practices, the work of engineers is far less frequently
studied and theorized. When concepts from the history and philosophy of science
are applied to the history and philosophy of engineering, strange distortions
occur. The introduction attempts to clarify such distortions and to legitimate
engineering knowledge by its own standards. Doing so requires a recognition
that engineering knowledge is a genuine kind of knowledge, not merely the
application of already existent scientific knowledge. Since knowledge is seen
as something engineering communities produce, this chapter also explores the
entanglement between engineering's social structures and its knowledge."
_Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge_ by Ann Johnson

"L'appétit vient en mangeant" -- French proverb

"Strangely, when Lisp is taught at all in computer science curricula, it is taught using a circa-1965 view of the state of Lisp implementations: interpreted execution, limited data structures, and no real application beyond the manipulation of symbols."
--Successful Lisp, ch 28

ネガティブな感情は他の人のネガティブな感情を引き起こす
("Negative emotions cause negative emotions in others")
--Sephira Su

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to be able to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."
Rob Pike on Go, https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent at 20:33

"i'm sitting here like an ass using immutable data structures and reading about TLA+ and people at Toyota are like #define MAKE_CAR_GO 1"
Paul Ford (https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/671394222218592256)

“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. 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

"As we look back into the past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously.
The mistakes and miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the
present faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice
that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse is to
conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes reminded what the
past really was."
--Froude

"There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is not a slave, a sailor is
not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is not a slave; yet they may not
live by their own wills or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from
positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves
voluntarily entered."
--Froude

Think of the process of signaling and handling as analogous to finding a fork in a road that you do not commonly travel. You don't know which way to go, so you make known your dilemma, that is, you signal a condition. Various sources of wisdom (handlers) present themselves, and you consult each, placing your trust in them because you have no special knowledge yourself of what to do. Not all sources of wisdom are experts on every topics, so some may decline to help before you find one that is confident of its advice. When an appropriately confident source of wisdom is found, it will act on your behalf. The situation has been handled.
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
--Henri Poincaré

Don't expect the material rewards of unrighteousness while engaged in the pursuit of truth.
-Edith Hamilton

Ignorance can be cured, however, and everyone who has once been ignorant knows
that it is but a temporary condition, but stupidity is not curable, because
stupidity is evidence of the more or less conscious decision to remain ignorant
when faced with an opportunity to learn.
--Erik Naggum

"There are diverging programming styles in the Forth community. One uses hyphenated words that express in English what the word is doing. You string these big long words together and you get something that is quite readable.

But I immediately suspect that the programmer didn’t think out the words carefully enough, that the hyphen should be broken and the words defined separately. That isn’t always possible, and it isn’t always advantageous. But I suspect a hyphenated word of mixing two concepts."
--Chuck Moore, Thinking Forth, p166

There's a great anecdote in Victor Klemperer's diary of life as a Jew in Nazi Germany. He was a longtime subscriber to a cat magazine. In 1932 his cat magazine was all about cats. By 1935 it couldn't shut up about the virtues of the "German Cat."
--Relayed by Moldbug

"Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.

Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better."
--Carmack https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25551&cid=2774808

"Amongst turners, as with every other class of men, the best man drifts into
the best work of his class and gets the highest wages; this inequality of wages
is infinitely greater than is generally supposed, and it is unintentionally
increased by the trades unions, for although the union may insist upon a
minimum wage of, say, 30s a week for the worst man, and a first-rate turner may
receive £3 a week, yet the former does not receive half the wages of the
latter, as may at first appear to be the case, because he is unable to secure
permanent work, and he may easily be without employment, upon an average, from
one to three months each year of his working life, whereas a first-rate man
need never be out of work except through illness. On the other hand, if the
turners' union did not interfere with the matter of wages, and left every man
to make his own terms, every man would have an equal chance of obtaining
permanent work, and earning what he is worth, which, at present, an indifferent
man is unable to do."
--The Home Mechanic

"Many amateurs try to find out everything for themselves without help from
others; they always fail. The opposite extreme are those who try to buy
knowledge like sweets at a shop; they fail equally. But by combining the two
systems they as certainly succeed."
--The Home Mechanic

"For example, suppose that some posts are required for a clothes' line, he may buy some pieces of pine about nine feet long; these are rough from the saw; he may then drive a big nail into one end of each to support the line, then dig a hole in the garden, put into it the other end of his post, fill in the earth and tread it down, without caring whether his post is, or is not, perpendicular; he considers this quite "good enough." He cares nothing about the opportunity of having materials upon which to practise, nor that the nail will rust and cut through the line, nor that the rusty nail will iron-mould the clothes, nor that the rough posts will wear out or tear the clothes when they are blown by the wind against the rough edges. This person is not an amateur. He may be left to follow his own methods; he has chosen "good enough" for his motto; this he will keep throughout his life. He will be taken at his own valuation as being "good enough" for third-rate work, and when he is an old man he will look back on his lost opportunities and then know that "good enough" has ruined his life because he failed to perceive that his favourite "good enough" really means "*not* good enough."

The "amateur" (by which term is implied the person who wishes to learn, and who may be considered to be in the position of the apprentice) would make his posts in quite another way."
--The Home Mechanic

"The amateur must learn to think and to use his own judgment, because he intends to become a better man than the ordinary mechanic, who is little more than an animated machine, and who executes, or, rather, makes visible and of practical use, the thoughts of others."
--The Home Mechanic

"C is JQuery for the computer."
-- Micha Niskin

"The farmer, therefore, in common with every other class, is unquestionably suffering from monopolized products, and the question may be as profitably considered here as anywhere, what remedy, if any, can be adopted to prevent such abuses? One remedy, which may be called the natural or societary, is to let the monopolists alone, believing that the motive which has led them into the movement is quite as strong in others, and will lead them to engage in a similar business, and that the competitive warfare thus kindled will result in the fall of prices to a just level. A single illustration may be given to show the working of this remedy. A large number of companies in New England were engaged in making small nails, and as competition among them became keen, profits were reduced to zero. At last they met together, formed a trust, advanced the price of nails and their losses ceased. The price of nails was advanced only enough to earn fair dividends, and this happy and prosperous family continued for two years, during which period ten percent dividends were regularly declared. At the end of that time some of the members, not satisfied with these profits, insisted on advancing the price of nails so that the profits might be twenty-five or thirty percent on the capital invested. The wiser objected, saying that such profits would attract others into the business and that in a little while they would be ruined, but the greedy party was strong enough to carry the day, and so prices were advanced and the dividends for a time were greatly increased. The day of golden prosperity, however, was short, for the great profits were soon discovered, others entered the business, and within two years the combination was bankrupt, and this is likely to be the end of all the monopolies now existing, at no distant day, even if the state does not interfere. The monopolists in most cases are seeking for such extravagant profits that others, who are equally greedy, are sure to enter the field and engage in a fierce competition for the trade, and in the end prices will be greatly lessened.

We may, therefore, conclude that, even if no legal steps are taken to overthrow these newly-created enterprises, they will in a short period go to pieces; in other words, the forces which have started them into being will ultimately destroy them. Others will be just as eager to make money as the persons who are now engaged in them, and who, believing that a better opportunity for making money exists in these ways than in any other, will forthwith enter into the race, and in a few years competition between the newly-created and the older concerns will be as sharp as ever. Already evidences exist of such a temper and movement."
--Annual Report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Part 3, Industrial Statistics, Vol XVIII, 1890

"Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them." – Ed Catmull

"Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
--ROTK

"The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
--Malcolm Turnbull, Australia Prime Minister (2015-2018)

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and  you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Alcohol is humanity's friend. Can I abandon a friend?
"It's always alcohol's real wish to be drunk.
Humans were drinking alcohol five thousand years ago, and they're still drinking it now.
And five thousand years from now, they'll be drinking alcohol.
Although it's unlikely that there'll be a human race in five thousand years."
--Yang Wen-li

"Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day. That's how much that paper is worth."
--Linus Torvalds, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477#c129

"I followed the instructions and it said I didn't have grunt installed. Now I'm
an old guy so I didn't really know what grunt was and my grunt files weren't
right or something. So I googled a bit and I found out what grunt was.
Grunt's... I still don't really know what it is."
--Joe Armstrong, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

There are far more ugly programs than ugly languages. Using a 'good' language
does not guarantee pretty programs. In fact, since a 'good' language has
immense power, it is possible to write uglier programs in a 'good' language,
than it is to write ugly programs in a 'bad' language.  This, of course, is one
of the justifications I've seen for forcing people to write in 'bad'
languages!!
– Henry Baker, unaware of what he predicted in a Usenet thread
(https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.c++/c/xLNt2BU34SA/m/Hd78cAAMUVYJ)

"> And how do you estimate the time needed to implement one of those
> applications?

By proxy-based estimation:  You analyse the problem domain until you
can break the application down into the required parts, and then you
compare those parts with functional units you implemented before, and
based on its closest proxies, your current understanding of the
problem, and some good rules-of-thumb knowledge you make initial
estimates.  The more you progress towards a fuller understanding of
the problem, the more you can refine those estimates.

Of course there are always problems that are so dissimilar to anything
you did before that you can't give a reasonable initial estimate.  In
that case you might have to invest considerable time just to be able
to offer a good estimate, upon which a go/no-go decision can then be
based.  Of course it might be that this approach carries too high a
risk or too high costs, so that the feature in question (or the entire
project) will have to be axed."
--Pierre R. Mai, "Re: loc measurement for Common Lisp?"


> The world was fair, the mountains tall,
> In Elder Days before the fall
> Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
> And Gondolin, who now beyond
> The Western Seas have passed away . . .

"I like that!" said Sam. "I should like to learn it. *In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.* But it makes the darkness seem heavier, thinking of all those lamps."

By his enthusiastic 'I like that!' Sam not only 'mediates' (and engagingly
'Gamgifies') the 'high', the mighty kings of Nargothrond and Gondolin, Durin on
his carven throne, but places them at once at an even remoter distance, a
magical distance that it might well seem (*at that moment*) destructive to
traverse.
. . .
The effect that 'the glimpses of a large history in the background' have in
*The Lord of the Rings* is incontestable and of the utmost importance, but I
did not think that the 'glimpses' used there with such art should preclude all
further knowledge of the 'large history'.  The literary 'impression of depth
. . . created by songs and digressions' cannot be made a criterion by which a
work in a wholly different mode is measured: this would be to treat the history
of the Elder Days as of value primarily or even solely in the artistic use made
of it in *The Lord of the Rings*.
. . .
'Depth' in this sense implies a relation between different temporal layers or
levels within the same world. Provided that the reader has a place, a point of
vantage, *in the imagined time* from which to look back, the extreme oldness of
the extremely old can be made apparent and made to be felt continuously. And
the very fact that *The Lord of the Rings* establishes such a powerful sense of
a real time-structure (far more powerful than can be done by mere chronological
assertion, tables of dates) provides this necessary vantage-point.  To read
*The Silmarillion* one must place oneself imaginatively at the time of the
ending of the Third Age -- within Middle-earth, looking back: at the temporal
point of Sam Gamgee's "I like that!" -- adding, "I should like to know more
about it". Moreover the compendious or epitomising form and manner of *The
Silmarillion*, with its suggestion of ages of poetry and 'lore' behind it,
strongly evokes a sense of 'untold tales', even in the telling of them;
'distance' is never lost. There is no narrative urgency, the pressure and fear
of the immediate and unknown event. We do not actually see the Silmarils as we
see the Ring.
--Christopher Tolkien, Foreword to The Book of Lost Tales
[I think that "I should like to know more about it" feeling is the test to determine whether someone would actually enjoy reading The Silmarillion.
Also a good point that the 'lore' isn't just some literary device, just for world-building of LotR, but also stands on its own.]

