Quotes

I don't understand why the NSA was so insistent about including Dual_EC_DRBG in the standard. It makes no sense as a trap door: It's public, and rather obvious. It makes no sense from an engineering perspective: It's too slow for anyone to willingly use it. And it makes no sense from a backwards-compatibility perspective: Swapping one random-number generator for another is easy.

16. When you see anyone weeping in grief because his son has gone abroad, or is dead, or because he has suffered in his affairs, be careful that the appearance may not misdirect you. Instead, distinguish within your own mind, and be prepared to say, "It’s not the accident that distresses this person, because it doesn’t distress another person; it is the judgment which he makes about it." As far as words go, however, don’t reduce yourself to his level, and certainly do not moan with him. Do not moan inwardly either.

Touji: “Oh, yes. the view of the world that one can have is quite small.” Hikari: “Yes, you measure things only by your own small measure.” Asuka: “One sees things with the truth, given by others.” Misato: “Happy on a sunny day.” Rei: “Gloomy on a rainy day.” Asuka: “If you’re taught that, you always think so.” Ritsuko: “But, you can enjoy rainy days.”

WS-\ is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-\ is doomed to sixty years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.

It’s impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then I wonder—hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the monastery probably believe that there’s a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now I’m ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn’t? But, do you know, there’s a damnable question involved in it? If there’s no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down...

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

He [Mikhail Botvinnik]did not dissolve and he did not change. On the last pages of the book he is still the same Misha Botvinnik, pupil of the 157^th^ School of United Workers in Leningrad and Komsomol member. He had not changed at all for seventy years, and, listening to his sincere and passionate monologue, one involuntarily thinks of Confucius: "Only the most clever and the most stupid cannot change."

Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don’t know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I’m sorry, but I don’t know that, either.

It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race. It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we’ve never actually fallen. That is our progress.

Someone asked me today if there was a case for using React in a new app that doesn't need to support IE. I could not come up with a single reason to prefer it over Preact or (better yet) any of the modern reactive Web Components systems (FAST, Lit, Stencil, etc.). One of the constraints is that the team wanted to use an existing library of Web Components, but React made it hard. This is probably going to cause them to favour Preact for the bits of the team that want React-flavoured modern webdev. It's astonishing how antiquated React is.

They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly. Even with good context the rot will start to become apparent around 100k tokens (with Gemini 2.5). They really need to figure out a way to delete or "forget" prior context, so the user or even the model can go back and prune poisonous tokens. Right now I work around it by regularly making summaries of instances, and then spinning up a new instance with fresh context and feed in the summary of the previous instance.

When you know something it is almost impossible to imagine what it is like not to know that thing. This is the curse of knowledge, and it is the root of countless misunderstandings and inefficiencies. Smart people who are comfortable with complexity can be especially prone to it! If you don’t guard against the curse of knowledge it has the potential to obfuscate all forms of communication, including code. The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

Of all the books I have delivered to the presses, none, I think, is as personal as the straggling collection mustered for this hodgepodge, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few things have happened to me, and I have read a great many. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worth remembering than Schopenhauer's thought or the music of England's words. A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.

When I first came there, I found two other pupils of mine own age newly arrived, Hakim Omar Khayyam, and the ill-fated Ben Sabbah. Both were endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers; and we three formed a close friendship together. When the Imam rose from his lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a native of Naishapur, while Hasan Ben Sabbah’s father was one Ali, a man of austere life and practice, but heretical in his creed and doctrine. One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyam, “It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imam Mowaffak will attain to fortune. Now, even if we all do not attain thereto, without doubt one of us will, what then shall be our mutual pledge and bond?” We answered, “Be it what you please.”— “Well”, he said, “let us make a vow, that to whomsoever this fortune falls, he shall share it equally with the rest, and reserve no pre-eminence for himself.”—“Be it so”, we both replied. …The Vizier was generous and kept his word. Hasan demanded a place in the government, which the Sultan granted at the Vizier’s request; but, discontented with a gradual rise, he plunged into the maze of intrigue of an Oriental court, and, failing in a base attempt to supplant his benefactor, he was disgraced and fell…One of the countless victims of the Assassin’s dagger was Nizam ul Mulk himself, the old school-boy friend. …Omar Khayyam also came to the Vizier to claim his share; but not to ask for title or office. “The greatest boon you can confer on me”, he said, “is to let me live in a corner under the shadow of your fortune, to spread wide the advantages of Science, and pray for your long life and prosperity.” The Vizier tells us, that, when he found Omar was really sincere in his refusal, he pressed him no further, but granted him a yearly pension of 1,200 mithkals…At Naishapur thus lived and died Omar Khayyam, “busied”, adds the Vizier, “in winning knowledge of every kind, and especially in Astronomy, wherein he attained to a very high pre-eminence. Under the Sultanate of Malik Shah he came to Merv, and obtained great praise for his proficiency in science, and the Sultan showered favours upon him.”

