Quotes
These are my favorite quotes from all the books I've read...
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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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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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The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don't know.
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
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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. -
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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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. -
There's a name for a person who finds no emotion or meaning in anything: a psychopath.
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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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For the human makers of things, the incompleteness and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.
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Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
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We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
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We're all, for the most part, pretty average people.
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Life is wasted on the living.
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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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You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.
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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. -
All animals are equal.
But some animals are more equal than others. -
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
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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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To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
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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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My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.
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"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." Or put more simply: Don't try.
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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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Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
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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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Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
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Don't Panic.
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The fastest and most reliable network request is no request at all!
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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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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." -
Once our civilization learns how to do something useful, we generally keep that knowledge and build on it.
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Fahrenheit 451:
the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns. -
The internet has not just open-sources information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.
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Big Brother is Watching You.
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If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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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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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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To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
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One of the best tools we have for removing accidental complexity is abstraction.
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Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
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Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you're currently making, every second of every day.
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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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Reality is frequently inaccurate.
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[Emotions are] feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or likely wrong for us - nothing more, nothing less.
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Aristotle wrote, "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
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Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it's not necessarily the best way to live.
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In distributed systems, suspicion, pessimism, and paranoia pay off.
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Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.
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Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist 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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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
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But part of living in a democracy and a free society is that we all have to deal with views and people we don't necessarily like. That's simply the price we pay - you could even say it's the whole point of the system. And it seems more and more people are forgetting that.
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The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.
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For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
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As a thought experiment, try replacing the word data with surveillance, and observe if common phrases still sound so good. How about this: "In our surveillance-driven organization we collect real-time surveillance streams and store them in our surveillance warehouse. Our surveillance scientists use advanced analytics and surveillance processing in order to derive new insights."
This thought experiment is unusually polemic for this book, Designing Surveillance-Intensive Applications, but I think that strong words are needed to emphasize this point. -
Much as the pain of touching a hot stove teaches you not to touch it again, the sadness of being alone teaches you not do the things that made you feel so alone again. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
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Thinkers are rare; doers are rarer; and thinker-doers are rarest.
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The right to privacy is a decision right; it enables each person to decide where they want to be on the spectrum between secrecy and transparency in each situation.
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Parkinson's law: "Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion."
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"machine learning is like money laundering for bias"
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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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Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
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We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability - on some unconscious level - scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever.
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The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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data outlives code.
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A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
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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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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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An ancient adage warns "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."
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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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It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
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The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
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It's not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it's about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That's unconditional love, baby.
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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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giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.
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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." -
"Did you eat something that did't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization."
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We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no - our own pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution; they're a feature.
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Sometimes if you received an answer, the question might be taken away.
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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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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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May your application's evolution be rapid and your deployments be frequent.
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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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How does a project get to be a year late? ... One day at a time.
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I am I, and I wish I weren't.
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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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The Mind of the Maker, devides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction.
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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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When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
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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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[...] conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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Death is the light by which the shadow of all of life's meaning is measured.
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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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A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?