I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it,and when I first did it I felt very perverse.
— Diane Arbus
While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.
Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself—so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
We live forward, but understand backward.
— Harald Høffding
The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.
— Reinhold Niebuhr, 1932
The commentators focussing on these shortcomings are either missing or nailing the point; I’m not sure which.
— Robert Heaton, How sad should I be about ChatGPT?, 2022-12-14
The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it.
— Thaddeus Golas, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, 1971 (via)
Persist too long in making choices without justifying them, and an entire creative effort might wander aimlessly. The results might be the sum of wishy-washy half decisions. [..] Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your gut you can also justify with your head. It’s not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it’s possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.
— Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, 2018 (via)
It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.
— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024-01-02 (via)
The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction.
— Paul Ford, Why So Bad, AI Ads?, 2024-07-31
We advance by learning what to give up.
— John L. Heilbron, Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction, 2020
For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
— Oscar Wilde, Intentions, 1891
the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belong statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called “deep truths,” are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.
— Niels Bohr, Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics, 1949
The orders are arriving non-stop. My left hand grabs tickets, separates white ones for the grill man, yellow ones for the sauté man, and pink master copies, which I use to time and generally oversee the production. My right hand wipes plates, inserts rosemary sprigs into mashed potatoes. I’m yelling full time, trying to hold it all together. If there is an unforeseeable mishap—say, one of the big tables’ orders was prematurely sent out, only to be returned—the whole process could come to a full stop. “Where’s that fucking confit?” I yell at Angel, who’s struggling to make blinis for smoked salmon, to brown ravioli under the salamander, to lay out plates of pâté, and to do five endive salads, all more or less at once. A hot escargot explodes in front of me, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts.
— Anthony Bourdain, One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles (via)
[Transcription] is a more subtle art than at first it might appear
— R. Barbour, Introducing Qualitative Research: A Student’s Guide, Page 257, 2013 (via)
Changing your life is difficult. It requires hard work. But your life may depend on it, so stop procrastinating and find something that works.
— Sam Seliger, “No Salt”
The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one.
— Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time, 1998 (via)
The gaze requires no words at all; it is an honest meeting.
— Caleb Azumah Nelson, page 2, Open Water , Page 2
I just want to be an honest man and a good writer.
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
There was an inevitability about their road towards one another which encouraged meandering along the route.
— Zadie Smith, NW, 2012 (via)
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902 (via)
The gift must be given back, sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly, and sadly it seems that I will be made to give it back before my time. I have learned much, experienced much, made many mistakes, enjoyed my triumphs, suffered my defeats, and, most vitally, experienced love. So many people live who never get that last one, and I have been lucky enough to.
— Jake Seliger, How do you say goodbye?
I feel an existential completion. Wanting to stay and being able to stay are not the same things. No matter how agentic I’ve learned to become, not every problem has a solution. Every problem does, however, have a resolution. I think my resolution is close.
— Jake Seliger, More isn’t always better: death and over-treatment as a downside of agenticness
Every day is pain. And the reward for surviving the pain, is more pain.
— Jake Seliger, More isn’t always better: death and over-treatment as a downside of agenticness
Non-action is already something. There are people who don’t seem to do very much, but their presence is crucial for the well-being of the world. You may know people like this, who are steady, not always busy doing things, not making a lot of money, or being engaged in a lot of projects, but who are very important to you; the quality of their presence makes them truly available. They are contributing non-action, the high quality of their presence. To be in the here and the now—solid and fully alive—is a very positive contribution to our collective situation.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Sit, 2014 (via)
Evolution, it seems, doesn’t come up with answers so much as generate flexible problem-solving agents that can rise to new challenges and figure things out on their own.
— Michael Levin and Rafael Yuste, How evolution ‘hacked’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up (via)
Looks like our writing on the wall
Is lorem ipsum after all
— Dessa, 2013
The man of talent is like a marksman who hits a mark others cannot hit; the man of genius is like a marksman who hits a mark they cannot even see.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1886 (via)
[mastery] to the point where working forwards from the possibilities of a set of parts, and backwards from the constraints of a vision, are part of a near-unconscious fluency in the medium.
— Venkatesh Rao, Imagination vs Creativity
Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little ” night signs ” display the instantaneous values so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre ; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.
Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station.
Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar.
In a neighbouring building there is a research department, where they invent improvements.
— Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather prediction by numerical process, 1922 (via)
The morality of this means that we have the possibility of progress. It’s not one life and you’re done, it’s like being a goldsmith. As a goldsmith crafts a beautiful statue, and if he doesn’t like it, can melt it back down again, and try to make something more perfect, so that’s what our lives are. They’re attempts, and they can get better.
[on karma] It’s to do with your actions. It’s a physics of ethics.
— Matt Webb, Karma as ancient progress studies
Our software interfaces are fiercely rigid; they can’t be meaningfully nudged — in big ways or small — to more closely reflect our mental models or meet our individual needs. We can’t modify the interfaces which render our things, and we can’t bring things together to reflect our thinking. Each thing lives in its pre-determined box, can’t be taken elsewhere, and can only be seen in a handful of pre-determined ways.
— Alexander Obenauer , Noticing the problem with our operating systems
The concepts in modern operating systems — apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and so on — have so permeated our understanding of personal computing that it’s hard to imagine anything else, let alone believe there could be anything better.
It’s easy to assume that this is, somehow, simply, how computers work.
But this can’t be further from the truth.
Consider our concepts of time: the day and year are based on the earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun, yet the seven-day “week” and the twelve months are constructs of human imagination, which hopefully serve us well.
Similarly, in computing, binary is how our chips process logic. But the apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and such — these are all constructs of human imagination. This is true of nearly all the systems, metaphors, and interface patterns we’ve built on top of our binary-crunching chips.
Common as some of these concepts are, they are all manufactured attempts at making personal computing easier for people to contribute to and use.
But today, our abstractions are holding us back.
— Alexander Obenauer, The Interfaces With Which We Think
Advice is never universal. Advice can be harmful when it’s received by the wrong person or at the wrong time—or interpreted or remembered incorrectly.
— Jane Friedman, Being a Very Online Advice-Giver Has Made My Writing Worse
Hell! there ain’t no rules around here! We are tryin’ to accomplish somep’n!
— Thomas Edison, Edison in His Laboratory (via)
Writing online—where the barrier to people responding to you is very low—tends to make people slightly worse writers because you always have the voice of the most pedantic reader in your head, so you go with the unassailable generic over the specific, or you dilute the impact of a strong sentence by adding a bunch of disclaimers to head off commenters. Presumably the bigger your audience, the stronger the effect.
— McKinley Valentine, Heart-smitten with that desire of wandering and looking on new things (via)
If I take too much, dragging it from place to place will be tiresome; on the other hand, if I take too little, I will forever be having to break my journey to pick up things along the way—and that will be even more tiresome.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael , 1997
The people of your culture are captives of a story….All of you know it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. You hear it incessantly. Every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly….Once you know this story, you’ll hear it everywhere, and you’ll be astonished that the people around you don’t hear it as well but merely take it in….Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way….Two different stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One has been enacted from the very beginning of human life millions of years ago and is still being enacted here today, as successfully as ever by peoples that you (in your superior wisdom) deem to be primitive. The other story began to be enacted here some ten thousand years ago by the founders of your culture and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.
— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017
Francis, the best editor I was ever to know, was a great and severe teacher, and nothing passed his desk (to reach the desk of the editor in chief) that didn’t make sense. Making sense may sound like a rather low standard, but it was a very high one when applied by Francis. To give him an article in which one sentence fell short was to be loudly summoned to his desk in the middle of the room and given a sarcastic scolding that would leave any department head gnashing his teeth (not because Francis was wrong but because he was so damned right).
I learned perforce to demand sense of every word in every article handed me by one of the writers in my department or by one of the outside scholars who contributed articles. (Our article on relativity was written by Albert Einstein.) And without noticing it, I began to demand sense of everything I knew, which included the received wisdom of our culture.
— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017
I don’t write, I rewrite.
— Truman Capote
When putting something into words you don’t have to settle for the first thing you try, there are always going to be dozens of others to try.
— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
— Mona Simpson (sister of Steve Jobs) (via)
A complex world has made us over-emphasize How-based thinking and education. Once the tools are understood, grasping why to do certain things becomes more valuable than how to do them. How is recipes, but learning a craft is more than following instructions.
— Frank Chimero, Big Ideas
To delight means to present something with a different point of view, while retaining clarity. It makes others see the world in new and different ways.
— Frank Chimero, Big Ideas
To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
— Eva Zeisel (via)
When you go into the desert, you meet your demons face to face. After coming out of the desert, all those demons become angels.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
The dignity of rebellion.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
Trust me: design the footer first, then simplify it to make the header navigation. A good footer is an idealized header, what the header wishes it could be.
— Frank Chimero, Redesign: The Raccoon King of Garbage Mountain
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead (via)
Your life is the manifestation of your dream. It is an art.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with god, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements, you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say this is what I am, this is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
True justice is paying only once for each mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake. How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is thousands of times. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone we are not. We become a copy.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997
Well planted is not uprooted. Well kept is not lost.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
If my mind is modest, I walk the great way. Arrogance is all I fear. The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and today it is the state that answers this demand. Yet the more the state protects his right to consume and “be himself” without restraint, the less independently capable and differentiated he becomes, even as his private affairs increasingly become the business of the expanding state.
Subject to the impersonal regulations of mechanistic processes and procedures rather than his own judgement or that of the people in close communion with him, the individual is molded into a more and more uniform cog to fit into the machine: a mere passive “consumer” and easily manipulated and programmed puppet – an automaton – rather than a true individual actor. In the effort to maximize his autonomy, his real autonomy has been lost.
— N. S. Lyons, Autonomy and the Automaton (via)
Wise souls are children.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Obedience to law is the dry husk of loyalty and good faith. Opinion is the barren flower of the way, the beginning of ignorance.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Overcoming others takes strength, overlooking yourself takes greatness. Contentment is wealth. Boldly pushing forward takes resolution, staying put keeps you in position. To live til you die, is to live long enough.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
If you know when to stop, you’re in no danger.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
To give no trust is to get no trust.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
To do good: work well, and lie low.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
When you do not doing, nothing is out of order.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The un-wanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever wanting soul sees only what it wants.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a housepet by comparison.
— Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (via)
There is no consensus on the origin of the movement’s name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on “dada”, a French term for a hobby horse.[14] Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement’s internationalism.
— Wikipedia, Dada
Simple is better than complex, but complex is better than complicated.
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
— Leonardo Da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 1883
The fact that writing can be hard is one of the things that makes it meaningful.
— John Warner, Ideas Aren’t Worth Anything
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than other people.
— Thomas Mann, Tristan, Page 70, 1903 (via)
The price of life is death.
— Bentley Beetham, 1924 (via)
To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977 (via)
So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow — the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977 (via)
[the mountain] does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977 (via)
[the mountain] intensifies life to the point of glory.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977 (via)
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below but what is below does not know what is above.
— René Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1952 (via)
I felt in perfect control and knew the thrill of seeing the ropes from my waist curl down through empty space. I was as light as the air around me, as if I were dancing on tip-toes, relaxed, measuring every movement and seeking a complete economy of effort. Speak with your eyes, speak with your hands, let it all flow from your heart. True communication, true communion, is silent.
— Pete Boardman, The Shining Mountain: Two Men on Changabang’s West Wall, 1976 (via)
[the] kinesthetic pleasures of one’s body moving at the limit of its ability.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, 2000 (via)
Control of fear is the spice.
— John Harlin (via)
concrete building… is the most repellant object imaginable… it has no beauty of surface… no translucence… and it is an exceptionally ugly color.
— an unknown architect, 1920 (via)
We must love each other, or die.
— Auden, September 1, 1939, 1940 (via)
The medium is the message.
— Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964 (via)
The enlightenments metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life, it leads almost inevitably to an intolerable one
— Hubert L. Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining
The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990
Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.
As an instance of [friction], take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground.
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832 (via)
Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999 (via)
You have to hold the thing in your hands, collaborate with teammates, and talk to users to find the right design.
— Pete Millspaugh, Things I found interesting in Bonnie Nardi’s “A Small Matter of Programming”
absence of incidents do not indicate an absence of risk.
— Lorin Hochstein, Green is the color of complacency
I think I prefer strangers to the people I know.
— straybob, 400 Miles of Jordan Ep 3
you can maybe describe what those steps mean […], but even if you can’t, you are still changed by their meaning! You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.
— Craig Mod, Continuous Uninterrupted Solo Walks
I didn’t explore the idea strongly enough, or readers don’t want to take seriously the much more (quietly) radical ideas in McPherson’s book: that limits on our existential choices are part of how we make our peace with life, that Tyler Harper’s “therapeutic libertarianism” — or what Christopher Lasch, by way of Adorno, called the “cult of authenticity” — is the default mode of so much contemporary socio-political discussion, and an active agent that deforms one’s character. Taking limits seriously is an enormous challenge, one that I assumed would come across in the piece. But then, it’s easier to domesticate constraints to the ones we pick and choose, cafeteria-style, for some modest stylistic innovation.
— Sara Hendren, not that kind of constraint, 2024
No, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact, with petrol. It’s flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-colored plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing. Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.
— Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice, 1978
Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Page 128, 1952
As young children, we listen to adults talking before we understand what they’re saying. And that’s, after all, where we start — we start in a position of not getting it. It’s true of listening to music, too. The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental — that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you, but you don’t know what it is. You’ll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you’ve been educated in a certain way, but I think you’ll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
— Paul Holdengräber, Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7 (via)
Cold writing is a feeble medium for heart hot ideas.
— John Muir
The Internet is going through a major upheaval. Mega-corporations are trying to box consumers into proprietary platforms. A frothy VC market chasing after the Next Big Thing is beginning to see major warning signs. Top operating systems vendors have gotten the smackdown for their monopolistic business practices, being forced to offer real choice for access to third-party browsers and other key software. A growing backlash against technology’s dominance threatens to stall the heady growth of the industry. The nerd set is fighting back against capitalist entrenchment, building new open infrastructure that respects user privacy and eliminates gatekeepers. A revolution is underway to make it even easier to publish on the web, push content and software features across networks, and find meaningful successful as an indie producer.
Wait, which decade am I describing here? The late 90s? Or now??
— Jared White, Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again, 2024
Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which means you’re traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped, which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point. How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don’t consciously rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting; but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting.
— Paul Graham, The Best Essay
If you come across a question that’s sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn’t seem very momentous. […] you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that’s a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.
— Paul Graham, The Best Essay
In my social circles, many people have read James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is subtitled How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human World Have Failed. A key concept from the book is “legibility”, what a state can see, and how this distorts what states do. One could easily write a highly analogous book, Seeing like a Tech Company about what’s illegible to companies that scale up, at least as companies are run today. A simple example of this is that, in many video games, including ones made by game studios that are part of a $3T company, it’s easy to get someone suspended or banned by having a bunch of people report the account for bad behavior. What’s legible to the game company is the rate of reports and what’s not legible is the player’s actual behavior (it could be legible, but the company chooses not to have enough people or skilled enough people examine actual behavior); and many people have reported similar bannings with social media companies. When it comes to things like anti-fraud systems, what’s legible to the company tends to be fairly illegible to humans, even humans working on the anti-fraud systems themselves.
— Dan Luu, Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm.
— Publilius Syrus (via)
Keeping a “writer’s notebook” in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can’t slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas.
— Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic: Pluralistic is four; The Bezzle excerpt (Part III), 2024
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
— John Gall, Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail
February 25. Continuing on positive emotions, this subreddit post disagrees with my statement that nobody would consciously avoid feeling good. Clearly this subject is less straightforward than I thought, because it’s hard to separate “feeling good” from the stuff that you feel good about, from social displays of feeling good, and from the whole internal ecology of how you feel.
When I think about my personal perspective, it’s mainly about motivation: feeling good about doing things. That’s why, despite high grades and test scores, I didn’t get into an elite college, and never passed an interview for a salaried job, because everyone could tell I wasn’t really into it. I failed at homesteading because tasks that I valued in an abstract way turned out to feel like chores. I’m constantly trying to 1) find stuff that I feel like doing, or 2) hack my own perspective so that I feel like doing stuff, or if both of those fail, 3) force myself to do stuff, which is exhausting. So that’s the context from which I don’t understand why someone would avoid feeling good if they have the option.
And Noah comments:
Happiness is not a meaningful state without something to compare it to. If there was no suffering, we would have no word to describe happiness, it would simply be the natural state of things. It would be invisible to us I imagine, like the background space of our awareness.
That sounds wonderful! And it reminds me of the Christian idea, that the fall of man happened through knowledge of good and evil. This never occurred to me, but maybe the principle that you can’t have something without also having its opposite, is only true on a cognitive level.
— Ran Prieur, Feeling Good
Trying too hard to say something just right can result in it not being said at all.
— Mike Grindle, Some Thoughts in Lieu of an Abandoned Post
She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading… She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.
— Roger Ebert, Life Itself, 2011
Because it’s like, when you start rubbing against each other, in that sense, a feeling comes up like “I don’t like this. I’d rather go and hide away.” Staying with that is a powerful way of getting to know yourself and others, deepening conversations and relationships.
I think it’s so important to embrace conversations, particularly ones with people who make salient points with whom you don’t agree. That’s when you really learn stuff. “You think this and I think something different. Change my mind. Let me come into your perspective.” You don’t need to feel threatened by that. Because it’s not like you as a human being are weakening as your opinion is changing.
— Jacob Collier, On managing the complexity of virtual collaborations
I think the job of someone who’s in charge of the beginnings of the process, is to encourage an environment where it’s cool if something doesn’t work. Because a lot of that stuff is the friction that creates the spark that makes the idea happen. The myth that the frictionless environment is the most effective is just not true. It’s not true in your life, it’s not true in your workflow, and it’s not true in your music.
— Jacob Collier, On managing the complexity of virtual collaborations
it’s been important to form a routine because it lets me curate my habits. Since I was young, I would get incredibly interested in something and build a routine around it. Then once that routine breaks, it’s like I’ve forgotten it ever existed. Even if that routine went on for months, I struggle to get back to it. When a good one sticks, I want to protect that. There’s an inner conflict of breaking my routines. The safety of the known. I wonder if fear of the past failed routines makes me overvalue routines that are currently sticking. But then there’s a dullness of the known.
— Jamie Crisman, Getting Out, Getting Lost
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
A powerful way to improve the Web platform is to provide new primitives. A primitive is a capability that, on its own, likely doesn’t do much that interesting. But a good primitive will be designed to interact usefully with existing (and future) parts of the stack, and this will enable it to enrich the platform across the board.
— Robin Berjon, Web Tiles
the idea that lack of effort to maintain the talismans and protocols of representation would result in a void. Put more simply: You’re the keeper of yourself and of what matters. There is no consistency that will protect you.
— Jason Scott, Archiving in the Time of Streaming
I thought I was going to die.
But strangely enough, that became for me, a wonderful opportunity.
— Jacques-Yves Cousteau
When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.
— Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Every explorer I have met has been driven—not coincidentally but quintessentially—by curiosity, by a single-minded, insatiable, and even jubilant need to know.
— Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World
Charismatic figures are obeyed because of the extraordinary abilities of an individual personality, by virtue of which they are set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with superhuman, supernatural, or exceptional powers or qualities that are not accessible to the ordinary person.
— Vaber
You’re currently running an experimental version of earth.
— Google, Google Earth
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jersusalem, 1920
Shellen in particular still rues losing the fight over the name. Even now, he bristles thinking about the fight and the fact that Google Reader is known as “an RSS reader” and not the ultra-versatile information machine it could have become. Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”
— David Pierce, Who killed Google Reader?, 2023
Having and not having arise together.
— Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching, 4th Century BCE
Do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892
In Japanese, the word for mountain pass is tōge. It’s written: 峠. It’s a great character, comprised of three other characters (or “radicals”). On the left is the character for mountain: 山. On the top right is the character for up: 上. And on the bottom right is the character for down: 下. So the character for pass — tōge — is mountain-up-down: 峠.
— Craig Mod & Dan Rubin, Koya Bound: Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo, 2016
You must strive to find your own voice, boys, and the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.
— N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society
A computer shall not harm your work or, through inactivity, allow your work to come to harm.
— Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, 2000
Identity is not some magic homunculus that lives somewhere to the left of your pituitary gland, but the role you play in the drama your brain naturally constructs to map what’s happening.
Halving requirements is the same as doubling capacity.
— Nigel Calder (via)
One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.
— Giacomo Casanove
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
— Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith, Page 50, 1940
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.
— Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time, 1969
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
— Werner Herzog
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.
— Bessie A. Stanley, What Constitutes Success?, 1905
Understanding is love’s other name.
— Nhat Hanh, How to Love, 2015
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting.
— Richard Feynman, Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1981
Know the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
— Richard Feynman, Feynman: The pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1981
Jokes are the unit tests of our understanding.
— smitty1e, Jokes are the unit tests of our understanding
The map appears to us more real than the land.
— D.H. Lawrence
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
— Ansel Adams
He was thrifty, of Scotch-Irish descent, and at two minutes past three had never had an adventure in his life.
At three minutes past three he began his career as one of the celebrities of the world.
— Arthur C. Train & Robert Williams Wood, The Man Who Rocked the Earth, 1915
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series, 1841
I’m lost. I’m going to find myself. If I return before I get back, please ask me to wait.
— unknown
The world needs all kinds of minds.
— Temple Grandin
People think about you much less than you either hope or fear.
— Merlin Mann, Merlin’s Wisdom Project
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Mother Night, 1962
The Extroverts are not the problem. And the problem with the Introverts is that we think the Extroverts are the problem. And the problem with Extroverts is that they don’t think about Introverts at all.
— Kyle Aster, Toward a More Resilient Future
- Every shrub, every tree
- if one has not forgotten
- where they were planted
- has beneath the fallen snow
- some vestige of its form.
See also: The Snowbanks of Time
— Shōtetsu, Snow in a Garden
When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.
You only get one chance to make a first impression; why have it be “junk”? Once that’s associated with your name or project, it’s tough to scrape off. Even people who didn’t see it themselves may have heard about it second-hand. And once they hear about it, they’re not likely to see for themselves. Life’s too short to waste it on junk.
— Aaron Swartz, Release Late, Release Rarely
The Programmers’ Credo: We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
— unknown
The need of people to express power by writing about how much they could destroy has continued to present day. However, with more information than ever available to the serious researcher, files seem more and more professional than ever before. But make no mistake; the same caveats and warnings of previous generations are the same: don’t believe everything you read, and don’t try to blow things up based on what you read.
— Jason Scott, destruction
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
It is strange how people seem to belong to places - especially to places where they were not born…
— Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939
Life… we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.
— Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson: It is the Imagination that Counts
You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
— Ansel Adams
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
— Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (via)
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
— Rumi
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
— George Box (Statistician), Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building, Page 201–236, 1978
Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning.
— D. W. Brogan, The American Character, 1944
I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety.
— Joseph Chamberlain, 1898
I don’t ask that the story address my experience. I ask that my experience make it possible for me to understand the story.
— Susan Sontag, To Tell A Story, 1983
Your system should be as simple as possible, but not simpler than that.
— David Allen, Getting Things Done, 2001
Never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.
— Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science, Caltech commencement address, 1974
I wish life was not so short; languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings, 1987
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
— unknown, probably not Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We live in fragments. You are one thing at the office, another at home; you talk about democracy and in your heart you are autocratic; you talk about loving your neighbours, yet kill them with competition.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, 1969
Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, 2013
In fact, not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. And saying that, I am prompted to add what follows out of it: that since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule.
— Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker, 1975
If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, 1999
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
— god, apparently, Mattew 7:13–14
When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
— Genesis 4:12, 1400-400 BCE
All I know is that I know nothing
and I’m not even sure about that.
Unfortunately, most warning systems do not warn us that they can no longer warn us.
— Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents, 1984
Most important things in life are a hassle. If life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.
— Hayao Miyazaki, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, 2019
You don’t choose the things you believe in, they choose you.
— Lamar Burgess, Minority Report, 2002
I want to share with you my simple two-step secret to improving the performance of any website.
- Make sure that the most important elements of the page download and render first.
- Stop there.
You don’t need all that other crap. Have courage in your minimalism.
— Maciej Cegłowski, The Website Obesity Crisis, 2015
Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.
You cannot get a simple system by adding simplicity to a complex system.
— Richard O’Keefe, 2012
Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
— Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, 1945 (via)
The opposite of fragile is something that actually gains from disorder.
— Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, 2012
I’ve never been a cropper. Having grown up photographing with film and spending years developing black and white photos in my university apartment in Philadelphia, cropping has always felt like a hack, a lie. Of course, all photos are lies, all photos are crops. The very definition of a photograph is to add edges to the world, slice off some snippet, place it in a tiny box. Or, as the late Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain put it, “The game [of photography] is to organize the rectangle.”
I realize now that a “perfect” rectangle — pulled back so you see the edges of the negative in the exposed print (to “prove” you haven’t cropped) — is a parlor trick more than anything.
— Craig Mod, The Leica Q: A six month field test, 2016
The story isn’t the art, nor its players, nor the paint, the technique, or the interpretation. The feelings are the art. The rest is just the way in.
— Adriana Trigiani, All the Stars in the Heavens, Page 4, 2014
It takes so long for us to do so little.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Possibilities, Page 3, 2014
conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
— Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 1975
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
— unknown
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.
— David McCullough
A place for everything, everything in its place.
The relentless accretion of code over months, years, even decades quickly turns every successful new project into a legacy one.
— Grady Booch, Architectural Mining: The Other Side of the MDD, 2009
The moment that code springs into being and is made manifest in a system, it becomes legacy.
— Grady Booch, Architectural Mining: The Other Side of the MDD, 2009
The essence of systems is relationships, interfaces, form, fit, and function. The essence of architecture is structuring, simplification, compromise, and balance.
— Eberhard Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting (Second Edition), 2000
Good sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.
— Mae West
The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.
No one can grow if he does not accept his smallness.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy
The code is the truth, but it is not the whole truth.
Meaningful architecture is a living, vibrant process of deliberation, design, & decision, not just documentation.
It requires energy to make a system simple, and to intentionally apply that energy requires that one reason about, understand, and visualize the system as built.
Although software has no mass, it does have weight, weight that can ossify any system by creating inertia to change and introducing crushing complexity.
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
— Phil Karlton, The Curmudgeon’s Homepage
