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(This page was copied from my long lost to spam MoinMoin, so excuse the wiki syntax errors)

  • Talmud: “לך ואמור לאומן שעשאני כמה מכוער כלי זה שעשית” * JR: “The Protocol of the Elders of Tami”
  • Stupidity is always a capital crime –Larry Niven, The Fourth Profession
  • Haskell tends to be part of the solution for a problem, not a part of the problem itself. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Why_Haskell_Matters
  • For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
  • “It’s a dangerous business going out your front door”. J. R R. Tolkien
  • There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.” - Dave Barry
  • Well, any time you find a community whose overall Humor Level is rated at “Homeland Security”, it’s a pretty good indicator that you don’t ever want to have to deal with them. Ever. - Steve Yegge (referring to the Church gettingreal.37signals.com of Agility steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/10/egomania-itself.html)
  • The best way to accelerate a computer running Windows is at 9.81 m/s² (from an opensuse developers sig)
  • http://www.makezine.com/blog/306528267_7bb0ac881a-1.jpg
  • Brooks’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
  • Charles Simonyi’s ’‘’Rosenberg’s Law:’’’ “Software is easy to make except when you want to make something new. And then, of course, there is the corollary. The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new.”
  • More Charles Simonyi: “…Programmers today, he often says, are”unwitting cryptographers”: they gather requirements and knowledge from their clients and then, literally, hide that valuable information in a mountain of implementation detail–that is, of code…“. See http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18021/page4/, penultimate paragraph.
  • The world is divided into two groups of people. Those who have no idea what their doing, and those of us who work for them. Anonymous.
  • ERROR: src/plugins/alsa/alsa.c:603: Could not set hwparams, consult your local guru for meditation courses.
  • Idiot-safe is nice, but it’s also expert-proof.
  • “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” - Brian W. Kernighan
  • Hehe, troll attack on Trolltech :D (on qtopia-announce)
  • In 1969, Goodwin and colleagues published two of the most influential studies in the literature on blackouts (Goodwin et al. 1969a,b). Based on interviews with 100 hospitalized alcoholics, 64 of whom had a history of blackouts, the authors posited the existence of two qualitatively different types of blackouts. People experiencing the first type, en bloc blackouts, are unable to recall any details whatsoever from events that occurred while they were intoxicated, despite all efforts by the drinkers or others to cue recall. Referring back to our general model of memory formation, it is as if the process of transferring information from short-term to long-term storage has been completely blocked. En bloc memory impairments tend to have a distinct onset. It is usually less clear when these blackouts end because people typically fall asleep before they are over. Interestingly, even in the midst of an en bloc blackout, people appear able to keep information active in short-term memory for at least a few seconds. As a result, they can often ’‘’carry on conversations, drive automobiles, and engage in other complicated behaviors’’’. Information pertaining to these events is simply not transferred into long-term storage.
  • It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content – http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
  • Alan Perlis quote: “A programming language that doesn’t change the way you think about programming is not worth knowing” (quoted from andy wingos blog
  • (from www.kernel.org, an email sig) This space intentionally has nothing but text explaining why this space has nothing but text explaining that this space would otherwise have been left blank, and would otherwise have been left blank.
  • from oprofile (they have more): Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don’t do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. - M.A. Jackson
  • The early bird catches the early worm – Garfield.
  • There is a theory which says that only crazy people work on version control system. There is another theory which says that the first theory gets the causality backwards. - Anonymous
  • PROFESSOR HANSEN: “The technology community has, what, radical elements who want free copying; Open Source people who are barely sane… Thank God for open source. If it weren’t for open source, these people would be creating viruses. I consider it basically occupational therapy for these people: to keep them at least not committing serious crimes on the Internet”
  • Python is faster than assembly. Really. Speed is measured as distance divided by time. Someone at CERN said that only 4% of the matter in the universe is known. Well, we can say that there are a few things that don’t exist: the tooth fairy, santaclaus and completely specified projects. So the only distance points that really matter are the business idea and the process is implemented, revenue is created. The time python takes between those points way less than with assembly or C, so python is faster than assembly.
