I have an old page: legendary quotes.
As I gather new ones, I will add new ideas here and prune them over time:
“Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix.
The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and “traditional” companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are able to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good.” – hef19898 – On HN
“When making life decisions, going in the direction of more money can be wise. However, we must keep in mind that when we choose money, we don’t choose much. We just decide to decide later.”
“Upper limit of complexity is infinity? An engineer can hold a whole complicated system in his head and work on it. When he leaves and needs to pass it on, he won’t be able to communicate it all. Complexity we can sustain over time is less than today.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2841&v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
Norris Numbers – average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean effort.
… the very language that one could use to make a comparison is taken away, and the possibility of benchmarking on a different infrastructure is an endeavor akin to rewriting everything from scratch.
https://cerebralab.com/Is_a_billion-dollar_worth_of_server_lying_on_the_ground
““The choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of M.I.T.’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.””
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” -Banksy
Articles:
The most plausible explanation I’ve seen for people moving off programming onto different jobs:
https://whoisnnamdi.com/never-enough-developers/
A case where tight feedback loops don’t help.
https://brianlui.dog/2020/05/10/beware-of-tight-feedback-loops/
THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
psychohistory is real:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237458&type=printable
Ryan Hamilton 