Some lines worth noting, but not worth their own page.

This page is a rip-off, check out Bryce Alexander Lynch's .plan file.


a physicist stares at the ceiling while an undergraduate, high off internet forums, explains that Buddhism anticipated quantum theory

Paul Ford


I am an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read but by what we are ashamed not to have read.)

Paul Ford


Everyone falls into creative ruts, but two people rarely do so at the same time.

James Somers


I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way. A day of programming might involve constructing an elaborate regular expression, investigating a file descriptor leak, debugging a race condition in the application you just wrote, and thinking through the interface of a module. Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed.

James Somers


Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”


The world of computing, I came to learn, is vast but organized almost geologically, as if deposited in layers

James Somers


Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.

James Somers


Yea as long as you do all the work and watch all the lectures you’ll be chilling

seph


XML is dead, the millennials’ best kill so far.

varjag


networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice

Feminist Server Manifesto


With woodworking you actually get to hold your creations.

Zain Rizvi in Why Software Engineers like Woodworking


its study break, and just like its name suggests we study till we break

@randomtako. on UWA Computer Science discord


On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.

Robin Sloan


Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Steph Ango


If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

Steph Ango


Girlfriends are temporary, ex-girlfriends are forever

/u/UnemployedTechie2021 (maybe)


Algorithms are human-directed and humans are algorithm-directed in ways we do not fully understand.

John Green


Speaking as the most senior member of my team, nothing useful starts with that phrase

Sarai Rosenberg


Tom M: Entropy's #1 enemy

- Tom M


Today, you're either above the API or below the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do.

Devine Lu Linvega


Engineering is the art of finding the solution that only sucks in ways that don't matter

Skylar Hill


I do not collect your data. Stop sending it to me.

Tristram Oaten


Joyce Kilmer and most computer scientists agree: there is no poem as lovely as a tree.

Philip Wadler


A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Internal IBM Presentation 1979


"Proof" for thousands of years was whatever was written down, and that was even easier to forge.

There was a brief time (maybe 100 years at the most) where photos and videos were practically proof of something happening; that is coming to an end now, but that's just a regression to the mean, not new territory.

thepasswordis


The most important output of senior engineers is more senior engineers.

Some guy Tim Bray overheard


security budget:

  • $1 looking into languages that don’t trivially buffer overflow
  • 50¢ looking into enabling exploit mitigation features
  • 1¢ research into things like compile-time diversity
  • $10M hiring a disgraced CISO from a FAANG company
  • $100 hiring a red team to ignore feedback from

someone who is good at the economy please help me. my enterprise platform is dying

Kate Temkin


Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.

jacoblambda


Xeact remains open-source software to this day where it is used by thousands of milli-developers.

Xe Iaso


Linear algebra churned through the sand in a remote data center

Xe Iaso


A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam

Frederik Pohl


My robot girlfriend walks in with the crop, I'm already tied to the bed. "what's the safeword?", she asks. I respond by saying the letter "A" for 90 seconds straight followed by a short hex string.

calc.exe opens up on her eyes. Finally, a PoC!

Shouldn't have used fixed length buffers without bounds checking, babe. This is a rookie C mistake.

Foone Turing


NO MORE IDEAS

WE HAVE ENOUGH

(merge them instead)

Lu Wilson


Treating Sunday as the first day of the week is a religious tradition going back thousands of years.

However, I know only one god, and his name is ISO 8601.

jl6


I think that’s the real danger, that you can do that and then nothing’s original anymore. Everything’s just a copy of something else. The problem is, that’s what readers like.

Jennifer Lepp


The courts are like the doors to the Ritz, open to everyone!

monkaiju (my favourite phrasing of a much older aphorism)


The computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work and it was a serious problem we were trying to do. The disease with computers is that you play with them.

Richard Feynman, Los Alamos from Below


@jerry@infosec.exchange:
Hi all. Fedia.io is going to be offline for a while during some open heart surgery on the database. If you are a religious person, praying might be in order.

@sehugg@infosec.exchange:
ALTAR TABLE

Stephen Hugg


We kill people based on metadata. But that's not what we do with this metadata

Michael Hayden


who called it object oriented programming and not class struggle

Elle Mundy


Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Cory Doctorow, TikTok's Enshittification


You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them

noduerme


There is a floor on how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don't have that.

Ian Crosby Danskin


I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

Paul Graham


I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

Randall Munroe


The site will live or die by how it handles its first porn of misty from Pokemon

lori

Written on cohost, though I came across it in their pre-emptive autopsy of cohost.


An industrialist might soon purchase Twitter, Inc. His substantial success launching reusable spacecraft does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science.

Robin Sloan


Web scraping is an absolutely despicable practice and if you want to learn how to do it at an industrial scale check out this video on my second channel

Fireship


It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money.  And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.  A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear.  “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements.  Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes.  They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

G. K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem


Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.

David Chapman


You can't imagine how much harder it would be to be a JavaScript programmer in 1882

Zach Holman


Users need open source projects, but open source projects do not need users.

Matt Holt


In Unix everything is a file. Files are files, folders are files, disks are files, your keyboard is a file, your mouth is a file, the air is a file, you can't breathe, your file lungs fill with files and you try to scream but only files come out oh god Dennis how could you do thi

Sy Brand


The only technology that you need is deadlines.

Paul Ford, here (allegedly, I came across the quote here)


You can't have art without resistance in the materials

William Morris


In ISO C, file handles (of type FILE) cannot be safely copied as their addresses may be magic

Wikipedia - Magic (programming)


Miyazaki said he can feel it every day, the limit of his ability, and he was talking about getting older but I think that's something a lot of us have experienced. Personally I can feel myself straining against the limit of my ability as though it were a brick fucking wall and my true potential, whatever the hell that is, is some amorphous shape on the other side that I can't quite reach.

Savannah Brown


Look I'm an atheist, but when God sends me to hell I want him to hesitate

Technoblade


lambda has the benefit of making the code compact and foreboding. Plus, it prevents people from trying to add meaningful names, documentation or type-hints to the thing that is about to unfold.

David Beasley


This code is free as in mattress. If you decide to use it, it's your problem.

Xe Iaso


This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Woodie Guthrie's Anti-copyright notice.

More on this on the Creative Commons site


It's easy to say with hindsight that NFTs are a stupid scam but it was also easy at the beginning to say that and through the middle too

@IlllllllllllllI on 2022-06-14