Quotes

Links: People

Funny

• YouTube comment

  • My wife asked me why I always carry a gun in the house. I said "transformers!". My wife laughed, I laughed, the toaster laughed. I shot the toaster.

  • rowtheboat.png

General

• Yoda

  • "Do or do not. There is no try." ...
  • "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

• Gary Player

  • The harder I work, the luckier I get.

• Lao Tzu 2600 years ago

  • 'Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny'.

• Carl Sagan

  • "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

• Voltaire

  • “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

• Sam Harris - memes

  • Some ideas really are worse than others, and the idea that all religions, cultures, and belief systems are equal is one of the worst of them all.

• The Buddha

  • 'All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?'

• Robert A. Heinlein

  • "Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things"

• Hines Ward

  • Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

• Linus Trovalds said:

  • "this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US," while "I'm just not a huge believer in politeness and sensitivity being preferable over bluntly letting people know your feelings."
  • its only when you see a mosquito landing on your testicles that you're realise that there is always a way to solve problems without using violence
  • If you have no dreams and determination to make them work, someone will employ you to make theirs come true...

• Warren Buffett writes:

  • “I’ve observed that many acquisition-hungry managers were apparently mesmerised by their childhood reading of the story about the frog-kissing princess. Remembering her success, they pay dearly for the right to kiss corporate toads, expecting wondrous transfigurations.”

    Buffett continues: “Initially, disappointing results only deepen their desire to round up new toads. Ultimately, even the most optimistic manager must face reality. Standing knee-deep in unresponsive toads, he then announces an enormous “restructuring” charge. The CEO receives the education, but the stockholders pay the tuition.” I’ll try to remember this story next time a takeover-hungry CEO crosses my path.

• William Gibson

  • "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed."

Space

• "Me And Royal Enfield" - @YouTube - 2021

  • Every philanthropic cause in history is rendered useless by one meteor
• Christian Ready - @launchpadastro - 2019
  • Exploration is the gateway to human imortality.

Programming

• Jake Archibald - Javascript

  • As a human being, you're multithreaded. You can type with multiple fingers, you can drive and hold a conversation at the same time. The only blocking function we have to deal with is sneezing, where all current activity must be suspended for the duration of the sneeze. That's pretty annoying, especially when you're driving and trying to hold a conversation. You don't want to write code that's sneezy.

• Jeff Bezos on Amazon and web services

Politics

• Dune / Carl Jung

  • Fanaticism is always a function of repressed doubt.

• Edward Snowden

  • 'When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.'

• Tacitus

  • 'The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws'

• Joe Scott

  • 'Privatize the profit and socialize the losses' is a huge problem in America.

Life

• "Rules for happiness:

something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for. - Immanuel Kant"

• "It's not happiness or joy that makes us grateful. It's gratitude that fills us with happiness and joy."
• “Happiness is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy. No person will make you happy unless you decide to be happy. Your happiness will not come to you. It can only come from you.” -Ralph Marston
• • If you are depressed you are living in the past.
  • If you are anxious you are living in the future.
  • If you are at peace you are living in the present."
• “It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.” – Hugh Laurie

...

• “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

Life Strategy

• From Your Quora Digest: What are some startup strategies that people should implement into their daily lives?

Anna Akbari
Anna Akbari, Sociologist/entrepreneur/prof; author of Startup Your Life
Written Jan 13 · Featured in The Huffington Post
There are several big ones that I talk about throughout my book, but here are 3 to get you started:

Become an MVP: Startups build an MVP or Minimum Viable Product that delivers only the essential features. They keep it simple and lean. And you can become your own personal MVP by stripping away the unnecessary layers that bog you down - all the “shoulds” and “nice to haves” that cloud your judgement, and reconnect with the things that really matter. What’s your personal mantra? What is at the core of everything you do? Let it guide you and give yourself permission to let go of the stuff that isn’t in line with it. (You’re never too old to become an MVP)

Make space for failure: The prevailing Silicon Valley sentiment is that if you aren’t failing frequently, you probably aren’t risking enough. And I’m reminded of Henry Ford’s conception of failure: “failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” If we look at our greatest minds and inventors, from Henry Ford to Thomas Edison, they failed more often than they succeeded. But they persevered and continued to experiment and learn from their shortcomings. It’s our failures, not our triumphs, that shape us the most and make us better, stronger, more compelling. Giving yourself permission to fall down can be a win. It cultivates patience, teaches hard lessons, and -- if you commit to analyzing what went wrong -- makes you exponentially stronger the next time around.

