Quotes

like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99

The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great *officina gentium*. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also in which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud...Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. Into these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I awoke. It was broad noon, and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside—come to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.

Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

There are two [Wikipedias]: One is the public-facing reliable-enough-on-average encyclopedia that people read every day, which makes for nice fluff pieces in the media about "these new Web thingamajigs that the kids are building, aren't they neat?". The other is the insular behind-the-scenes bureaucracy, which reads like an improvised performance of the collected writings of Clay Shirky.

If the nearnesse of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happinesse in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying; When Avarice makes us the sport of death; When even David grew politickly cruell; and Solomon could hardly be said to be the wisest of men. But many are too early old, and before the date of age. Adversity stretcheth our dayes, misery makes Alcmenas nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his Nativity; Content to have so farre been, as to have a title to future being; Although he had lived here but in an hidden state of life, and as it were an abortion.

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger. Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.

There is plenty of evidence in the ecosystem to support the hypothesis that, if given the tools to do so easily, object-oriented programmers are ready to embrace functional techniques (such as immutability) and work them into an object-oriented view of the world, and will write better, less error-prone code as a result. Simply put, we believe the best thing we can do for Java developers is to give them a gentle push towards a more functional style of programming.

For most books, the review is a bell-shaped curve of star ratings; this one has a peak at 1, a peak at 5, and very little in between. How could this be? I think it is because SICP is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist (or willing to become one).

Inside the labs we have these capable models, and they're not that far ahead from what the public has access to for free. And that's a completely different trajectory for bringing technology into the world that what we've seen historically. It's a great opportunity because it brings people along. It gives them intuitive sense for the capabilities and risks and allows people to prepare for the advent of bringing advanced AI into the world.

Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses.

And for what? Again - there is a swath of use cases which would be hard without React and which aren’t complicated enough to push beyond React’s limits. But there are also a lot of problems for which I can’t see any concrete benefit to using React. Those are things like blogs, shopping-cart-websites, mostly-CRUD-and-forms-websites. For these things, all of the fancy optimizations are optimizations to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.

Over the years, across multiple deployments, DynamoDB has learned that it’s not just the end state and the start state that matter; there could be times when the newly deployed software doesn’t work and needs a rollback. The rolled-back state might be different from the initial state of the software. The rollback procedure is often missed in testing and can lead to customer impact. DynamoDB runs a suite of upgrade and downgrade tests at a component level before every deployment. Then, the software is rolled back on purpose and tested by running functional tests. DynamoDB has found this process valuable for catching issues that otherwise would make it hard to rollback if needed.

The possibilities of developing an atomic weapon and the desirability of doing it secretly were discussed at a Princeton University conference in which I participated in March 1939...Bohr said this rare variety could not be separated from common uranium except by turning the country into a gigantic factory. Bohr was worried that this could be done and that an atomic bomb could be developed—but he hoped that neither could be accomplished. Years later, when Bohr came to Los Alamos, I was prepared to say, "You see . . ." But before I could open my mouth, he said: "You see, I told you it couldn't be done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have done just that."

You always get the name of the dog, the editor explained. The dog is a character in your story, and names tell readers a lot about your characters. It’s a crucial storytelling detail, and if you’re alert and inquisitive enough to ask for the name of the dog, you’ll surely not miss any other important details.

271. While I am laughing at you, asshole, I do not hate you very much. But I am not doing you any favors. My hate, after all, happens to me. 273. You who have proved how much like me you are: how could I trust you? 285. I need a much larger vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 300. I forget the future, but when it happens I remember. 23. All stones are broken stones. 453. The mercy of a stone is in asking no mercy. 476. Some of my secrets everybody knows, but not that they are secrets.

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind.

GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels. When we need to update Git references, we briefly take a lock across all of the replicas in all of our data centers, and release the lock when our three-phase-commit (3PC) protocol reports success.

Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. [...] And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are.

If a hard takeoff occurs, and a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensourcing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff. As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).

He asked who the stout man was who had just been so ceremoniously disposed of. “He was an admiral”, they told him. “But why execute this admiral?” he enquired. “Because he had not enough dead men to his credit”, was the reply; “he joined battle with a French admiral, and it has been established that their ships were not close enough to engage.” “But surely”, exclaimed Candide, “the French admiral must have been just as far from the English as the English admiral was from the French!” “True enough”, was the answer; “but in this country we find it pays to shoot an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.”

I died from a mineral and plant became; Died from the plant, took a sentient frame; Died from the beast, donned a human dress. When by my dying did I ever grow less...? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blessed; but even from angelhood I must pass on: 'All save the face of God doth perish.' When I have sacrificed my angelic soul, I shall become what no mind has ever conceived, Oh let me not exist! for non-existence Proclaims in organ-tones: 'To Him shall we return.'

All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: “Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.”

The benefit of ground effects are: - 10-20% range extension (agreed, between 50% and 100% wingspan, which is where seagliders fly, the aerodynamic benefit of ground effect is reduced compared to near surface flight) - Drastic reduction in reserve fuel. This is a key limitation of electric aircraft because they need to sustain powered flight to another airport in the event of an emergency. We can always land on the water, therefore, we can count all of our batteries towards "mission useable" [...] Very difficult to distribute propulsion with IC engines or mechanical linkages. Electric propulsion technology unlocks the blown wing, which unlocks the use of hydrofoils, which unlocks wave tolerance and therefore operations of WIGs, which unlocks longer range of electric flight. It all works together.

Finally, in most workplaces, incentive structures don’t exist for people to (a) reduce their workloads to such an extent that their role becomes vulnerable or (b) voluntarily accept more responsibility without also taking on more pay. These things are all natural rate limiters on technology adoption and the precise mix they show up in varies from workplace to workplace as every team has its own culture and ways of working. And regardless of what your friendly neighbourhood management consulting firm will tell you, there’s no one singular set of mitigations to get around this – technology will work best in your workplace if it’s rolled out in tune with existing culture, routines, and ways of working.

An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration [...] Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts. “The Manosphere Report gave us a really fast and clear signal that this was not going over well with that segment of the President’s base,” said Seward. “There was a direct link between seeing that and then diving in to actually cover it.”

Wikipedia's articles are no place for strong views. Or rather, we feel about them the way that a natural history museum feels about tigers. We admire them and want our visitors to see how fierce and clever they are, so we stuff them and mount them for close inspection, with all sorts of carefully worded signs to get people to appreciate them as much as we do. But however much we adore tigers, a live tiger loose in the museum is seen as an urgent problem.

While I don’t expect Twitter to master its own destiny as far as the decentralization of the medium goes, I do support the idea, and I hope that Twitter as a business can coexist with the need for the world to have a free, open, reliable, and verifiable way for humans to instantly communicate in a one-to-many fashion.

What do they think has happened, the old fools To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose They could alter things back to when they danced all night Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September? Or do they fancy there's really been no change And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange Why aren't they screaming?

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.