Quotes

I spent more time on my iPhone X review than anything I’ve written in years, and it went to paper twice. (Here’s a scan of my second printed draft, with handwritten revisions.) My thing is that I don’t use my favorite pen — which, of course, has black ink — but instead a pen with red ink. Editing is an angry, bloody act and therefore must be done in red.

Overnight, tens of thousands of businesses, ranging from one-person shops to the Fortune 500, woke up to a new reality where the underpinnings of their infrastructure suddenly became a potential legal risk. The BUSL and the additional use grant written by the HashiCorp team are vague, and now every company, vendor, and developer using Terraform has to wonder whether what they are doing could be construed as competitive with HashiCorp's offerings.

In 2015, the men controlling 80% of Bitcoin mining stood on stage together at a conference. Three or four entities have run Bitcoin mining since then. The only thing preventing miner misbehaviour is wanting to avoid spooking the suckers — it’s completely trust-based. Bitcoin now uses a country’s worth of electricity for no actual reason. You could do the transactions on a 2007 iPhone.

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people.

Moreover, the economic approach seems (if not rejected owing to aristocratic or puritanic taboos) the only device apt to distinguish neatly what is or is not contradictory in the logic of uncertainty (or probability theory). That is the fundamental lesson supplied by Wald’s notion of 'admissibility'...probability theory and decision theory are but two versions (theoretical and practical) of the study of the same subject: uncertainty.

I have felt it myself... The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

I've often been building single-use apps with Claude Artifacts when I'm helping my children learn. For example here's one on visualizing fractions. [...] What's more surprising is that it is far easier to create an app on-demand than searching for an app in the app store that will do what I'm looking for. Searching for kids' learning apps is typically a nails-on-chalkboard painful experience because 95% of them are addictive garbage. And even if I find something usable, it can't match the fact that I can tell Claude what I want.

"The people who wrote the medieval ballads", answered the priest, "knew more about fairies than you do. It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland." "Oh, bosh!" said Flambeau. "Only nice things could happen under such an innocent moon. I am for pushing on now and seeing what does really come. We may die and rot before we ever see again such a moon or such a mood." "All right", said Father Brown. "I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous."

Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. [...] Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. Flickr helped pioneer “Web 2.0″, and personal data ownership is a key piece of that vision. Just because the wider public hasn’t caught on yet to all the nuances around data access, data privacy, data ownership, and data fidelity, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be failing to deliver a quality product.

When you have to mock a collaborator, avoid using the Mock object directly. Either use mock.create_autospec() or mock.patch(autospec=True) if at all possible. Autospeccing from the real collaborator means that if the collaborator's interface changes, your tests will fail. Manually speccing or not speccing at all means that changes in the collaborator's interface will not break your tests that use the collaborator: you could have 100% test coverage and your library would fall over when used!

2024's top three front end framework [React, Vue, Angular] were all launched over a decade ago. Now sure, all three have evolved a lot along the way, and the patterns of 2014 would seem downright antiquated today. But given the JavaScript ecosystems's reputation as a constantly-churning whirlwind of change, it can be nice to know that some things do remain constant.

For the past 10 years or so, AWS has been rolling out these peripheral services at an astonishing rate, dozens every year. A few get traction, most don’t—but they all stick around, undead zombies behind impressive-looking marketing pages, because historically AWS just doesn’t make many breaking changes. [...] AWS made this mess for themselves by rushing all sorts of half-baked services to market. The mess had to be cleaned up at some point, and they’re doing that. But now they’ve explicitly revealed something to customers: The new stuff we release isn’t guaranteed to stick around.

Although fine-tuning can feel like the more natural option—training on data is how GPT learned all of its other knowledge, after all—we generally do not recommend it as a way to teach the model knowledge. Fine-tuning is better suited to teaching specialized tasks or styles, and is less reliable for factual recall. [...] In contrast, message inputs are like short-term memory. When you insert knowledge into a message, it's like taking an exam with open notes. With notes in hand, the model is more likely to arrive at correct answers.

Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don't want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

143. Is there in this world any man so restrained by humility that he does not mind reproof, as a well-trained horse the whip? 144. Like a well-trained horse when touched by the whip, be ye active and lively, and by faith, by virtue, by energy, by meditation, by discernment of the law you will overcome this great pain (of reproof), perfect in knowledge and in behavior, and never forgetful. 145. Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; good people fashion themselves.

Open source is really part of my process of getting unstuck, learning and contributing back to the community, and also helping future me have an easier time. ‘Me’ is probably the number one beneficiary of my open-source software work. To be honest with you, a lot of it is selfish. It's really about making me more productive, happier, and less stressed. For people who wonder why we should do open source, I think that they should consider that they themselves may benefit more than they realize.

[… OpenAI’s o1] could work its way to a correct (and well-written) solution if provided a lot of hints and prodding, but did not generate the key conceptual ideas on its own, and did make some non-trivial mistakes. The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Bruegel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

This achievement is often praised as a sign of the great superiority of modern civilization over the many faded and lost civilizations of the ancients. While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till death is Relief afar. They are concerned with matters hidden—under the earthline their altars are- The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth, And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again at a city’s drouth.