---

The dragons shall never be forgotten... We knights fought valiantly, but for
every one of them, we lost three score of our own. Exhilaration, pride, hatred,
rage... The dragons teased out our dearest emotions... Thou will understand,
one day. At thy twilight, old thoughts return, in great waves of nostalgia.
--Gough

The purpose of this book is to explain the rudiments of Algebra and
Trigonometry to artisans and others, who may wish to be acquainted with them so
far as to make the computations which arise in practice, and to read books in
which science is treated mathematically. It is my hope that a student who
masters this book and works its examples will find himself able to solve a
large number of the questions which applied science raises, and to perform all
the ordinary calculations which logarithms assist, and that he will find
himself in possession of a trustworthy and available power, although, so far as
I conduct him, he will have entered but a small portion of the wide field of
modern analysis.
--William N. Griffin, The Elements of Algebra and Trigonometry, 1871

"I think there's a world market for about five computers."
--Thomas J. Watson, IBM Chairman, 1943

"With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto
industry isn't likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market for
itself." Business Week, 1958

"TV won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first
six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every
night." Daryl F. Zanuck, Head of 20th Century Fox, 1946

"By 1980, all power (electric, atomic, solar) is likely to be virtually costless."
--Henry Luce, founder and publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, 1956

"1930 will be a splendid employment year." U.S. Department of Labor, 1929

"My imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but
suffocating its crew and floundering at sea." H. G. Wells, 1902

"Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value." France's Marshall Foch, 1941


He was (vide his life) 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library in ..., Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I[Pythagorean theorem]. He read the proposition. 'By G--,' sayd he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.
--John Aubrey about Thomas Hobbes in Brief Lives

Dionysius of Heracleia was notorious for his appetite, and eventually grew so
weighty that he could scarcely budge: he suffered from apnea or narcolepsy
besides, prompting his doctors to prick his flesh with needles whenever he fell
asleep on his throne. A contemporary poet has him declare that he aspired to
end his days "on my back, lying on my many rolls of fat, scarcely uttering a
word, taking labored breaths, and eating my fill," for of all the ways a man
might die, an excess of luxury was the only truly happy death. Nevertheless, he
lived to what was then the ripe old age of 55, earning a reputation for
fairness and generosity that competed with his size as an object of
astonishment.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
EY 2006, artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf

Henry D. Thoreau, in *Walden*: "Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, --that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?"

Yamagami (Nintendo-side director for Treasure's N64 title, Sin and Punishment):
When I said, “It’s too difficult. I can’t do it,” they responded,
“Then you’re not good enough to be in charge of this project.”
When I said, “But normal people can’t do this!” they said,
“Everyone in our company can do it. Anyone who can’t do this can’t be on our team.”
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-Sin-and-Punishment-Successor-of-the-Skies/Iwata-Asks-Sin-and-Punishment-Successor-of-the-Skies/3-The-Phantom-Title-Dark-Wasteland/3-The-Phantom-Title-Dark-Wasteland-214229.html

"Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise."
"We cannot look squarely at either death or the sun."
--Francois de la Rochefoucauld

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."
--Goethe

Si serré vont li baron chevalchant,
Se getissiés sor les hiaumes un gant
Ne fust a terre d'une louée grant.
Desor les crupes des destriers auferant
Gisent li col et deriere et devant.
--Raoul de Cambrai, Chanson de Geste, verse CXIX, lines 2412-2416:
(The barons ride so close together that if you were to throw a glove on to their helmets, it wouldn't fall to the ground for a good league. The necks of the fiery horses behind are touching the cruppers of the ones in front.)
(By the eleventh century, heavy cavalry articulation was refined to the point where the units were so closely formed that the horses were touching each other in formation. In the Chanson de geste we read: ‘The Barons are so closely packed as they advance that if you throw a glove on their helmets it would not fall to ground within a mile.’ Other contemporary references state that if a ‘glove, apple or plum had been thrown amongst them, it would not have fallen to the ground but on the vertical lances’, for example, or that ‘the wind should not be able to blow through’ the lances. Even allowing for poetic exaggeration, medieval heavy cavalry units were capable of manoeuvring and fighting in extremely close order on the battlefield.)

"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered … After the ALGOL course in Brighton, Roger Cook was driving me and my colleagues back to London when he suddenly asked, "Instead of designing a new language, why don't we just implement ALGOL60?" We all instantly agreed--in retrospect, a very lucky decision for me. But we knew we did not have the skill or experience at that time to implement the whole language, so I was commissioned to design a modest subset. In that design I adopted certain basic principles which I believe to be as valid today as they were then.

"(1) The first principle was security: The principle that every syntactically incorrect program should be rejected by the compiler and that every syntactically correct program should give a result or an error message that was predictable and comprehensible in terms of the source language program itself. Thus no core dumps should ever be necessary. It was logically impossible for any source language program to cause the computer to run wild, either at compile time or at run time. A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to -- they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

-Tony Hoare, 1980 Turing Award Lecture (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf)

"I will not die until I achieve something.
Even though the ideal is high, I never give in.
Therefore, I never die with regrets."
                      "I am not alive, thus I can't die.
               I won't give up even if my Ideal isn't fulfilled.
                 My will, just as my regrets, won't ever end"
"There is no "absolute" in this mundanity."
                      "In this world there is nothing absolute."
"Releasing restraint device. Removal of the limiter will cause overheat and
possible destruction of the ship. Was I helpful for you? I am deeply grateful to
you."
"Is this what we wished for?
Don't worry, we will understand each other someday."
                  "Do you think... we did the right thing?
                  It's alright... I'm sure that sometimes,
              The day will come where we understand each other."
--Ikaruga

“I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty,
you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to
yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough
immortality for me.”
--Edsger W. Dijkstra


"VIM is to the violin as the IDE is to an electronic keyboard.

Anyone can read notes off paper and mechanically press the keys to play the tune, but only a virtuoso violinist can make his instrument sing and croon and weep and quaver with the voice of an angel.

Select whatever "Violin" preset your Yamaha keyboard has; it will never sound the same.
"--takatori the jerker

"If you nail simple and fast, elegant is usually forced to come along for the ride.."
--Derek Collison

"If a doctor treats your cold, it will go away in fourteen days. If you leave it alone, it will go away in two weeks."
--Gloria Silverstein

"Fooling with the return stack is like playing with fire. You can get burned.
But how convenient it is to have fire."
--Thinking Forth

La mélancolie, c'est le bonheur d'être triste.
--Victor Hugo

"Clojure is the gutted and zombie-reanimated corpse of a dream."
--Stanislav http://www.loper-os.org/?p=42

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence […]. If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it.
--Kent Beck

“For silence is not God,” he says in the Epistle of Discretion, “nor speaking
is not God; fasting is not God, nor eating is not God; loneliness is not God, nor company is not
God; nor yet any of all the other two such contraries. He is hid between them, and may not be found
by any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be known by reason, He
may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by understanding; but He may be loved and chosen
with the true lovely will of thine heart. . . . Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of longing love
may never fail of the prick, the which is God.”

John began to attend The Church of the Impending Power Catastrophe. He sat in the pew and he heard the cautionary tales, and he was afraid. John learned about the new hyperthreaded processor from AMD that ran so hot that it burned a hole to the center of the earth, yelled “I’ve come to rejoin my people!”, discovered that magma people are extremely bigoted against processor people, and then created the Processor Liberation Front to wage a decades-long, hilariously futile War to Burn the intrinsically OK-With-Being-Burnt Magma People.
--James Mickens, The Slow Winter

“And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

"Yet, even amidst the hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist." --Hayao Miyazaki

"The entire thrust of our medical regulatory system, from the Flexner Report to today, is the belief that it's better for 1000 patients to die of neglect, than 1 from quackery. Until this irrational fear of quack medicine is cured, there will be no real progress in the field." --Moldbug
(Might even be 10,000.)