But we’ve largely lost patience with cultivating success. We want instant gratification, but the arc of our lives is long -- and we need to calibrate our definition of success accordingly. Failure and success are not opposites; they are complements on the same spectrum. So redefine failure -- what does it mean to fail? Failure is an opportunity to grow from adversity -- but ONLY through the sense-making process; we must actively, deliberately reflect on failure (because we don’t grow merely from the failure itself, but from what we make of it).

Make space for failure by surfing fear. Constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone. Putting yourself out there is rewarding, even without a definite exterior metric of success

Live a life in transition. Change is not coming: it’s already here. And the sooner we accept that the stronger we’ll be. Startups change course -- or pivot -- all the time when things don’t go as planned. It’s not perceived as bad or embarrassing, just necessary for survival. But we often don’t give ourselves the same freedom to explore and hit refresh. Sometimes you’re just a pivot away from a major breakthrough— professionally or personally. Living a life in transition and hitting refresh allows you to pull from your accumulated knowledge and to move toward something better.

You can be the boss of change if you adapt an “always be changing” mindset to keep your mind ripe and ready for change, making you less likely to become derailed when things ultimately don’t go as planned.

Biology / Natural selection

• Krister Sundelin , Copywriter, game designer, atheist, Swedish, geek

  • Answered Sep 12 2017 on Quora· Upvoted by Maurits Dijkstra, Doctorandus Biology, University of Groningen (1984)
    Following the concept of natural selection, why shall we take care of the weakest members of society knowing that they constitute a hindrance to development?
    
    It’s not “survival of the strongest”, but “survival of the fittest”. And by “fittest”, we mean as in well-fit clothes, not fit body.
    
    So what does “fittest” mean to us humans? Obviously, it doesn’t mean “strongest”, as we can’t really compete on our own against even a herbivore wildebeest – it will just trample the ordinary human. And definitely not a lion. We don’t have the speed, the strength or the fangs and claws to fight them.
    
    If we are to stand a chance against either, we need to make our fangs and claws. So we make spears, daggers, javelins and arrows from flint, wood and sinew. This is not something done easily: we need to be taught how to do it by our elders. To that extent, we have a big brain, an opposable thumb and a vocal box. We also need a free hand to use them, so we have an upright stance, leaving our forelimbs free to shoot arrows and throw or thrust spears.
    
    We also hunt in groups, which means that we have to coordinate and plan ahead, using our big brains and vocal boxes even more.
    
    One drawback of that big brain, and the upright stance, is that the big brain has to be pushed through the pelvis of the female. So we have evolved a compromise: the youngling does not have a fully developed brain at birth to make it a bit smaller. It will grow until it can handle the balance and muscles of an upright stance, and the fine control of the voice box, and finally the use of the opposable thumb.
    
    The drawback is that the youngling is completely defenseless for the first years, and even then, it need to be taught the tools of the trade, not only how to use them but how to make them. That takes a good 10–12 years, in which the youngling is the weakest and least usable member of society.
    
    And that’s why we have a society: to allow those weakest to grow up and learn.
    
    So to humans, “fittest” means “socially adaptable, caring, and defending of the weaker member of the flock”. It really doesn’t matter if the weaker is weak from illness, youth, being old, or being handicapped: it is the same mechanism of caring at play. To take away that caring of the weakest means taking away the greatest advantage the human species have.
    
    And that would lead to our extinction.

• famous aviation quote goes:

  There's nothing more useless than runway behind you and altitude above you!

Toasts

• Some ships are wooden ships, but those ship's may sink, the best ships are friendships and to those ships we drink. - Tiktok

Code

Clean code

• Michael Feathers

  • "Clean code": Looks like it was written by somebody that cares

Code Comment

//
//                       _oo0oo_
//                      o8888888o
//                      88" . "88
//                      (| -_- |)
//                      0\  =  /0
//                    ___/`---'\___
//                  .' \\|     |// '.
//                 / \\|||  :  |||// \
//                / _||||| -:- |||||- \
//               |   | \\\  -  /// |   |
//               | \_|  ''\---/''  |_/ |
//               \  .-\__  '-'  ___/-. /
//             ___'. .'  /--.--\  `. .'___
//          ."" '<  `.___\_<|>_/___.' >' "".
//         | | :  `- \`.;`\ _ /`;.`/ - ` : | |
//         \  \ `_.   \_ __\ /__ _/   .-` /  /
//     =====`-.____`.___ \_____/___.-`___.-'=====
//                       `=---='
//
//
//     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
//
//               佛祖保佑         永无BUG
//              Buddha bless     never BUG
//

Work

• Cant be mistaken

  • What you are witnessing is what happens when someone who can't possibly be mistaken encounters something that doesn't support their personal world view. Facts become opinions, objective truth become subjective interpretation, and neutral retelling of events becomes biased slander intended to further some agenda. It's not unusual. We all do it, in some way or another.

...