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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.

09/30/2020

…when discussing scalable data systems, people make comments along the lines of, “You’re not Google or Amazon. Stop worrying about scale and just use a relational database.” There is truth in that statement: building for scale that you don’t need is wasted effort and may lock you into an inflexible design.

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

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09/28/2020

Goodman’s Grue, is about the limitations of induction. Suppose you have two hypotheses, namely “emeralds are green”, and “emeralds are green and will so remain until New Year’s Day 2050, at which point they will all turn blue.” (This can also be expressed by saying that “emeralds are grue”, where “grue” is defined as “green until 2050 and blue thereafter”.) Statistically, both of these hypotheses are equally confirmed by current observations.

— Christopher Michael Langan, The Art of Knowing

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