"C++ is a general purpose programming language designed to make
programming more enjoyable for the serious programmer.
C++ retains C's ability to deal efficiently with the fundamental
objects of the hardware (bits, bytes, words, addresses, etc.). This
allows the user-defined types to be implemented with a pleasing
degree of efficiency. . . . Features that would incur run-time or
memory overheads even when not used were avoided. . . . C++ types and
data-hiding features rely on compile-time analysis of programs to
prevent accidental corruption of data. . . . They can, however, be used
freely without incurring run-time or space overheads."
--Stroustrup

Poincaré once said: “Sociologists discuss sociological methods; physicists discuss physics.”
I love this statement. Study of method by itself is
always barren. . . . (Alexander 1964)

A manager should be like the
sweeper in curling: The sweeper runs ahead of the stone and sweeps away
debris from the path of the stone so that the progress of the stone will be
smooth and undisturbed—does this sound like your manager?
--rpg, Patterns of Software

Shortly after I joined IntelliCorp, I became perplexed by the fact that
a couple of managers in the product development group got terrific
results from their people (in terms of adherence to schedule as well as
innovation) without apparently doing much managing—planning,
organizing, controlling. Although I did not realize it at the time, these
managers were practicing the art of leadership, creating a vision for
their group, aligning their group behind that vision, and motivating
them towards it. . . .While management and leadership skills are both
important for the well-rounded executive, American companies are
over managed and under led, so there’s a premium on the latter. For
years, I learned from my peers in product development and their
ornery crew (“strong leaders choose poor followers”), and I even tried
to implement some of their techniques within the administrative
groups reporting to me. Although I believed in my heart that vision-
ing, aligning, and motivating could not have much success in the
highly structured realms of accounting, human resources, and facili-
ties management, I was absolutely wrong, Leadership is for everyone,
even CFOs. (Haas 1993)

Many computer scientists spend nearly all their time writing, and some of them
are pretty good. But a significant number of these decent computer science writ-
ers are decent in the same way that someone who picks at a guitar for 5 or 10 years
can eventually play something that resembles a tune—they are persistent dilet-
tantes.
---rpg, patterns of software

A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power clearly to express
it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.
--Thucydides

Sure, read Elements of Style and every book on writing you can get your hands
on, but there really is only one I’ve seen that tries to teach what it means to omit
needless words, to write clearly and simply. That book is Style: Toward Clarity and
Grace by Joseph M. Williams (1990).
--rpg

Eric Benson was the main technical guy—he made things work. He was from
the University of Utah where he worked on Portable Standard Lisp (PSL), which
at least doesn’t sound far off from Portable Common Lisp, which was what our
company would do. He had worked at HP commercializing PSL and was working
at the Palo Alto office of Symbolics, a hardware-based Lisp company. Before we
decided to try starting a company, he and I tried to get the Portable Common Lisp
project funded within Symbolics, but it didn’t work and he quit to become a
founder. Eric could do brilliant prototypes and could press ahead toward a com-
mercial product when required, though it wasn’t his first choice. Every now and
then he came down with the “bright, shiny object syndrome”: When working on
one thing in the boring stage of getting the details right, he would get distracted
by the next exciting project. Even so, he was our go-to guy for most of Lucid’s
years.
--rpg

...deep inside, we never quite forget the needs with
which we were born: to be accepted as we are, without
regard to our deeds; to be loved through the medium
of our body; to be enclosed in another’s arms; to
occasion delight with the smell of our skin—all of
these needs inspiring our relentless and passionately
idealistic quest for someone to kiss and sleep with....
–Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex, 2012

"Program to the API rather than the ABI.  When we see benefits, we
change the ABI more often than the API.

I have altered the ABI.  Pray I do not alter it further."
--Theo de Raadt

"① I fucking hate this motherfucking tech geeking hacker fucks who
leave dead links on the web and don't fucking care. What the fuck?
Aren't these elite, elegant, coding experts who always take perfection
in algorithm, code, style, language, etc?

