Quotations

Quotes Archive

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style.

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing -- Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences. — Peter Deutsch

• The network is reliable
• Latency is zero
• Bandwidth is infinite
• The network is secure
• Topology doesn’t change
• There is one administrator
• Transport cost is zero
• The network is homogeneous

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Cached from Thread Reader:

• “Any man who bears the ability of a polymath shall not be interfered by specialty, he needs discipline to manage his behaviors and nurture his creativity.” ― Shawn Lukas
• Read staggering amounts, regularly returning to the classics both fiction and non-fiction.
• Multi subject. Read some chemistry along-side some marketing strategy. Some Cubism along- side some leadership coaching. Be amazed at how synergy comes into play, ideas spark and smartness is boosted.
• Write your own notes of your daily learnings aiming for super concise summaries. In that way you must squeeze and reveal the essence of a subject.
• Stay active during the day. That’s not just ‘go to the gym’. Stay active; you’ll notice the ideas owing so much more quickly and easily.
• Reduce TV watching drastically. Talk, write, cook, listen to music, walk, shoot ball, hold hands... instead.
• Find a mentor. He/she inspires. He/she can spend some time with you. He/she will challenge you.
• "A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• Develop other parts of the brain. Reading loads? Take up art. Writing loads? Take up the guitar.
• Write your personal manifesto. What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What are your resolutions without needing a New Year.
• Ask deeper questions and thus build your knowledge base upon which your best thinking-and intelligence-is dependent.
• Play with scale. Go smaller; consider the minutiae; go bigger: consider the landscape.
• Change your environment and notice how the dulled, ‘not smart’ feeling will leave you.
• Write a list of what you believe to be fundamentally true. And now ask what if everyone of those ‘facts’ were in fact malleable...?
• Sit quietly on a winter’s beach for 1h with a blanket wrapped around you and watch the waves crashing. And now through boredom, through ‘oh why?’, through meditative experiences will arise one or two epiphanies.
• Sort out your music by mood and use it to change your mood; make sure there is ‘I feel pretty damn smart’ category. Keep it to yourself; humility allows smartness.
• Start travelling again.
• Admit that you make mistakes, errors and crazy decisions. But you are learning. And fast.
• Go back to the primary source of your data more often. Read the wikipedia article. But then, note and certainly read some of the sources quoted.
• Every 45 minutes stop, stretch and ask: what is truly important at this point?
• Create a virtual advisory team: assemble your heroes from all elds, alive, dead, imaginary and when you want inspiration, ask: what would they do?
• Stop the relentless interrupts to your quality thinking.
• Go back-packing: climb high, breathe deep and take no photos. Just be there.
• Crack algebra once and for all.
• Read the history of the Periodic Table.
• Review your week and itemise what could be improved for next week. Focus on when you were smart.
• Focus on some of the other elements of intelligence apart from numeric/linguistic e.g. spatial (go shoot ball), musical (borrow a keyboard and learn some basics) and artistic (sketch with some charcoal).
• Learn Chess and/or Go for mental stretch. And hopscotch for mind-body co-ordination.
• Sleep until rested. Do not press snooze. Get up and stretch into activity. Fatigue causes stupidity.
• Work in intense pulses of application, say 90 minutes. Then take a proper break.
• Develop your thinking: treat it as a skill.
• Observe your thinking to re ne it and get more bang per buck.
• Use proactive thinking: what do I need to anticipate?
• Use critical thinking: what do I need to do better?
• Use lateral thinking: what do I need to do differently?
• Take any major conspiracy theory and explain why it is false/accurate in 100 words.
• Re-invent your working environment so that (1) distractions are minimised (2) the vital few are prioritised and visible (3) the trivial many look after themselves.
• Look after your brain. Keep it oxygenated by stretching and breathing deep into the lungs. Keep it hydrated with pure water. Avoid it getting over-heated with fresh air.
• Start a personal development fund: put 2% of your income towards courses, books, coaching. Spend the money. Some people spend more on their car than they do on their brain.
• Study the masters in as many fields as possible. You can’t have Einstein’s brain but you can be curious about his routine. Were their things he did which boosted his intelligence? Can you copy those?
• Produce stuff. Make stuff. Get it out there.
• A qualification means knowledge; it does not necessarily mean wisdom. Apply your learning every day.
• Much school, college and work is about social conditioning. Your true, deep and on-going smartness comes when you question the most fundamental of assumptions. For your health. For your business. For your life. For your very best work.
• Like an artist, build a portfolio of your best work. Regularly review and update it and allow yourself to be reminded of what you can do.
• Notice the foods that wipe you out, especially at work, especially in the afternoon. Eliminate them. 100% totally. Keep them for chill out days.
• Set up a learning team. Three people, 1h/ month, every month. Bring along ten minutes of materials to teach the other two. You get smarter by teaching and in return you learn two new subjects.
• Struggle with the problem. Don’t give up. Clarify the problem. Research the problem. Then allow the problem to incubate for a while before returning to it. When you get that breakthrough you will have become smarter.
• Write lists. Simply write down 10 ideas related to a topics. Like doing pushup, the more you practice ideation, the better you’ll get at it.
• Memorise more. Key numbers. Key passwords.
• Just know that you are smarter than you were and you can be smarter still.
• Practise representing data in 2 by 2 matrices and graphs to get to the point.
• Learn a meditative practice. A simple breathing meditation will do.
• Don’t believe the majority of what you have been told about your intelligence.
• Work at a different speed.
• Switch off your phone in queues and watch, observe and think.
• Get that MBA off your CV and into action.
• Use walking to overcome mental blocks.
• Flick through your notebooks seeking inspiration.
• Think less about qualifications and more about accelerating your real experience.
• Eradicate any limiting mind-sets such as age. Age is not a chronological fact; it is a psychological choice.
• Become so free, you can become super-smart.
• Regularly review to reinforce and capture detail which boosts smartness and decision- making. Review the conversation, the meeting and the day.
• Learn a new word every day and boost your vocabulary to allow ner points of expression
• Become your own guru, your own thought- leader. Push to the edges of your subject be it building walls, chess or ne art and express your own unique views.
• As you read non-fiction ask provocative questions. What do they mean? How can that be true? How quickly could I use that?
• Stare into the night sky and immerse yourself in the immensity of possibility.
• Write down five stupid things you do. Go cold turkey and stop doing them now.
• Sing in the shower and come out refreshed in every sense.
• Represent ideas visually on a whiteboard or with felt pen and paper to access a different part of the brain.
• Learn to juggle.
• Study your route on the map. Memorise the essential parts of the journey; use SatNav as a back up.
• Work on the problem/issue in a different location. Busy (but not packed) coffee shops invariably seem to increase smartness and creativity.
• "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Represent the idea/problem/concept in photographs on your phone.
• Work in the kitchen whilst cooking.
• Sharpen ten pencils. Now write on the issue until all need re-sharpening.
• Try different note-taking styles: cartoon/mind-map/bullet/narrative.
• "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” ― Stephen Hawking.
• Never accept ‘OK’ work from yourself.
• Write a book: the demands will stretch you to your smartness limits.
• Start a blog and post on a regular basis: force yourself to commit to something which will have the scrutiny of everyone including your greatest enemies.
• Discover where and when and with whom and at what time you do your greatest work.
• Learn the fine art of debating.
• Write a plan now to become more intelligent. Procrastination is so tomorrow.

