Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying, “I probably learned more coding from random side projects that I did than the courses I took in college.”

— Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.

— Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life

Show subjects a picture of an object embedded in a complex background. Within seconds, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., China) tend to look more at, and remember better, the surrounding “contextual” information, while people from individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) do the same with the focal object.

— Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

…functional programming is quite popular within the research community but I think a lot of people outside that community see functional programming as being driven by ideas that, while neat, can be very mathematical and divorced from day-to-day programming.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

…abstractions make the world manageable: simpler problem statements - free of reality - are much more analytically tractable and provided that we did not ignore anything essential, the solutions are widely applicable.

— Mikito Takada, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit