Quotes
These are my favorite quotes from all the books I've read...
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"Optimism is not an idle speculation on the future but rather a self-fulfilling prophecy." Belief that a better world is genuinely possible is a powerful motivator to work hard on creating it.
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"If I ever meet myself," said Zaphod, "I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me."
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For the human makers of things, the incompleteness and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.
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Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day", or "You're very tall", or "Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?" At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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Don't Panic.
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Long before any code exists, the specification must be handed to an outside testing group to be scrutinized for completeness and clarity. As Vyssotsky says, the developers themselves cannot do this: "They won't tell you they don't understand it; they will happily invent their way through the gaps and obscurities."
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How does a project get to be a year late? ... One day at a time.
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Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though. -
Once our civilization learns how to do something useful, we generally keep that knowledge and build on it.
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Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design.
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The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. -
Connectionist AI is prone to becoming a "black box" - capable of spitting out the correct answer, but unable to explain how it found it.
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But every boss needs two kinds of information, exceptions to plan that require action and a status picture for education.
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My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.
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I am I, and I wish I weren't.
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A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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But the day-by-day slippage is harder to recognize, harder to prevent, harder to make up. Yesterday a key man was sick, and a meeting couldn't be held. Today the machines are all down, because lightning struck the building's power transformer. Tomorrow the disk routines won't start testing, because the first disk is a week late from the factory. Snow, jury duty, family problems, emergency meetings with customers, executive audits - the list goes on and on. Each one only postpones some activity by a half-day or a day. And the schedule slips, one day at a time.
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There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. ...
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
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He was a philosopher, if you know what that was. "A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth."
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All animals are equal.
But some animals are more equal than others. -
[...] conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. -
If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
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Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.
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Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
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Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.
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Computers multitask through a process called "threading", which you can think of as being like juggling a set of balls. Just as a juggler only hurls one ball at a time into the air but keeps three aloft, a CPU only works on one program at a time, but by swapping between them quickly enough [...] it appears to be [doing] all at once.
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For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
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A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
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[The] concept of free will must somehow synthesize both deterministic and indeterministic philosophical ideas - avoiding rigid predictability without devolving into randomness.
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He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
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It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
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Ford Prefect: "Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Arthur Dent: "Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that." -
The Mind of the Maker, devides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction.
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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
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All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers.
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You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.
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See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.
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Arthur Dent: "[...] I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
Ford Prefect: "Why what did she tell you?"
Arthur Dent: "I don't know, I didn't listen." -
We all like to congregate... at boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where time meets space. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.
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To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
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It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.
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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castle in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.
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Big Brother is Watching You.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind (or machine) can ever face.
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I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.
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By starting with the most basic and fundamental axioms possible [...] a machine can [...] search through every possible way of combining the fundamental axioms in search of the truth.
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Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest.
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Fahrenheit 451:
the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns. -
An ancient adage warns "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."
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"Did you eat something that did't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization."
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Life is wasted on the living.