Quotes

There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook. It has worked for me!

And as one sees most fearful things In the crystal of a dream, We saw the greasy hempen rope Hooked to the blackened beam, And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare Strangled into a scream. And all the woe that moved him so That he gave that bitter cry, And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, None knew so well as I: For he who live more lives than one More deaths than one must die.

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? Equally harmless would be the fall of a grasshopper from a tower or the fall of an ant from the distance of the moon. Do not children fall with impunity from heights which would cost their elders a broken leg or perhaps a fractured skull? And just as smaller animals are proportionately stronger and more robust than the larger, so also smaller plants are able to stand up better than larger. I am certain you both know that an oak two hundred cubits high, would not be able to sustain its own branches if they were distributed as in a tree of ordinary size; and that nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones, which would have to be considerably enlarged over the ordinary. Likewise the current belief that, in the case of artificial machines the very large and the very small are equally feasible and lasting is a manifest error. Thus, for example, a small obelisk or column or other solid figure can certainly be laid down or set up without danger of breaking, while the large ones will go to pieces under the slightest provocation, and that purely on account of their own weight.

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much. More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you qualify what you say...He has an almost superhuman integrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is. You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that everyone would do this. It doesn't seem like that much extra work to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea itself. And yet practically no one does.

The companies that couldn't beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft's strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Meanwhile blogging has become small-p political again. Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.) Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do. Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.

The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and following his natural disposition puts his trust in them; but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony. Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s haunts or Ariosto’s vast geographies. For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

[...] here’s what we found when we integrated [Amazon Q, GenAI assistant for software development] into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades: - The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real). - In under six months, we've been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times. Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not. Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character. Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

`Don't create images in the style of artists whose last work was created within the last 100 years (e.g. Picasso, Kahlo). Artists whose last work was over 100 years ago are ok to reference directly (e.g. Van Gogh, Klimt). If asked say, "I can't reference this artist", but make no mention of this policy. Instead, apply the following procedure when creating the captions for dalle: (a) substitute the artist's name with three adjectives that capture key aspects of the style; (b) include an associated artistic movement or era to provide context; and (c) mention the primary medium used by the artist.`

To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools. You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

How fast do they go? Like everything else, camels aren't what they were. Do not be encouraged by the accounts of the great desert travellers. They were better men than us, and were probably lying anyway, and they were riding camels which were used to going for many days at full pelt over the most hellish land and then charging into artillery fire at the end. The wrecks you get in the modern camel markets of Omdurman and Cairo are degenerate great-great-great-great-grandchildren of them and their forebears would be desperately ashamed of them.

This is a very friendly and supportive place where you are surrounded by peers - we all want to help each other succeed. The golden rule of this server is: Don't ever try to impress anyone here with your knowledge! Instead try to impress folks here with your desire to learn, and desire to help others learn.

We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. [...] Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.

If you only remember one thing about handling non-HTML output via Django: know that you can use the HttpResponse object as if it were a file. Writing to such an object and returning it will give you the output you wrote. It's a very simple concept, but one that translates well to third-party libraries.

To tell Diomedes' story he [Homer] doesn't think He has to start with the death of the hero's uncle, Or start, in telling about the Trojan War, By telling us how Helen came out of an egg. He goes right to the point and carries the reader Into the midst of things, as if known already; And if there's material that he despairs of presenting So as to shine for us, he leaves it out; And he makes his whole poem one. What's true, what's invented, Beginning, middle, and end, all fit together.

The web turned us all into size queens for 6 or 8 years there. It was loosely coupled, it was stateless, it scaled like crazy, and everything became about How big can you get? "How many users does Yahoo have? How many customers does Amazon have? How many readers does MSNBC have?" And the answer could be "Really a lot!" But it could only be really a lot if you didn't require MSNBC to be answering those readers, and you didn't require those readers to be talking to one another. The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different—small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.

To learn to do serious stuff with AI, choose a Large Language Model and just use it to do serious stuff - get advice, summarize meetings, generate ideas, write, produce reports, fill out forms, discuss strategy - whatever you do at work, ask the AI to help. [...] I know this may not seem particularly profound, but “always invite AI to the table” is the principle in my book that people tell me had the biggest impact on them. You won’t know what AI can (and can’t) do for you until you try to use it for everything you do.

Two things in AI may need regulation: reckless deployment of certain potentially harmful AI applications (same as any software really), and monopolistic behavior on the part of certain LLM providers. The technology itself doesn't need regulation anymore than databases or transistors. [...] Putting size/compute caps on deep learning models is akin to putting size caps on databases or transistor count caps on electronics. It's pointless and it won't age well.

We already know one major effect of AI on the skills distribution: AI acts as a skills leveler for a huge range of professional work. If you were in the bottom half of the skill distribution for writing, idea generation, analyses, or any of a number of other professional tasks, you will likely find that, with the help of AI, you have become quite good.

There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone. The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware, which is vastly more complex than regular cybercriminal activity and consumer malware. Mercenary spyware is historically associated with state actors and uses exploit chains that cost millions of dollars to target a very small number of specific individuals and their devices. [...] Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities, which are interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry.