Quote of the Day
If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.
01/04/2024
The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that acceleration is taking place with a protected meta level doing the actual optimizing.
— Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate
01/03/2024
Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary Zukav.
— Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I
01/02/2024
What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence. It’s confidence that comes from a lifetime of success after real success, an objectively great job, working at an objectively great company, making a measurably great salary, building products that get millions of users. You must be smart. In fact, you are smart. You can prove it.
— Avery Pennarun, The Curse of Smart People
01/01/2024
If you can’t build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?
— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures
12/31/2023
…no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else.
— Steven Pinker, Rationality
1883 post articles, 377 pages.