QuoteBack Library 

1. Always remember to keep your eye on the money.

2. Never forget to keep your eye on the money.

3. Always remember to never forget to keep your eye on the money.

4. Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the money.

Everything else is smoke and mirrors designed to get you to violate one or more of above-listed tenets and dissipate your energy into something harmless.

To me, there's an innate frustration in programming. It doesn't stem from having to work out the solutions to difficult problems. That takes careful thought, but it's the same kind of thought a novelist uses to organize a story or to write dialog that rings true. That kind of problem-solving is satisfying, even fun.

But that, unfortunately, is not what most programming is about. It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand.

Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.

Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.

By default, we should assume that any given function of government is grossly mismanaged in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary. I don’t just mean “inefficiently run” or “somewhat poorly setup” but, in fact, a level of misconduct that would warrant immediate termination in even the most bloated corporations.

When interacting with government bureaucracies, therefore, we should not assume good will upon their part. Instead, the default assumption should be that you are interacting with the organ of an adversarial, even arguably anti-human behemoth.

"You're away from your kids," he said. "You work all kinds of crazy hours. Now, what happens when you work those kinda hours?"

I wasn't sure where he was going, so I didn't answer.

"What happens is you come home and your kids say they love you. Now, they're not saying that because they know you. They're saying that because of what their mom instilled in them kids. She's instilled in them kids that this is a good man."

"I guess so," I said.

"Because my kids didn't know me. You know what I mean? I wasn't there. So why do my kids think so much of their dad? It's because of what their mom has instilled in them. Now, my portion of that is that everything she says about me, I have to make it more or less be true. That's my portion of the equation.

"Do you see? Do you know what I mean? If I'm a good man, it's because of the people I got around me expecting good out of me."

Asiyefunzwa na mamaye = A person that is not taught by his/her mom

Hufunzwa na ulimwengu = is taught by the world

He recommends trying to hit four “primary W’s” in any argument:

1. What’s your argument?
2. Why is it true?
3. When has it happened before?
4. Who cares?

The universe loves you because you are love.

Charity begins at home.

Sadly, the human brain really, really want to cast to boolean.

I generally support applying made-up models to pretty much any problem possible, just to notice where our intuitions are going wrong and to get a second opinion from a process that has no common sense but is also lacks systematic bias (or else has unpredictable, different systematic bias).

Although people pretending to be offended for personal gain is a real problem, it is less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations. If a person appears to suffer from an action of yours which you find completely innocuous, you should consider the possibility that eir mind is different from yours before rejecting eir suffering as feigned.

The literal teaches history,

the allegorical, what you should believe,

the moral, what you should do,

the anagogical, where you are going.

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

seem very confusing to grug

note, this good engineering advice but bad career advice: "yes" is magic word for more shiney rock and put in charge of large tribe of developer

sad but true: learn "yes" then learn blame other grugs when fail, ideal career advice

I always imagined my midlife crisis would materialize in the form of sports cars, skydiving, and banging supermodels half my age.

Instead, I got a paralyzing sense of existential dread that never goes away.

When choosing technology, you have both known unknowns and unknown unknowns [3].

• A known unknown is something like: we don’t know what happens when this database hits 100% CPU.
• An unknown unknown is something like: geez it didn’t even occur to us that writing stats would cause GC pauses.

Both sets are typically non-empty, even for tech that’s existed for decades. But for shiny new technology the magnitude of unknown unknowns is significantly larger, and this is important.

"please engage with the text"

a more perfect exhortation to internet culture doesn't exist.

An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures.

– D. Donoho

I think the point of Joyce is that she isn't Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher had something approaching anti-charisma. She was a deeply close-minded, cruel, and unpleasant person and she struggled to hide that part of herself in public interactions. Joyce is... not that. Joyce is urbane, witty, and friendly. She seems like a true citizen of the world, fascinated by all it has to offer, and freely admits she doesn't work for good people.

The point of Joyce in the game is to throw you off the scent. If you're a leftist coming into a game like this, you automatically have some sympathy for the union and mistrust of the corporation. But Joyce is charismatic and helpful, while Evrart is antagonistic and seemingly corrupt. If you're not a leftist, you take them at face value.

But this is a bait-and-switch. Evrart is only corrupt as a means to an end, and is secretly pursuing the far more moral and sympathetic goal: the economic freedom of Revachol from the Coalition. Joyce, meanwhile, is not a better person because she's aware she works for bad people. If anything, her awareness of it makes her worse. The way she describes "slumming it" in Martinaise as a youth also shows that while she might be worldly and hip, she's also fundamentally predatory towards these communities, taking what she wants from them and moving on. She has literally sold her soul to her corporate masters, as the Pale may very well have eradicated who she was and you have no idea how much of the persona she presents to you is accurate to who she is, or if there even really is one "Joyce."

Whenever someone pooh-poohs rationality as unnecessary, or makes fun of rationalists for spending zillions of brain cycles on “obvious” questions, check how they’re making their decisions. 99.9% of the time, it’s Heuristics That Almost Always Works.

(but make sure to watch for the other 0.1%; those are the people you learn from!)

The biggest lie developers tell themselves and they actually believe: This time we will do it right.

“Any sufficiently advanced hobby is indistinguishable from work.”

arch is just a lightweight OS optimized for running neofetch