…if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn’t have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

There’s never an easy answer to the question “Should we do more testing?” because information can guide risk reduction, but doesn’t necessarily do so.

— Gerald Weinberg, Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing

If someone starts out by asking whether or not AIs are gonna put us into capsules like in The Matrix, they’re jumping to a 100-bit proposition, without a corresponding 98 bits of evidence to locate it in the answer space as a possibility worthy of explicit consideration.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

Knuth has stated that he feels that at the beginning of the 1970s, academics were good programmers and industry professionals were not. Yet during that decade, as the scope of software that industry wrote increased, the situation reversed itself, and by the end of the decade the academics had drifted out of sync with what was going on in industry and restricted their programming, and therefore their area of expertise, to smaller programs that were no longer useful for generating advice for industry.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software