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.
06/15/2020
The committee perceives that Department of Defense acquisition has lost that permeating sense of urgency, replaced with ever-increasing layers of “oversight” mechanisms to avoid mistakes.
— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Designs of Design
06/14/2020
“The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.”
— Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense
06/13/2020
But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.
— Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play
06/12/2020
The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who’d want to go into that as a career?
— Peter Seibe, lCoders at Work
06/11/2020
Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
1655 post articles, 331 pages.