Quotes

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers? We cannot think of a time that is oceanless Or of an ocean not littered with wastage Or of a future that is not liable Like the past, to have no destination. We have to think of them as forever bailing, Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage; Not as making a trip that will be unpayable For a haul that will not bear examination.

...And so we go on dealing with the fortress [Château d’If], Abbé Faria sounding out the weak points of the wall and coming up against new obstacles, I [Edmond Dantès] reflecting on his unsuccessful attempts in order to conjecture new outlines of walls to add to the plan of my fortress-conjecture. If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one—and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere else—or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here—and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.

[In Mali...] The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as "the first world standard" and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it's a legal way of getting quality software for free.

After giving it a lot of thought, we made the decision to discontinue new access to a small number of services, including AWS CodeCommit. While we are no longer onboarding new customers to these services, there are no plans to change the features or experience you get today, including keeping them secure and reliable. [...] The services I'm referring to are: S3 Select, CloudSearch, Cloud9, SimpleDB, Forecast, Data Pipeline, and CodeCommit.

A couple of years ago when I was working on a now defunct search engine, we were using ActiveMQ to pass messages between the frontend and the backend. The system was unreliable, flaky, and hard to debug. It delivered exactly none of the reliability queues promised. [...] More likely there's something wrong with the whole design of network systems based on message queues, and we need to start developing alternatives.

Fighting bots is fighting humans [...] remind you that "only allow humans to access" is just not an achievable goal. Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it's about deciding where you want to set the cutoff. I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction.

Pleasure has a hundred thousand obvious forms, plentiful variety for the most fickle spirit. Pleasure of convalescence (how voluptuous weakness can be); pleasure of need (a dry crust of bread); pleasure of the first time and the last time; pleasure of mere looking (as the sunlight delights itself upon the tumbling fountain, as the small morning makes the metropolis unreal); pleasure of being a child (mixture of curiosity, wantonness, and the gradual stages); pleasure of having a child (O my son Absalom, graduating from high school!); pleasure of discovery and pleasure of memory, freshness and nostalgic sweetness, surprise and return. Pleasure of arising, the keenness of breakfast; pleasure of sleeping (there one is Caesar); the pleasure of the old, a stronger tobacco, to possess the time that is past; the pleasure of the young, who are not yet tired; the pleasure of marriage—the mystery of being called Mrs. for the first time; the pleasure, do not deny it, of the funeral (that, after all, the conclusion should have a certain sublimity and repose); pleasure of the grandchild (a difficult pleasure, needing so much strength to last that long and so many refusals, year after year); the pleasure of ritual, the gloves drawn on precisely; the pleasure of spontaneity, kissed by the overjoyed, the wave's foaming white head, touched at the lips. Delight in the silver, delight in the rock, delight in the soft silk, delight in the stubble, delight in the thimble, delight in the mountain, happiness of the virgin, the satisfaction of custom, joy in denial (the firmness of the soldier, the rigor of the surgeon, the formal athlete, the painstaking scholar), and the sweetness of saying yes.

The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one, the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds. I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize the losses. "If we knew how to do that", he said, looking up from his hoe at me, "we would not be poor."

(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)

We have a unique opportunity with phishing and OpenID. OpenID can make the possibility for bad things to happen from phishing that much worse. However, having an OpenID means you create a more intimate relationship with your OpenID provider. You go there everyday. You will more likely know when something is wrong.

In some tasks, AI is unreliable. In others, it is superhuman. You could, of course, say the same thing about calculators, but it is also clear that AI is different. It is already demonstrating general capabilities and performing a wide range of intellectual tasks, including those that it is not specifically trained on. Does that mean that o3 and Gemini 2.5 are AGI? Given the definitional problems, I really don’t know, but I do think they can be credibly seen as a form of “Jagged AGI” - superhuman in enough areas to result in real changes to how we work and live, but also unreliable enough that human expertise is often needed to figure out where AI works and where it doesn’t.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.  It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.

The logical consequence of Social Darwinism is that everything of value has been built in Hell. It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed—from a human perspective—indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved—with torturous inefficiency—from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then—still further—of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.

...but I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to have no place in experimental philosophy. To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained.

3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. 4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue. 5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. ...15. Hence a wise general makes a point of foraging on the enemy. One cartload of the enemy’s provisions is equivalent to twenty of one’s own, and likewise a single picul of his provender is equivalent to twenty from one’s own store.

What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

The floors of Tokyu Hands are haunted for me now with the mysterious, all-encompassing presence of the hikaru dorodango, an artefact of such utter simplicity and perfection that it seems it must be either the first object or the last, something that either instigated the Big Bang or awaits the final precipitous descent into universal silence. At the very end of things waits the hikaru dorodango, a perfect three-inch sphere of mud. At its heart is the unthinkable. The secret of Tokyu Hands is that everything on offer there inclines, ultimately, to the status, if not the perfection, of hikaru dorodango. The brogues, shined lovingly enough, for long enough, with those meticulously imported shoe-care products, must ultimately become a universe unto themselves, a conceptual sphere of lustrous and infinite depth. Just as a life, lived silently enough in sufficient solitude, becomes a different sort of sphere, no less perfect.

Creating art is a nonlinear process. I start with a rough goal. But then I head into dead ends and get lost or stuck. The secret to my process is to be on high alert in this deep jungle for unexpected twists and turns, because this is where a new idea is born. I can't make art when I'm excluded from the most crucial moments.

When God speaketh to man, it must be either immediately or by mediation of another man, to whom He had formerly spoken by Himself immediately. How God speaketh to a man immediately may be understood by those well enough to whom He hath so spoken; but how the same should be understood by another is hard, if not impossible, to know. For if a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it...For to say that God hath spoken to him in the Holy Scripture is not to say God hath spoken to him immediately, but by mediation of the prophets, or of the Apostles, or of the Church, in such manner as He speaks to all other Christian men. To say He hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him.

Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.

Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling one day on the bridge over the River Hao, when the former observed, "See how the minnows are darting about! Such is the pleasure that fish enjoy." "You are not a fish", said Huizi. "How do you know what fish enjoy?" "You are not I", retorted Zhuangzi, "so how do you know that I do not know what fish enjoy?" "I am not you", said Huizi, "and you are not a fish, and so it is certain that you do not know what fish enjoy." "Let us go back", said Zhuangzi, "to your original question. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy. The way you put the question shows that you already knew what I knew. I know that just as we stand here over the Hao."

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked. Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.

I surveyed the pond carefully, early in 1846, with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it. The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics.

Cross, lasso, and arrow—former tools of men, debased or exalted now to the status of symbols. Why should I marvel at them, when there is not a single thing on earth that oblivion does not erase or memory change, and when no one knows into what images he himself will be transmuted by the future.

If you measure things by foot traffic we [the SFO Museum] are one of the busiest museums in the world. If that is the case we are also one of the busiest museums in the world that no one knows about. Nothing in modern life really prepares you for the idea that a museum should be part of an airport. San Francisco, as I've mentioned, is funny that way.