Found Quotes
Things that smarter folks than I have said.
Your performance as a manager of cloud seeding efforts should not be measured in fish.
Leadership should instead simply put out the mandate of “Go out and make it rain”.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, you only have to know one thing: you can learn anything.
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
In our search for fulfillment, we keep paying first prices, creating a correspondingly enormous debt of unpaid second prices. Yet the rewards of any purchase – the reason we buy it at all — stay locked up until both prices are paid.
‘Live’ is the shortcut to FOMO.
The reward for good work is more work.
When I look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious is not what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that.
I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, and then there is all that you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next thing better.
Our readers are perhaps our greatest untapped resource. Deepening our connection with them both online and offline is critical in a world where content so often reaches its broadest audience on the backs of other readers.
Life in the college dorm and on the grassy quad are rarities discussed as norms.
Quoted passage omitted.
Those of us in the traditional academy could have a hand in shaping that future, but doing so will require us to relax our obsessive focus on elite students, institutions, and faculty. It will require us to stop regarding ourselves as irreplaceable occupiers of sacred roles, and start regarding ourselves as people who do several jobs society needs done, only one of which is creating new knowledge.
What if we designed our exhibitions to hold things back from some visitors? And to purposefully make some elements of an exhibition ‘in-accessible’ to all?
What if we made ‘wonderment’ our Key Performance Indicator?
So far there's been no technology that we've invented that we have not been able to invent a greener version of. So I don't think that right now the technology that we have is necessarily the most compatible with life but because we can always make the Technium more compatible it suggests that the Technium is not inherently incompatible with life, that that compatibility is there, resident; we have not yet expressed it entirely.
Every disruption begins with an n of 1.
Instead, it must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.
If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.
In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
The value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Freed of the twin dangers of navel-gazing and random walks, an institution can concentrate its efforts on some persistent, medium-sized, and tractable problem, working at a scale and longevity unavailable to its individual participants.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
If you bite on everything they throw at you, they will grind you down. You have to ignore a certain amount of stuff. The thing I keep saying to them lately is: “I have to love you, and I have the right to ignore you.” When my kids ask what I want for my birthday or Christmas or whatever, I use the same answer my father did: “Peace and quiet.” That was never a satisfactory answer to me as a kid — I wanted an answer like “A pipe.” But now I see the wisdom of it: All I want is you at your best — you making this an easier home to live in, you thinking of others.
The only memento ‘kids these days’ want is a selfie. It’s part of the new currency, which seems to be ‘how many followers you have on Instagram.’
Small objects travel further, faster.
Somewhere on Earth today are young geniuses waiting for a technology that will perfectly match their gifts. If we are lucky, they'll live long enough for our knowledge and technology to make the opportunity they need.
You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important
You can say to yourself: this I saw, this I experienced, this I know to be the truth.
We will use the world as our playground and I have the technology to back it up. If I don't, I will make it.
THINGS CAN BE BETTER, SO THERE IS WORK TO DO. THE WORLD IS NOT YET DONE.
LUCKY US.
Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”