  • I think I just had an evilgasm oots
  • One must learn to think well before learning to think. Afterward it proves too difficult. -A. France (from an essay “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages by Alan C. Kay, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972)
  • The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence – attributed to Edsger Dijkstra
  • I don’t trust everybody. In fact I am a very cynical and untrusting person. I think most of you are completely incompetent, right? … – Linus Torvalds, excerpt (28:05) taken from From a Google Talk about Git and Source Code Management (SCM) systems sometime in 2007.
  • Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. Donald Knuth (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)
  • I may make you feel but I can’t make you think – Jethro Tull, Thick as a brick
  • The Matrix is a system, Neo. The system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of the system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
  • ‘Beware,’ she recited a personal beatitude, ‘those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we /will/ be satisfied’. ‘And beware the meek,’ she continued, ‘for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth’. – The Dream Master, Roger Zelazny.
  • What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love – Dostoevsky
  • Server Core comes up with a blank desktop and a single command line window. ’‘’There’s no shell, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, or any other pointless graphical applications’’’. Indeed, even Notepad–which is available in Server Core–had to be hacked so that it could present an ancient version of the Open Save dialog. – review of Windows Server 2008 beta 3 from winsupersite
  • “Nell,” the constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, “the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to be become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. – Nell/Constable, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
  • Call no man happy until he is dead, Herodotus. (I read it in American Gods, Neil Gaiman. I like authors with first name Neil :).
  • It’s always a good idea to replace an infinite set of candidates by a finite set, provided the latter contains the ones we’re interested in. – ‘’From Computational Geometry, Chapter 8, page 165-166’’
  • On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. – Stewart Brand, circa 1984
  • The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. – Jon Hammond
  • Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research. — Wilson Mizner (quote found in Numpy book).
  • Some people don’t think performance issues are “real bugs”, and I think such people shouldn’t be allowed to program. – Linus Torvalds, from git mailing list
  • Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity, then use the resulting product as both an information service and a database for targeting ads and you have Super Google — the most valuable company on Earth and entirely based on metadata. – Robert X. Cringely, The Pulpit (a.k.a. Mark Stephens)
  • you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on - Dean Martin
  • The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance - Robert R. Coveyou (rand31)
  • According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” Compared with Morse’s “What hath God wrought!” this is disappointingly banal - as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had uttered the words: “Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?” – Neal Stephenson quoting, wired article, circa 1996
  • .. warranty is void when NOT opened. (about openmoko, from a post by Holger “zecke” Freyther)
  • Suddenly the Dungeon collapses!! - You die… (not original, but seen on my employers ssh login when they kill my “cpu zealous” processes).
  • It occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk – I frequently need to be forced to completion. – paraphrased from a plan file. (copied from Theodor Tso’s thunk.org)
  • “Master, does Emacs possess the Buddha nature?” the novice asked. “I don’t see why not,” replied the master. “It’s got bloody well everything else.” Several years later, the novice suddenly achieved enlightenment. – John Fouhy
  • Her name was Xaphania. She told me many things… She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angles, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed. She gave me many examples from my world. – Serafina Pekkala to Mary Malone, pp 482, The Amber Spyglass, part 3 of His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman.
  • Someone: Why do you always think you’re right? House: I don’t, I just find it hard to operate under the opposite assumption” House M.D. Yes, the T.V. Series.
  • Delay is the deadliest form of denial. – C. Northcote Parkinson (taken from email sig, unsure of authenticity)
  • Whether you think you can, or think you can’t… you’re right! / Henry Ford (
  • My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater. – Neal Stephenson, from an Slashdot (paraphrasing Jaron Lanier)
  • I see you like to CHEW, why don’t you CHEW on my FIST? – KUNG FU PANDA
  • On the day I go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone will go super conductive. – Erik Raymond, 2005
  • אלון מעבד עצמו לדעת – חנן
  • Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things. – Peter Drucker
  • Matt was a very poor student and never went to college. When he got older, he was pleased to discover that no one actually cares. Matt doesn’t want to imply that college is bad or anything. He’s just saying is all. There’s other ways to fill your head. – (presumably written by Matt Harding)
  • The fundamental economics of software developments leads you to open-source software – David Rivas, quotes by Jonathan Erickson, on DDJ0109
  • “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.” – Columnist David Brooks, commenting in yesterday’s New York Times on a book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers,”
  • Cory Doctorow, Down and out in the magic kingdom, introduction (from 2003, not the newer one), about releasing the book’s source: Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.”
  • Parson Gotti, aka Lord Hamster, Erfworld, the battle of Gobwin Knob, Page 124. (author Rob balder, illustrator Jamie Noguchi) We have… maybe an hour before the end of the world. Which is cool. That’s about when I would /usually/ start cramming for a final
  • “yeah, I’ve seen editors like that, but I don’t feel a need for them, I don’t want to see the state of the file when I’m editing” - Attributed (paraphrased) to Ken Thompson, how em became vi, http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/
  • Giving a multicore CPU to a programmer is like giving a drink to an alcoholic. Saint Knuth taught us that premature optimization is the root of all evil. I’m here to tell you that virtually all of programming is premature optimization – Jonathan Edwards
  • אדון סעדי, אין לי סמכות להוציא אותך, אז אני אוציא אותי. – היו”ר השופט מישאל חשין ** Out of the transcript of a request to not allow balad and Azmi Bassara to participate in the 2002 elections, from the knesset site
  • – interview with Haruki Murakami ** Murakami: I will go on running for as long as I can walk. You know what I would like to be written on my tombstone? ** SPIEGEL: Tell us. ** Murakami: “At least he never walked.”
  • Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. – Athos, Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers.
  • I couldn’t really choose, so here is a collection of quotes: http://www.cs.yale.edu/quotes.html
  • Optimize for Happiness - 37signals, in the book Getting Real, title of chapter 10.
  • “All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” T. E. Lawrence (http://jyro.blogspot.com/2008/03/clutter-webkit.html)
  • They didn’t have silicon, well, they did have silicon but it was in the form of sand” – Mehran Sahami, in Stanford / Computer Science, lecture on The History of Computing
  • Board Quote! http://academicearth.org/lectures/a-wrap-up-of-multi-dimensional-arrays 20:21 Mehran Sahami Debugging:
    • Design - Architect
    • Coding - Engineer
    • Testing - Vandal
    • Debugging - detective
  • I think the more time you spend around computers, the more you get impatient with other people, impatient with their errors, you get impatient with your own errors. – Ellen Ullman
  • מסיבת מפתחות זה הסוג של משחק מלים סבנטיז סליזי שמזכיר לכולנו שאת תת-תרבות הקוד הפתוח הקימו היפים חרמנים. – Dotan Dimet (Facebook, August Penguin 2009 event wall)
  • A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it. – Why Programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily formulated ideas / Marvin Minsky
  • There is the perception that anyone who’s got money should throw money at a problem, but I’ve some experience with that and it’s really not a good way for trying to solve problems. – Mark Shuttleworth, in an interview with Andreas Proschofsky from derStandard.at
  • “… . You can see that, after a while, the civilizations with only short-term perspectives just aren’t around. They work out their destinies also.” – Outsider, Office of the Galactic Census, to Dr. Ellie Arroway. page 361, Contact / Carl Sagan, published 01985.
  • No country for old man. Carlan Jean Moss (~) and Anton Chigurh. ** C: No – I ain’t gonna call it. ** A: Call it. ** C: The coin don’t have no say. it’s just you. ** A: I got here the same way the coin did.
  • Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you’ve said. You don’t have to keep any state in your head. It’s a pure functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.) – Paul Graham, interview with Jessica Livingston in “Founders at Work” by same (2008).
  • There are two ways to slide easily through life: Namely, to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking - Manhood of Humanity/Alfred Korzybski (gutenberg)
  • As for manufacturing details for the XO-3, Forbes further quotes Negroponte as saying. “We don’t necessarily need to build it. We just need to threaten to build it.” – Negroponte
  • It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish. – J.R.R Tolkien
  • Ah, well. So be it. A convincing veil of sanity was all that most people could manage, anyway. – Jack Snipe, fictional character from Erf World Book 2 Text 21
  • Successes only last until someone screws them up. failures are forever. (House, Season 6, Opening Chapter, 59:18)
  • …the general feeling at the time that programming was something that should be doable by uneducated morons picked from the street… – An interview with Edsger Dijkstra, referring to the american (IBM) attitude to programming during the 1960’s (and still relevant today) (link)
  • Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it. – Larry Tesler
  • We may continue to think that programming is not essentially difficult, that it can be done by accurate morons, provided you have enough of them, but then we continue to fool ourselves and no one can do so for a long time unpunished. – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, EWD273: The Programming Task Considered as an Intellectual Challenge (1969); available from http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD273.html. (read in DijkstraCrisis_LeidenDRAFT.pdf August 2010)
  • At the time the 80387 was introduced, Intel attempted to correct a serious flaw in the design which arose from the fact that it was impossible for someone in Santa Clara and someone in Israel to be awake at the same time. – William Kahan when interviewed by DDJ
  • many eyes may make for shallow bugs, but many hands make for shitty design - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
  • I was not aware irony had military usage - Posca sasses, From the TV series Rome, season 1, chapter 6, quote of Julius Ceaser’s main slave.
  • רוב האנשים מאוד קשובים. אם הרופא שלהם אומר להם ללכת הביתה למות הם הולכים לבית ומתים. – 29:40 ** גראס באישור רופא, החבר המטפס של אברי גלעד.
  • Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. – Evegeny Morozov, The Meme Hustler
  • What do you make of a society that is so primitive that it clings to the belief that certain words in its language are so powerful that they could corrupt you the moment you hear them – Swenson, John (March 1980), Frank Zappa: America’s Weirdest Rock Star Comes Clean, High Times
  • Finally, crowd sourced science is winning, justice shouldn’t be too far behind. Justice Brandise was right: The states are the laboratories – http://www.webmd.com/news/breaking-news/marijuana-on-main-street/lundberg-marijuana 1:25 Dr. George Lundberg at large for Medscape, Marihuanna on Main street.
  • The meaning of life is combinatorial – Six Feet Under S04E12 56:50
    • A: You’re not even grateful are you?
    • B: Grateful? for the worst fucking experience of my life?
    • A: You hang on to your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well let me tell you, it’s not worth shit. Let it go. A [looks to sky]: Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.
    • B: well what am I supposed to do?
    • A: What do you think? you can do anything you like you bastard, you’re alive! What’s a little pain compared to that.
    • B: Can’t be so simple
    • A: What if it is?
  • Naomi Klein; The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (from hebrew translation, so double translation, apologies to the author and reader): Large scale prisoner abuse is an almost sure sign that politicians are trying to enforce a system - political, religous or economical - that is not accepted by a majority of the governed people. As ecologists define ecological systems via the presence of “indicator species” of plants and birds, so is torture a indicator species for a regime in the height of a clearly anti democratic work, even if voted freely into power.
  • from rust reddit > Safety can be retrofitted with a static analyser. C11 has the same concept of smart pointers. But not inherited mutability, which is absolutely crucial for Rust’s safety to work. A lot of people miss this and think that Rust is C++ plus static analysis. It is not. – pcwalton (https://pcwalton.github.io/) * A hackerspace is an aviation club for non aviators (from hebrew, recorded from memory) - Hanan Einav Levy ~January 2012 – האקרספייס זה קלוב תעופה ללא טיסנאים * Why not try using your brain as a CPU instead of a hard-drive for a change? – David Elliott from [[https://winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2002-February/004029.html kicking and screaming to the easy half of Lisp, circa 1972. – chromatic @ [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=695773 perlmonks: Re^2: Runtime introspection: What good is it?]
  • More seriously, he continued, “We sold people the way to solve their problems.” The trick was to figure out what their problems were. “Customers are like your kids, they say they ‘need’ ice-cream, but that’s what they want; what they really need is spinach. You need to understand the customers’ needs better than they do.” – Bob Young, interviewed about the history of Red Hat on [http://www.zdnet.com/bob-young-talks-about-the-origins-of-red-hat-7000035051/ ZDNet]
  • <shekel> omg, a qr code is better looking – lame person commenting about my awesome git profile picture
  • יבוא יום ואני אשכרה אדע מה אני עושה – יאיר
  • All of us on the Asana team have deep backgrounds writing rich web applications at companies like Google and Facebook. We’ve been continually frustrated by how long it takes to write software, and by a nagging feeling that in some deep sense we’ve been writing the same code over and over. Even when using the latest and greatest frameworks and disciplines, writing fast, highly interacting web applications involves a lot of accidental complexity: – [https://asana.com/luna Asana] about the rational for building Luna
  • Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. – Arthur Ashe (quoted by Alex “Skud” Bayley on Open Source Bridge, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuV9PfI03Jk talk] 17:40)
  • אפשר גם לומר מבריאה מסרטן - יונה וולך, בראיון עם מאיר שליו [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmKrpvIHQ0#t=256 ביוטיוב]
  • Why should we have to rely on a priestly class of experts who are the sole inheritors of a permission to play? – http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/computing-is-too-easy/ 2 March 2015 Samuel Arbesman
  • בחוק היבש, צרכני הקנאביס הם עבריינים ומקומם בכלא תחת קונסטלציה כזאת או אחרת. במציאות רוב צרכני הקנאביס הם אנשים נורמטיביים לחלוטין, שתסקיר שירות המבחן שלהם יוצא יותר חיובי ממסרים של דלאי לאמה – Anonymous Judge (retired) Shmuel on Ale Yarok page, day before elections for the 20th Knesset, 2015. 16th of March 2015, [https://www.facebook.com/AleYarok/photos/a.426820510719052.98207.424111577656612/865294346871664/?type=1&theater original] ** Full quote: שלום חברים, שמי שמואל ואני שופט בדימוס. בתור מי שראה את עצמו לאורך כל חייו כמחויב קודם כל למשפט צדק ורק לאחר מכן לרשויות שאוכפות את החוקים, נושא הקנאביס תמיד היה בתחום האפור מבחינתי. בחוק היבש, צרכני הקנאביס הם עבריינים ומקומם בכלא תחת קונסטלציה כזאת או אחרת. במציאות רוב צרכני הקנאביס הם אנשים נורמטיביים לחלוטין, שתסקיר שירות המבחן שלהם יוצא יותר חיובי ממסרים של דלאי לאמה. אני לא מתיימר לדעת מה הפיתרון, אבל בהחלט רוצה שעלה ירוק יכנסו לכנסת על מנת שהנושא הזה יוסדר אחד ולתמיד. #גאהבבחירהשלי
  • [http://www.bechirot20.gov.il/election/news/Announcments/Documents/27-20_Resolution.pdf החלטת] יו”ר וועדת הבחירות ה-20 לכנסת ישראל, השופט סלים ג’וברן, לחייב מכוני סקרים לפרסם אחוז תמיכה במפלגות שקיבלו מעל 1%: ההצבעה לרשימות באחוזים. לאחר שידוע מהם אחוזי התמיכה שקיבלה כל רשימת מועמדים, ניתן להמיר את האחוזים לחלוקה למנדטים. אינני סבור, שרק התפלגות המנדטים לבדה הווה את תוצאות הסקר ולעמדתי יש לסווג כחלק מ”תוצאות הסקר” כבר את השלב בו נודעת התפלגות ההצבעה באחוזים.
  • “קודם כל אנחנו בטלנים, אחר כך אנחנו יוצרים. אני יוצר רק בבית, כל מה שפירסמתי לא נכתב בבתי קפה. לקפה תמר אני הולך בשביל שרה, בשביל החברים וכדי לנקות את הראש מכל מה שעשיתי בבית.” – דודו בוסי על קפה תמר, בכתבה על סגירתו, http://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/recipes/food-news/1.2620519
  • The Agnostic prayer, by Roger Zelazny, from Creatures of Light and Darkness, © 1969: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
  • Any sufficiently experienced programmer contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a type checker. – twitter comment by Jake McArthur, retweeted by [http://www.atomic-oak.com/ JP], who is one of the authors of [https://nose.readthedocs.org/ nose-tests] for which I just landed a [https://github.com/nose-devs/nose/commit/2f9ad566a0f3edc840cb0c93294b1662ea3206e4 commit]! (original quote this quote is borrowing from is Greenspuns [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule tenth rule] of programming - Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp)
  • The standard basis vectors for <math> and <math> are the columns of I. That choice leads to a standard matrix, and <math> in the normal way. But these spaces also have other bases, so the same T is represented by other matrices. A main theme of linear algebra is to choose the bases that give the best matrix for T – [http://www-math.mit.edu/~gs/ Gilbert Strang] quoted in a post by Eli Bendersky. First time I’m using this page to tag an interesting person.
  • It’s not me it’s the cancer – Hanan Einav Levy, My brother, Hanuka, 2012
  • Reddit person: How do you think programming and philosophy relate to each other? do you think everyone is a philosopher? ** Jaan Tallinn: oh, wow, an excellent question! i think programming can help people to overcome the mind projection fallacy, because you develop a sense of what it means to have your thoughts fully specified. this is extremely important in philosophy (not to mention other areas!) that has a really bad track record due to treating intuitions as evidence (or, as my friend michael vassar puts it, “philosophers have been spectacularly bad at recognising that their insights are produced by cognitive algorithms”). in my view philosophers have had thousands of years to come up with interesting thoughts and questions, but now we need answers, and they better be in the form of executable computer code! ** From a Reddit Q&A with Skype co-founder and now Jaan Tallinn. Cannot find a quote about philanthropy taxonomy / categorization, but he is worried about long term.
  • Another quote and meta quote from that same reddit Q&A ** 1.What do you think about when you start a tech start-up? (no really, what would you say were your frame of mind, at launch) ** 2.Bitcoins. Hot or not? *** doing a startup is a process, not a moment, so there is no a single thing you’re thinking about. at launch people are usually anxious about the public reception – as you’d expect, really. *** brilliant idea, at least technically. as a friend of mine said, “bitcoin, like wikipedia, is one of those ideas that can never work in theory.. only in practice!”
  • im not better at computers, i just have a higher pain threshold for its shit. – Andrej Boleslavský during brvrbt workshop, prague 2015
  • If we treat the pixels and topology of pixels on a screen as a bottleneck in the I/O channel between hard drives and an analyst’s visual cortex, what are the best compression techniques at all levels of the data transformation pipeline? – self driving car
  • Alcohol. I’m not much of a drinker. And cocaine. It makes you think you know what you’re doing. Whereas when you’re smoking weed you know that you don’t know what you’re doing, which makes you learn new things. – Tommy Chong on AMA in Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3xvxn1/hey_man_im_tommy_chong_12_of_cheech_chong/
  • ח”כ ג’אמל זחאלקה “אתה לא קונה חתול בשק” - לגבי האמפ בדיון בכנסת ישראל על הסדרתו. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpQ2UxGRqt4 1:52:00 ~
  • אורחי גל – חן אצל גל
  • I had a novice’s hunger for history, but also a novice’s inability to envision it – Mukherjee Emperor of maladies
  • Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody’s gonna die – Morty in Rick and Morty, Season 1 Episode 8, 18:02
  • implicitly depicted Indians as people who never changed their environment from its original wild state. Because history is change, they were people without history. – Charles C. Mann, 1491, according to New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/1491-vanished-americans.html?_r=1 article]
  • Marc Edwards on an interview (chronicle, Feruary 2, 2016) about the Flint Lead in the water discovery opposed to what the EPA said. ** Q. I keep coming back to these university researchers in Flint who said: “The state has 50 epidemiologists. They say that the water’s safe. So I’m going to focus my energy on something that’s less settled.” How do you decide when the state should be challenged? ** A. That’s a great question. We are not skeptical enough about each other’s results. What’s the upside in that? You’re going to make enemies. People might start questioning your results. And that’s going to start slowing down our publication assembly line. Everyone’s invested in just cranking out more crap papers.
  • What this campaign is about is not just electing a new President (pause), And by the way, that’s important too – Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, POTUS [https://youtu.be/sqZdF-lCbL4?t=2068 speech] at Rally at Poughkeepsie, New York, 12.4.2016
  • I would definitely have agreed with you if that was what I said – Jon Stewart when interviewed by David Axelrod on his “The Axes files”, conducted at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, 2016, May, @[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da5VYSPsoE0 youtube]
  • Have a clarity of vision but a flexibility of process - Answer to Brock Hebner question in Q & A section about how come such talent came out of the daily show (paraphrasing) - Jon Stewart when interviewed by David Axelrod on his “The Axes files”, conducted at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, 2016, May, @[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da5VYSPsoE0 youtube]
  • You can only control your intention (paraphrasing), and then you try to execute that intention to its best avatar, to its best self – same question
  • News is not just another commodity that is placed on your cable box. – Same
  • Alexander Grahm Bell, he inveted the telephone, it was like “Watson, come quickly,.., and bring a towel” – Same
  • It’s designed for a reason, and the reason is to heighten urgency and anxiety, so you won’t turn away – Answering how you cope with being submerged in 24 hour multiple news networks coverage to do the daily show, same source.