I don't understand, how could they, have their home page dead? "
--Xah Lee (notorious hater, but I feel this way too sometimes)

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
--J. Krishnamurti

To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.
--Duncan Idaho (ghola)

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."
--Paul Muad'dib

These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must
promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is
the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a
good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans
protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient
mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness...
—from the Instruction Manual: Missionaria Protectiva (Children of Dune)

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who
learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating
argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms
the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself -- a
barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future
atrocities thus bred.
—The Apocrypha of Muad’Dib
(Children of Dune)

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn
irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
(Bene Gesserit saying, Children of Dune)

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of
those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will
of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of
government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
—Law and Governance, The Spacing Guild Manual
(Children of Dune)

This is the age of the shrug. He knows I’ve heard all the stories about him and
he doesn’t care. Our civilization could well die of indifference within it
before succumbing to external attack.
--The Lady Jessica (Children of Dune)

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic
forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as
the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in
the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty,
oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
—Politics as Repeat Phenomenon, Bene Gesserit Training Manual
(Children of Dune)

Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it
produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge
to greatness—they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
—A Letter to CHOAM
attributed to the Preacher
--Children of Dune

“To stay awake all night adds a day to your life,” Stilgar said
--Children of Dune

“My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion,
a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give
me a miracle, God, or I won’t believe in you!”
“Prayer as hubris,” Moneo said. “Intercession on demand.”
--God Emperor of Dune

Io non sò trovar capo à quella strana opinione degli Huomini, sia à quel
cattivo concetto che tengono delle Donne, che non possano queste riuscire nelle
cose d'alto rilievo che intraprendono, come se il loro consiglio fosse senza
fondamento nel darlo, e senza forza nell'eseguirlo, onde quando si vede
un'esempio di buon Governo in una Donna, o che gli togliono il preggio con
l'applicarlo a suoi Favoriti, e Ministri, o che lo decantano come un prodiggio
del capriccio della natura, sia d'un Miracolo della Gratia, quasi che
naturalmente la Donna fosse incapace d'alti maneggi.
--Gregorio Leti's The Life of Elizabeth I, 1693 (original italian)

Je ne sçai à quoi les hommes pensent, d'avoir conçu une si étrange, & si
méchante opinion des femmes, que de les croire incapables d'avoir la conduite
des grandes affaires, ni de donner des conseils solides, ni d'executer avec
vigueur de grands desseins. De-là vient, que s'ils voyent une personne de ce
sexe, gouverner un Etat avec prudence & avec succés, ils ne manquent pas de lui
en dérober aussi-tôt la gloire, pour l'attribuer à ses Favoris & à ses
Ministres, ou de la faire passer pour un Prodige de la Nature, ou pour un
miracle du Ciel; comme si les femmes étoient naturellement incapables d'aucune
affaire importante.
--official French

I cannot fathom the origin of that strange opinion of Men, or rather that ill
conception they hold of Women, that they cannot succeed in matters of high
importance which they undertake, as if their counsel were without foundation in
giving it, and without force in executing it, such that when one sees an
example of good Government in a Woman, they either rob her of merit by
attributing it to her Favorites and Ministers, or they proclaim it as a prodigy
of nature's caprice, or a Miracle of Grace, as if Women were naturally
incapable of high dealings.
--italian -> english

I know not what men are thinking, to have conceived such a strange and wicked
opinion of women, believing them incapable of conducting great affairs, giving
solid counsel, or executing grand designs with vigor. Hence, when they see a
person of this sex governing a State with prudence and success, they
immediately rob her of the glory, attributing it to her Favorites and
Ministers, or present her as a Prodigy of Nature or a miracle of Heaven; as if
women were naturally incapable of any important affair.
--french -> english

I do not know why men have conceived such a strange and evil opinion of women
as to consider them incapable of conducting important business . . . or
carrying out great plans with vigor. If [men] see a person of that sex govern a
state with prudence and success, they will inevitably take the glory away from
her and attribute it to her favorites and ministers.
--version from The Rise of Female Kings in Europe