Quotes

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way...Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.

TL;DR: To serve users at the 75th percentile (P75) of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight improvement on last year's budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. [... This is] what we should be aiming to send over the wire per page in 2023 to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load

[...] And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly.

"In that direction", the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction", waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad." "But I don’t want to go among mad people", Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that", said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be", said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."

I think there's a great danger that, as a result of framing the current opportunity around "data portability", the story that will get picked up and retold will be the about copying data between social networks, rather than the more compelling, more future-facing, and frankly more likely situation of data streaming from trusted brokered sources to downstream authorized consumers.

3. There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must be not attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed. 4. The general who thoroughly understands the advantages that accompany variation of tactics knows how to handle his troops. 5. The general who does not understand these, may be well acquainted with the configuration of the country, yet he will not be able to turn his knowledge to practical account.

Tools are the things we build that we don't ship - but that very much affect the artifact that we develop. It can be tempting to either shy away from developing tooling entirely or (in larger organizations) to dedicate an entire organization to it. In my experience, tooling should be built by those using it. This is especially true for tools that improve the artifact by improving understanding: the best time to develop a debugger is when debugging!

Consumer products have had growth hackers for many years optimizing every part of the onboarding funnel. Dev tools should do the same. Getting started shouldn't be an afterthought after you built the product. Getting started is the product! And I mean this to the point where I think it's worth restructuring your entire product to enable fast onboarding. Get rid of mandatory config. Make it absurdly easy to set up API tokens. Remove all the friction. Make it possible for users to use your product on their laptop in a couple of minutes, tops.

The problem of grues is, of course, their recursive nature. To wit: A) Grues are found wherever it is very dark. B) There are no light sources on the inside of a grue. Therefore, being eaten by a grue is a fate which entails being eaten by an infinite number of progressively smaller grues, presumably nested in a geometrically complicated and interesting way.

A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it... To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art;...to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to communative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

Sometimes, performance just doesn't matter. If I make some codepath in Ruff 10x faster, but no one ever hits it, I'm sure it could get some likes on Twitter, but the impact on users would be meaningless. And yet, it's good to care about performance everywhere, even when it doesn't matter. Caring about performance is cultural and contagious. Small wins add up. Small losses add up even more.

Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of 100 million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way—and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

Doctor No said, in the same soft resonant voice, “You are right. Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through - these are the vices of the herd.” Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. “I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac”

We (Jon and Zach) teamed up with the Harris Poll to confirm this finding and extend it. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z young adults (ages 18-27). We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.” For Netflix, Youtube, and the internet itself, relatively few said yes to that question (always under 20%). We found much higher levels of regret for the dominant social media platforms: Instagram (34%), Facebook (37%), Snapchat (43%), and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47%) and X/Twitter (50%).

By the middle of the seventeenth century it had come to be understood that the world was enclosed in a sea of air, much as the greater part of it was covered by water. A scientist of the period, Francesco Lana, contended that a lighter-than-air ship could float upon this sea, and he suggested how such a ship might be built. He was unable to put his invention to a practical test, but he saw only one reason why it might not work: ". . . that God will never suffer this Invention to take effect, because of the many consequencies which may disturb the Civil Government of men. For who sees not, that no City can be secure against attack, since our Ship may at any time be placed directly over it, and descending down may discharge Souldiers; the same would happen to private Houses, and Ships on the Sea: for our Ship descending out of the Air to the sails of Sea-Ships, it may cut their Ropes, yea without descending by casting Grapples it may over-set them, kill their men, burn their Ships by artificial Fire works and Fire-balls. And this they may do not only to Ships but to great Buildings, Castles, Cities, with such security that they which cast these things down from a height out of Gun-shot, cannot on the other side be offended by those below." Lana’s reservation was groundless. He had predicted modern air warfare in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing and bombing. Contrary to his expectation, God has suffered his invention to take effect. And so has Man.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all.

CCP often touts this sort of thing with the bland marketing lingo of 'player generated content.' What that actually means is that you get to share a galaxy with Russian aluminum magnates, French-Indonesian nightclub-owning hackers, self-aggranziding 'spymasters,' and people who will cut the power lines to your house to destroy your internet spaceship.

The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption. The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.

In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.' These are the feelings I wanted to arouse in the players with Aerith’s death relatively early in the game. Feelings of reality and not Hollywood.

I like to make sure almost every line of code I write is under a commercially friendly OS license (usually Apache 2) for genuinely selfish reasons: I never want to have to solve that problem ever again, so OS licensing my code now ensures I can use it for the rest of my life no matter who I happen to be working for in the future

"AI" has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models. Now, "AI" in people's minds means generative models. That's it, it doesn't mean generative models are replacing CNNs, just like CNNs don't replace SVMs or regression or whatever. It's just that pop culture has fallen in love with something else.

Using UUIDv7 is generally discouraged for security when the primary key is exposed to end users in external-facing applications or APIs. The main issue is that UUIDv7 incorporates a 48-bit Unix timestamp as its most significant part, meaning the identifier itself leaks the record's creation time. This leakage is primarily a privacy concern. Attackers can use the timing data as metadata for de-anonymization or account correlation, potentially revealing activity patterns or growth rates within an organization.

104\. Technology offers remarkable tools to oversee and develop the world's resources. However, in some cases, humanity is increasingly ceding control of these resources to machines. Within some circles of scientists and futurists, there is optimism about the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical form of AI that would match or surpass human intelligence and bring about unimaginable advancements. Some even speculate that AGI could achieve superhuman capabilities. At the same time, as society drifts away from a connection with the transcendent, some are tempted to turn to AI in search of meaning or fulfillment---longings that can only be truly satisfied in communion with God. [[194]](https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html#_ftn194) 105\. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that "have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear" (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can "speak," or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity---it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived "Other" greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself---which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work. [[195]](https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html#_ftn195)