  • When my kids go to college, I hope they aren’t too overwhelmed when they register for “American History 305: May through Mid-May, 2017” - Someone on Reddit in a comment about a news story about President Trump asking two Intelligence chiefs to publicly cast doubt on a third branch (the FBI), and referring to the speed in which everything is unfolding about Trump’s white house administration.
  • Tamir Leon, Anthropologist, 2016, Interview on Haaretz
    • אני אומר כבר כמה שנים להורים — שימו לב, הילדים לא צוחקים במקומות הנכונים, צריך להעיר להם.
    • תשמע, אתה ממש מפחיד אותי.
    • מצטער. תרבות מורכבת מהמון סימנים קטנים. אחד מהם הוא מדוע משהו מצחיק. הגבולות מיטשטשים אצל ילד שנמצא כל היום ביוטיוב. הבעיה היא לא רק מה שהוא רואה, הבעיה היא שאין שום תיווך. כשהייתי ילד, הייתי רואה עם החברים שלי סרטים של ברוס לי ואז היינו עושים אחד לשני תנועות כאלה של קונג פו, אבל כל הזמן ידענו שברוס לי זה בסרט. הילדים היום לא בטוחים בזה. מוסד חינוכי שלא מבין שהוא חייב לתווך את המציאות הזאת הוא מוסד חינוכי לא רלוונטי.
  • Dr. Benny Moses, About dr. google: נו, ומה הבעיה עם האינטרנט?

שיש שם 17 מיליון מאמרים, 700 אלף מחקרים קליניים ו–1.8 מיליון סקירות שמנסות לסכם את כל המידע הזה. קבוצת מומחים מארה”ב סקרה 60 אלף מחקרים שפורסמו בעיתונות מדעית, ומצאה שרק 7% מהם עמדו בקריטריונים של איכות שיטות המחקר. במחקר אחר לקחו 500 אנשי מקצוע מתחום הבריאות, ועשו להם מבחן של כישורים לכתיבת ביקורת ספרות מדעית — ורק 7% מהם עברו. בקיצור, בתוך מסד הנתונים הגדול כל כך, היכולת שלך להוציא מידע רלוונטי קלושה. לרוב האנשים אין כלים לדעת אם המידע אמין או לא. הם לא יודעים איך איך נערך המחקר, מה היתה קבוצת הביקורת ועוד. דבר נוסף הוא איך אתה מציג את המידע שנמצא במחקרים, גם אם נניח שהם אמינים.

  • Dr. Benny Moses, About the relative interchangedness of surgeons in Israel:מה שהוציא חלק מהרופאים מדעתם היה חוסר השונות בין המחלקות. זה היה ממצא מפתיע, כי עד אז התעמולה היתה כאילו יש מחלקות מצטיינות עם רופאים יחידים בדורם, כוכבים, לעומת מחלקות חלשות עם רופאים פחות טובים. זה היה כל כך חזק, שאני לא יודע כמה אנשים מישכנו את בתיהם כדי להגיע למנתחים מסוימים. בסוף נוצר מצב שההסתדרות הרפואית וראשיה התנגדו באופן גורף להשוואה, כי הרופאים החזקים במערכת לא רצו שזה יימשך. משרד הבריאות חתם על הסכם עם ההסתדרות הרפואית שלא יבוצעו מחקרים נוספים באותה מתכונת. ** Source: https://www.haaretz.co.il/tmr/1.4475246
  • “[Our members] believe they bought the tractor, or the combine, or the sprayer, and they should be able to adjust it,” said Mary-Kay Thatcher, the Farm Bureau’s senior director of congressional relations. “They don’t want to mess up intellectual property rights. They know how much it costs companies to develop that stuff. But they want to be able to get in and fix it themselves.” – Vice article, Mary-Kay Thatcher
  • Licenses are the peace treaty between two reptiles about who gets to control the territory – Simon Phipps, 20 years to OSI, FOSDEM 2018
  • .. right now we are in this epidemic of software getting worse and worse, because people don’t want to do that much work, and they want to make the most money. There is always free money out there. The free money and the terribleness of software are intimately connected. Because if you had to work hard to make the money software that’s bad would not survive, it would get out competed by software that’s good. Instead we have a situation where the first person out competes everybody else.. – Jonathan Blow, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX60gKsf7y0 youtube channel], 15th January 2018
  • אז חשוב לנו להדגיש משהו: נמאס שרבים בציבור מעודדים פוליטיקאים כאילו היו קבוצת כדורגל. תשפטו אותם כמו קוטג’. בדקו כל יום מחדש אם פג תוקפם. בחנו בשיפוטיות מלאה אם שירתו אתכם בתכלס או לא בעיניים טריות. זה מה שאנחנו עושים. רק כך אנחנו מצליחים להביא כתבות מפתיעות.
