appreciated
- cat-v.org introduced me to the potential beauty of a well-written program. Much of my study is now dedicated to the pursuit of that beauty.
- In particular, I appreciate
- the section regarding software harmfulness
- the section containing thoughtful quotes, the external of which I've manually sourced from an assumed origin
- “It’s possible that I understand better what’s going on, or it’s equally possible that I just think I do.”
— Russ Cox
- “Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
— Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, epigram 58
- “I have often said, this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those that feel: but when I thought so first, I was more disposed to smile than to feel; and besides, England was not arrived at its present pitch of frenzy.”
— Horace Walpope, Correspondence, page 315
- “some people never go crazy.
what truly horrible lives
they must lead.”
— Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, PDF page 192
- “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.”
— Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein Philosopher—Scientist, PDF page 33 and PDF page 35
- “What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!”
— Grant Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, chapter XV
- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
— Richard Feynman, 1974 Caltech commencement address
- “I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
— C.A.R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture, PDF page 7
- “Flexibility has a place, but it is sometimes deployed where it isn't actually needed, to some cost.”
— John Carmack, 2020 august 30 twitter.com post
- “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.”
— anonymous
- “there is nothing as boring as the truth” . . . “an intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”
— Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, page 207
- “When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”
— Steve Jobs, 1996 february Wired Magazine interview
- “One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, PDF page 138
- “la inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando”
— Pablo Picasso, published in Tomás R. Villasante's
Las ciudades hablan: identidades y movimientos sociales en seis metrópolis latinoamericanas, pagina 264
- various mailing list snippets
- “Chris Rumpf wrote:
> I would like to join this mailing list.
you want all of us to give you a call saying you're welcome ??”
— elko@home.nl on linux-kernel
-
“Remember: the biggest mistake to do is to overdesign.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
— Linus on linux-kernel
-
“Thanks, and THIS time it really is fixed.
I mean, how many times can we get it wrong?
At some point, we just have to run out of really bad ideas..”
— Linus Torvalds
- A place where simply beautiful software is discussed and distributed
- Some of the best examples of software that sucks less include the
- Small works of obfuscated art
- A fork of Plan 9, one of the few operating systems to meaningfully innovate after Unix
- Plan 9 happens to have been made by some of the same people who made Unix, at the same company
- The Frequently Questioned Answers bring me joy
- From this website, a variety of operating systems may be tried in a web browser
- Some of my favorite operating systems to try in this context are
- Their works taught me how much can be done with only a terminal
- They have written a
- An illustration of how many of the woes of web development are opt-in
- An example of a single person having a meaningful and varied impact on the world they live in through their creativity
- This person started the writing of
- A rare example of a modern linux without systemd or glibc that actually works
- It's small, and it boots to RAM, making it ideal for SD card booting
- I use this with a Raspberry Pi 400, that which may boot from either SD card or USB
- A fork of Debian that boots faster and uses less RAM
- A display of how much can be done with relatively little digital data
- A surprising level of interesting detail afforded by four colors
- Collections of photography
- A stylistically interesting gallery of visual art
- OpenBSD makes me feel much more comfortable than any other operating system
- Daemons installed after the operating system installation is complete must be chosen to run at boot explicitly if they are to run at boot at all
- Administrative changes and errors are relayed to a user's mailbox regularly, which may be viewed and reviewed whenever needed
- The documentation is superb
- The applications I care to be readily available are readily available, those being
- a good vi derivative, for when ed isn't comfortable
- a good clone of sam, for either when there's more than one file to edit or when there's a lot of writing to do
- I recommend explicitly setting the bitmap font to something other than the default; on a 1366x768 display, the default hurts my eyes
- I enjoy either Go Mono 14px or DejaVu Sans 16px, the latter of which is sourced from 9front's git repo
- a good shell
- curl, for downloading and uploading files over HTTP
- tcc, for compiling C code that's less insane than usual
- clang, for compiling most C code
- plan9port's rio
- plan9port's 9term
- drawterm, for interacting with my account at 9p.sdf.org
- openssh, for remote access to other running operating system along with other running operating systems having remote access to OpenBSD
- mutt, for e-mailing in a way that is less painful than expected
- netsurf, a web browser that both works quickly when it works and stops working quickly when it stops working
- surf, for when netsurf no workie
- firefox, for when it's necessitated
- mupdf, for viewing PDF files
- ghostscript, for viewing PostScript and converting it to PDF
- ffmpeg, for video and audio conversion and consumption
- imagemagick, for converting my camera's raw '.NEF' files to high quality '.jpg' files
- darkhttpd, for when I want to transfer files over the local network
- git
- picom, for vsync
- ircII, for going where all the interesting conversations are
- a good sound system, something I wish was more common
- Otherwise applications generally compile with little hassle using either tcc or clang, some examples being
- Occasional game playing is okay, and there are some high-quality games available, such as
- OpenBSD's default touchpad driver under Xenocara for the Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5218 is much better than any of the equivalent touchpad drivers available for Linux
- A screenshot of the best kind of silence
- Radio, but good
- No advertisements, only very occasional asks for donations
- There are a variety of interesting stations to choose from, my current favorite being Illinois Street Lounge
- Each station may be listened in on using a set of computer hardware and software that includes
- An internet connection
- A way of decoding and playing mp3s
- A HTTP client
miscellaneous quotations
- “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
— Edward Snowden, 2015 may 21 reddit comment
- “"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."”
— Scarecrow in Lyman Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter IV
- “And remember, my sentimental friend…that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”
— Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 31 minutes 58 seconds
- “Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propogating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp, page 181
- “with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs”
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, page 103
- “Personally, most of my technical accomplishments are just temporary. Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.”
— John Carmack, 2001 april GameSpy interview
- “If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”
— John Carmack, 2002 january 2 slashdot.org post
- “Free software that people value adds wealth to the world.”
— John Carmack, 2009 februrary interview with Brad Cook
- “DON'T TRY”
— Charles Bukowski, their grave
- “Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, it's usually the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch.”
— Pablo Picasso, translated by Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, page 66
- “I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works, I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.”
— John Carmack, Masters of Doom, page 295
- “Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”
— According to wikiquote.org, stated by Pablo Picasso in "The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5"
- “together we will live out this dream…my music and me…”
— Nate Dogg, Music and Me, printed on their grave
- “I can't come back, I don't know how it works…Goodbye, folks!”
—Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 35 minutes 16 seconds
- “The time has come!”
— Walrus in Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 19 minutes 54 seconds
- Daisy: “Just look at those stems!”
Iris: “Rather scrawny, I'd say…”
Rose bud: “I think she's pretty!”
Rose: “Quiet, Bud.”
— Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 30 minutes 42 seconds
- Alice: “I should like to be a little larger, sir.”
Caterpillar: “Why?”
Alice: “Well, after all, three inches is such a wretched height, and—”
Caterpillar: “I am exactly three inches high, and it is A VERY GOOD HEIGHT! INDEED!”
— Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 35 minutes 52 seconds
-
Alice: “Oh no no no... thank you, but—but I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go.”
Cheshire Cat: “Well, that depends, on where, you want to get to…?”
Alice: “Well, it really doesn't matter. As long as I c—”
Cheshire Cat: “Then, it really doesn't matter, which way, you go!”
— Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 39 minutes 41 seconds
-
Queen of Hearts: “Are you ready for your sentence?”
Alice: “Sentence? Oh, but there must be a verdict first!”
Queen of Hearts:“SENTENCE FIRST! Verdict afterwards!”
— Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 1 hour 7 minutes 49 seconds
- Wesley: “A few more steps and we'll be safe in the fire swamp.”
Princess: “We'll never survive!”
Wesley: “Nonsense! You're only saying that because no one ever has.”
— The Princess Bride, 40 minutes 43 seconds
- “I can make myself happy, then I should be able to do the same for somebody else.”
— Slick Rick in 2010 february 7 interview with Insomniac Magazine
- “I'm tired of using vi.”
— Bill Joy, 1984 august interview with Unix Review magazine
- “I'm pretty sure the concept of a hidden file was an unintended consequence. It was certainly a mistake. How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago?
Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.”
— Rob Pike, 2012 february 8 plus.google.com post
- “Intelligence is positively correlated with being nice to others.”
— antirez, a personal site of his
- “It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, page 45 and page 46
- “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the
part of every organism to live beyond its income.”
— Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, PDF page 38
- “I think modern art's almost total pre-occupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and sterility in the arts. The notion that reality exists only in the artist's mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality is only an illusion, was initially an invigorating force, but it eventually led to a lot of highly original, very personal and extremely uninteresting work. In Cocteau's film Orpheé, the poet asks what he should do. 'Astonish me,' he is told. Very little of modern art does that -- certainly not in the sense that a great work of art can make you wonder how its creation was accomplished by a mere mortal.”
— Stanley Kubrick, 1980 interview with Michel Ciment regarding A Clockwork Orange
- “What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data
have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions
miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate
from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design,
not attributes of information. Often the less complex and less subtle the
line, the more ambiguous and less interesting is the reading. Stripping
the detail out of data is a style based on personal preference and fashion,
considerations utterly indifferent to substantive content.” … “So much for the conventional, facile, and false equation: simpleness
of data and design = clarity of reading. Simpleness is another aesthetic
preference, not an information display strategy, not a guide to clarity.
What we seek instead is a rich texture of data, a comparative context,
an understanding of complexity revealed with an economy of means.” … “But, finally, the deepest reason for displays that portray complexity
and intricacy is that the worlds we seek to understand are complex and
intricate.”
— Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, page 51
- “Attention is the reader’s gift to you. That gift is precious. And finite.” … “Once a reader revokes the gift of attention, you don’t have a reader anymore. Then you become a writer only in the narrowest sense of the word. Yes, you put words on some pages. But if your reader has disappeared, what was the point? How is your writing more valuable than a random string of characters? Like the proverbial tree falling in the woods, no one’s there to notice the difference. Unfortunately, many professional writers adopt a high-risk model of reader attention. Instead of treating reader attention as a precious commodity, they treat it as an unlimited resource. "I’ll take as much attention as I need, and if I want more, I’ll take that too." Writing as if you have unlimited reader attention is presumptuous, because readers are not doing you a personal favor.” … “I’ll even go one better: I believe that most readers are looking for reasons to stop reading. Not because they’re malicious or aloof. They’re just being rational. Readers have other demands on their time. Why would they pay more attention than they must? Readers are always looking for the exit.”
— Matthew Butterick, Practical Typography, why does typography matter?
- “The input problem is technically the least interesting but perhaps emotionally the
most important of the problems of converting a system to an international character set.”
— Rob Pike; Ken Thompson, Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμε or こんにちは 世界
- “Data structures in computer science needn't
be homogeneous, and algorithms can involve many different kinds of steps. Sometimes that is a weakness of computer scientists, because we don't try as hard as we should to find uniformity; but sometimes it is a strength because we can deal fluently with concepts that are inherently non-uniform.”
— Donald Knuth, Algorithmic Thinking and Mathematical Thinking, PDF page 13
- I would provide a legal and readily accessible source if one existed. Unfortunately, the best that can be legally linked to here is JSTOR.
- ‘The important thing to keep in mind here is that analysis generally focuses attention upon concepts and not upon individual things. It is a fact that there are no unicorns—no equine individuals having (natural) horns protruding from their heads. Nenetheless there is—there really is—a concept that is expressed by the word “unicorn.” This concept exists, as an abstract object, even though no unicorn exists. Perhaps this concept somehow “exists in the mind.” Whether or not that is so, it is the concept that we are concerned with when we raise the question of analysis—the question “What sort of thing is a unicorn?” Analysis does not presuppose that there are (exist) any unicorns. What is presupposed is that there is a legitimate concept expressed by the word “unicorn.” Of course when we are dealing with commonplace things such as oak trees and psychopaths, it can happen that the task of analysis focuses not upon concepts but upon certain individuals.’
— William Carter, The Elements of Metaphysics, page 6
- “Now I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too. Damned. Hard.”
— The Colonel, 1992 film Scent of a Woman, The Decision