I clipped this back on 2017/12/07. I didn't save the attribution.

How to change?

Often the status quo is not an acceptable course of action. The environment is changing around us and we need to make not just incremental improvements over what we are doing, but rather to rethink, reinvent, and reengineer what our strategies should be. The conventional frameworks start the process of reflection on our past, and that is often the wrong way to make you think of change. We want to create discontinuities not to reaffirm what we have done. By providing too much emphasis on competitor’s behavior, the conventional frameworks tend to anchor us in the existing industry practices.

We have found that the obvious answer to initiate a process of change is to start with the customer. What can we do to help the customer improve its business? How can we look into its full life cycle and detect novel ways of providing something that is truly unique? By focusing on the customer, we find it is much easier to detect opportunities to be truly unique and promote change.

How to pursue profitable growth?

Profits are revenues minus expenses. It does not require much creativity to reduce costs; there are always ways to curtail our expenditures. What is more demanding is to find ways of increasing our revenues profitably. Are there a lot of potential revenues and economic growth which are left under the table because of our inability to detect those opportunities? How could we assess the potential for growth?

One practice that is commonly used is sales forecast. I find that completely unacceptable – first, because sales should not be a subject of forecast. We forecast events over which we have no control, such as the weather. On the contrary, sales are something that we truly can and should influence. Second, sales forecast means an exercise of extrapolation of the past into the future. Again, this is unacceptable if we want to challenge our previous performance and if we want to engage in new forms of management that, hopefully, can make our past irrelevant – for the better.

Where is the answer? Again this resides on the customer. If we were to look at each customer individually, we will detect what potential exists by treating them differently, meaning offering more creative value propositions. This will allow us to examine “white spaces” – untapped opportunities – from the bottom up to come up with a much more effective growth strategy than the one resulting from competitive analysis.

How to spark creativity?

What we are saying, in various ways, is that we need to find mechanisms that allow us to be more creative, the so-called thinking out of the box. When I was using the conventional frameworks, I rarely found them to be the source of inspiration conducive to creating an innovative strategic environment. It might be my limitation while using those frameworks, but I doubt it. The emphasis on creating “competitive advantage” was focusing on the competitors. That is not the best way to do it. Instead, attempting to understand the granular needs of the customer and to seek the best ways to satisfy them provides the answer.

I remember going to my first tutorial in room 404. I was most upset
when I found it.

A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint. Bartender asks him "What's
wrong?" The byte says "Parity error." Bartender nods and says "Yeah, I
thought you looked a bit off."

It remains on the list of dreams deferred, aspirations unrealised, goals
unaccomplished, and ambitions foreclosed.

Arthur C. Clarke - "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

• "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.": Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition)

David John Wheeler FRS (9 February 1927 – 13 December 2004) …

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many indirections.

An elephant superficially resembles a mouse. There are enormous structural differences.

An elephant is a mil-spec mouse.

Unrelated: "If you think the idea of a portable shrine archaic then look no further than the photo album on your smartphone" -- Grayson Perry

There's a funny thing that happens when you know the correct answer. It throws you when you get a different answer that is not wrong. -- Dr Bowman (Freefall)

The only thing worse than a half-baked question is running full tilt into a wall with a half-baked solution to a half-baked question. - Peter

Seduction is part of my stock in trade in the diplomatic service. Public lies are shouted in councils and courts, but secret truths are whispered in beds. -- The Miocene Arrow

"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end. -- an email footer

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -- Albert Einstein

<< One of the really cool things about the camera is its cooling system. >> -- One would hope so. -- email foot from Dan Drasin

Holmes opined "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts".

"Undecidable by reduction to the halting problem in general, though apparently possible for straight-line code (no loops/recursion) through the brute-force method of generate all paths and send them to a theorem prover to prove equivalence." -- email foot from Scott McMurray

"The American dream is not owning a house; it.s every individual having the opportunity to achieve their full, God-given ability, and each generation having the responsibility to leave the country better off and better-positioned than the next so that our children and grandchildren can have a better way of life than we have" -- former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker

"It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs." -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

"If you don't do it right the first time, you'll just have to do it again." -- Jack T. Hankins,

"The more sophisticated the technology, the more vulnerable it is to primitive attack. People often overlook the obvious." -- Dr. Who,

"Everything should be as simple as possible, and no simpler" -- Einstein

"Common sense is not so common" -- Voltaire

"Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits." -- Hyman Minsky

"Never appeal to a man's 'better nature,' he may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage."

"Unfortunately, inefficiency scales really well." -- Kevin Lawton

"Davenport answered with a lift of his own glass, sniffed, then sipped. Tantalizingly delicious, deliciously tantalizing. He saw that it could be dangerous--a taste too easily acquired for something not so easily acquired." -- Foundations Friends.

"Let me state the obvious and posit the known--nothing is so overlooked as the obvious and nothing is so mysterious as the known" -- Foundations Friends

"It is what you do in life, not what torments you in your soul, that matters. And who you are in life, not who you fear you might become." Bast to Herzer in There Will Be Dragons