  • Tomer Avital, [https://shkifut.info/2018/03/newsletter-2/ 100 days of sunlight]
  • A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable. – Leslie Lamport, according to someone on [https://www.reddit.com/r/PostgreSQL/comments/8l04sy/have_any_of_you_migrated_from_postgresql_to_a/dzc29kf reddit]
  • The zeitgeist of rust is developing load bearing software that will survive us – Bryan Cantrill (The summer of rust, recorded lecture, 1:08:11)
  • Trust, but deblobbify. – https://git.sr.ht/~amjoseph/ownerboot/tree/HEAD/doc/owner-controlled.md
  • אין מקום להשוות, כי אנחנו בישראל רחוקים מאוד משם, אבל לא הייתי רוצה לגדל את ילדיי במדינה שבה יש חשש תמידי על מה מותר ואסור להגיד, ורק המקורבים לשלטון נהנים משחיתות ממוסדת. זו מדינה ללא עתיד”. – Alef – https://www.yediot.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-6280472,00.html (archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20230304085244/https://www.yediot.co.il/articles/0%2C7340%2CL-6280472%2C00.html)
  • כבודו חוזר על הטענה שהרוב שבו התקבל חופש האדם וכבודו לא היה ב-61 ולכן איזה מין חוק יסוד זה. לפעמים גם העובדות חשובות. בשנת 94’ הבית הזה תיקן את חוק כבוד האדם וחירותו ברוב של 75 אל 0, וקבע: “זכויות היסוד של האדם בישראל מושתתות על ההכרה בערך האדם, בקדושת חייו ובהיותו בן-חורין, והן יכובדו ברוח העקרונות שבהכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל”. זה 75-0.
    • מתן מרידור – בוועדת חוקה של הכנסת, דיון בהצעת חוק יסוד: השפיטה, בראשות שמחה רוטמן - ישיבת ועדה של הכנסת ה-25 מתאריך 06/02/2023 בכנסת פתוחה
  • “ההבדל האמיתי בין המחנות הוא אחר: יש מחנה דמוקרטי שמאמין בחופש ובזכויות אזרח ותומך בשוויון. כנגדו יש את המחנה השני, שמחזיק בתפיסת עליונות מוחלטת שלו עצמו על אחרים. הוא ואנשיו — לעומת כל היתר. עליונות יהודית, אם תרצי. זו החלוקה בין המחנות, כל חלוקה אחרת היא קשקוש”.
  • “טענתי שאין סיבה להשאיר כבישים רחבים סביב הרכבת הקלה. עדיין יש פחד ברשויות המקומיות וגם במשרד התחבורה מדיאטת כבישים. הם אומרים 'כן, התחבורה הציבורית זה חשוב, אבל, צריך לחשוב גם על הרכב הפרטי'. וה'כן, אבל' הזה דופק את כל המערכת של התחבורה הציבורית”. – האדריכלית דניאלה פוסק 06:00, 08 באוגוסט 2023 הארץ
  • בזירת מערכות היחסים העדינות בין גברים לנשים קוראים לזה גזלייטינג - מניפולציה שמערערת את תפיסת המציאות של האחר וגורמת לו להטיל ספק ביכולת השיפוט ובהבנת המציאות שלו. יושב אדם בסוף היום מול החדשות, חרד מפני כל מה שהוא רואה, מפחד מפני האפשרות שאולי ייאלץ למשוך את הפנסיה שלו כדי לא לאבד את הבית, והנה מתפנן מולו גל תורן ואומר - “נו מה את כבדה? אומרים לך שאפשר להתקשר גם בשש וחצי בבוקר!”
tamiwiki/fortunecookies.txt · Last modified: 2023/08/16 11:16 by alon_levy

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