...For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. ...For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped. For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly. For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. For he is tenacious of his point. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat. ...For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom. For he can catch the cork and toss it again. ...For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly. For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land. For his ears are so acute that they sting again. For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention. For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.

Tidbit: the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave¹ part of the chip, so it is almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware.

We’ve built many tools for publishing to the web - but I want to make the claim that we have underdeveloped the tools and platforms for publishing collections, indexes and small databases. It’s too hard to build these kinds of experiences, too hard to maintain them and a lack of collaborative tools.

[On release notes] in our partial defense, training these models can be more discovery than invention. often we don't exactly know what will come out. we've long wanted to do release notes that describe each model's differences, but we also don't want to give false confidence with a shallow story.

I said the end of the overshadowing story would provide an end for the final volume. Perhaps I should add, 'if you are lucky'. It must wrap up its own volume, obviously. It must also wrap up the entire work in a satisfactory way. In general, it should not undercut the endings of any of the earlier books, rendering them, in retrospect, trivial. Rather it must validate them, assuring the reader that they were indeed important points in the overshadowing story—that you did not cheat. Thus in The Book of the New Sun, Severian leaves his native city at the end of the first book, reaches the distant city in which he is to be employed at the end of the second, and reaches the war toward which he has been inexorably drawn at the end of the third. At the end of the 4th book (when he returns to his city) I attempted to show that all had been significant, moulding his character and contributing to his rise to the Phoenix Throne. There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final novel should leave the reader with a feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character’s life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or us, nor the summers as golden.

Create a culture that favors begging forgiveness (and reversing decisions quickly) rather than asking permission. Invest in infrastructure such as progressive / cancellable rollouts. Use asynchronous written docs to get people aligned (“comment in this doc by Friday if you disagree with the plan”) rather than meetings (“we’ll get approval at the next weekly review meeting”).

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

Do technology and economic growth create problems? Certainly. But as Maurice Chevalier said about the disadvantages of growing old, consider the alternative...if you chose to live in Renaissance Florence you would not be able to enjoy Cezanne and Picasso. In Johnson’s London, you would not be able to listen to Beethoven or Brahms. In La Belle Epoque, you would not be able to read Joyce or Faulkner. To live in today’s world is not only to have access to all the best that has come before, but also to have a breadth and ease of access that is comparably greater than that enjoyed even by our parents, let alone earlier generations.

Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.

The rapid increase of COVID-19 cases among kids has shattered last year’s oft-repeated falsehood that kids don’t get COVID-19, and if they do, it’s not that bad. It was a convenient lie that was easy to believe in part because we kept most of our kids home. With remote learning not an option now, this year we’ll find out how dangerous this virus is for children in the worst way possible.

Authority, historically, gets bestowed on the gatekeepers of information, such as Britannica, universities, newspapers, etc. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and will then be available over the internet, which is disruptive, not only to business models, but to authority.

The very presence of surprising false results that take some time to get refuted might give scientists the illusion that they are getting somewhere—since the field changes all the time—and bravely applying the scientific method—since we are bold enough to repudiate the fashionable hypotheses of 10 years ago.

If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, they’ll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, they’ll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then they’ll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked.