Programme Starting Quotes

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The 85 Percent Solution: Getting started is more important than becoming an expert.
Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No guilt, no excuses - just a 6-week programme that works)
What would happen if you allowed a bug to slip through a module, and it cost your company $10,000? The nonprofessional would shrug his shoulders, say “stuff happens,” and start writing the next module. The professional would write the company a check for $10,000!
Robert C. Martin (The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers)
While overpaid CEOs take long vacations and hide behind e-mail autoresponders, some programmer is working eighteen-hour days coding the start-up that will destroy that CEO’s business.
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
Every pro starts off as an amateur. There's not one top artist, athlete, writer, scientist, architect, entrepreneur, programmer, musician, or potter who enters the field at the top of her game. To begin anything new or learn anything new means you will be a neophyte. You must go from outsider to insider. Respect that. Embrace it. Be willing to suck.
Marie Forleo (Everything Is Figureoutable)
Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.
Philip Greenspun
In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again. But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don't know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
If we were to define a sleeping bag as a house, India would move swiftly towards ending her housing shortage. A shortage of nearly thirty-one million units. Accept this definition, and you could go in for mass production of sleeping bags. We could then have passionate debates about the drastic reduction in the magnitude of the housing problem. The cover stories could run headlines: ‘Is it for real?’ And straps: ‘Sounds too good to be true, but it is.’ The government could boast that it had not only stepped up production of sleeping bags but had piled up an all-time record surplus of them. Say, thirty-seven million. Conservatives could argue that we were doing so well, the time had come to export sleeping bags, at ‘world prices’. The bleeding hearts could moan that sleeping bags had not reached the poorest. Investigative muckrakers could scrutinise the contracts given to manufacturers. Were the bags overpriced? Were they of good quality? That ends the housing shortage. There’s only one problem. Those without houses at the start of the programme will still be without houses at the end of it. (True, some of them will have sleeping bags, probably at world prices.)
Palagummi Sainath (Everybody loves a good drought)
There is a simple marketing trick that helps teams communicate as one: generate a brand. When you start a project, come up with a name for it, ideally something off-the-wall. (In the past, we've named projects after things such as killer parrots that prey on sheep, optical illusions, and mythical cities.) ...Use your team's name liberally when talking with people. It sounds silly, but it gives your team an identity to build on, and the world something memorable to associate with your work.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.
Nell Zink (The Wallcreeper)
About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. “It was a whole subculture. It’s been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days,” said Alsing. “The game of programming—and it is a game—was so fascinating. We’d stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think.” A few of his fellow midnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night. Some started sleeping days and missed all their classes, thereby ruining their grades. Alsing and a few others flunked out of school.
Tracy Kidder (The Soul of A New Machine)
the only way we can become more inclusive and ultimately more legitimate and successful at ensuring peace, prosperity and women's rights is by ensuring that all people can see themselves at the table, and that young women in particular have role models, mentors and the necessary support and amplification to ensure that we occupy those spaces. It was the reason I started my own mentorship programme - because, often, we can't be what we can't see.
Scarlett Curtis (Feminists Don't Wear Pink (And Other Lies): Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them)
Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany. ‘Out of Wilson’s and Kerensky’s Peace programme’, Germany could surely have rescued a peace
Adam Tooze (The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931)
The programme of life is the same as that of a bathing establishment, a crowd, or a journey: sometimes things will be thrown at you, and sometimes they will strike you by accident. Life is not a dainty business. You have started on a long journey; you are bound to slip, collide, fall, become weary, and cry out: "O for Death!
Seneca (Letters from a Stoic (and Biography))
The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can’t reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition)
The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
I flicked through the library to choose from one of a dozen eBooks I’d downloaded but had yet to start reading. As a rule, novels bore me. The concentration it takes to remember what you’ve read and who is who as you swipe from one page to the next is arduous. I much prefer downloading a television programme and watching it on my phone instead. But Janine, our branch manager, frowned upon us doing that, one of many petty little dislikes she’d made us aware of since she’d taken charge seven months earlier
John Marrs (The Good Samaritan)
There were the venture capitalists, who’d gotten in early, watched the tokens they bought climb to ludicrous heights, and now believed they could predict the future. There were the founders of crypto start-ups, who’d raised so many millions of dollars that they seemed to believe their own far-fetched pitches about creating the future of finance. Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.
Zeke Faux (Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall)
Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly—without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn’t make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition)
One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it's all too easy to slip into the mindset of "All the rest of this code is crap, I'll just follow suit.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
But the real problem was that the treatment was based around the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme, and as soon as my counsellor started talking to me about God, I flipped out. I didn’t want to know about religion: religion was dogma, it was bigotry, it was the Moral Majority and people like Jerry Falwell saying that AIDS was God’s judgement on homosexuals
Elton John (Me)
My very best thinking led me to a therapist’s office weeping and pleading for help regarding my alcoholism at the age of 19. I thought I could ‘manage’ my alcohol addiction, and I failed miserably until I asked for help. My older friends in recovery remind me that I looked like ‘death’ when I started attending support groups. I was not able to give eye contact, and I covered my eyes with a baseball cap. I had lost significant weight and was frightened to talk to strangers. I was beset with what the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous describes as ‘the hideous Four Horseman – terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair’. Similarly, my very best thinking led me to have unhappy, co-dependent relationships. I can go on. The problem was I was dependent on my own counsel. I did not have a support system, let alone a group of sober people to brainstorm with. I just followed my own thinking without getting feedback. The first lesson I learned in recovery was that I needed to check in with sober and wiser people than me regarding my thinking. I still need to do this today. I need feedback from my support system.
Christopher Dines (Super Self Care: How to Find Lasting Freedom from Addiction, Toxic Relationships and Dysfunctional Lifestyles)
there is a rule for solving certain types of problems in artificial intelligence called the “most constrained variable.” It means that in a problem where you are trying to assign different values to different variables to meet constraints, you should start with the variable that has the most constraints, or put another way, the variable that has the lowest number of possible values.
V. Anton Spraul (Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving)
Younger wizards in particular went about saying that is was time magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly-organised basis, with research programmes and three-day conventions in good hotels where they could read papers with titles like 'Whither Geomancy?' and 'The role of Seven League Boots in a caring society
Terry Pratchett
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.
Vernor Vinge (A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2))
The problem is that if the person then says I would rather go home and finish the job tomorrow, they start to feel guilty. Their Chimp is now saying, ‘You can’t let the troop down, what will they think?’ Well as we now know, it isn’t the troop at all. It is work and work colleagues. Looking after the Chimp by getting it home on time and looking after the real troop is more important than working to please work colleagues.
Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness)
As Cornford pointed out, the best way to understand the simile is to replace ‘the clumsier apparatus’ of the cave by the cinema, though today television is an even better comparison. It is the moral and intellectual condition of the average man from which Plato starts; and though clearly the ordinary man knows the difference between substance and shadow in the physical world, the simile suggests that his moral and intellectual opinions often bear as little relation to the truth as the averagefilm or television programme does to real life.
Plato (The Republic)
I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so. ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies. ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’" "I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell." "To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories. I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious. After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat. The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot.
David Suchet (Poirot and Me)
With programmes such as flooding of emotions, the parts involved might not feel safe in turning the programme off. But you might be able to negotiate that they turn it down so it is barely noticeable. Or you could ask the spinner parts to spin in the opposite direction, so that they spin the effects back into the part who originally held those feelings rather than out to the rest of the system. Or you could insert a hidden drain and start draining out some of the feelings. Or you could find a way for the parts doing their jobs to implement the programme without doing harm. p126-127
Alison Miller (Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We're not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds. There's a subtle reason why programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: They are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.
Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software)
Think about two young adults who go to college. One is brilliant, a genius who floats above her colleagues like a cirrus cloud, the other is merely a plodder: dogged, determined, competent. Throughout their education, the genius has always been able to leap obstacles as though they’re not there while the plodder has, through necessity, learned patiently to climb walls. One day, say in the second year of their Ph.D. programme, that genius will come across a wall so high even she can’t jump it. But she doesn’t know how to climb. The plodder, on the other hand, rubs his hands, checks his equipment, and starts hammering in the first piton. Who do you think will reach the top first?
Nicola Griffith (The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen #1))
Change always starts at home. The only person you can actually change is yourself. No matter how functional or dysfunctional your organization, you can begin applying XP for yourself. Anyone on the team can begin changing his own behavior. Programmers can start writing tests first. Testers can automate their tests. Customers can write stories and set clear priorities. Executives can expect transparency. Dictating practices to a team destroys trust and creates resentment. Executives can encourage team responsibility and accountability. Whether the team produces these with XP, a better waterfall, or utter chaos is up to them. Using XP, teams can produce dramatic improvements in the areas of defects, estimation, and productivity.
Kent Beck (Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (The XP Series))
Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions." Well, there it is. ...It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one - America in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour. When a war starts, nations go mad - and have to go mad, in order to survive. ...I am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere. And then people everywhere begin behaving as they never could in peace-time. Afterwards we look back, amazed. Did I really do that? Believe that? Fall for that bit of propaganda? Think that all our enemies were evil? That all our own nation's acts were good? How could I have tolerated that state of mind, day after day, month after month - perpetually stimulated, perpetually whipped up into emotions that my mind was meanwhile quietly and desperately protesting against?
Doris Lessing
For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.
Cheryl Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
More proof that Lynn is still meant to continue with the government programme occurred during the winter of 2000, when she was sitting at a cafeteria table at the area college. It was later in the afternoon when a few people congregated there with books spread out so they could study while drinking coffee or snacking. Many tables were empty, yet after Lynn had been sitting for a few moments, an elderly man sat down across from her. The old man seemed familiar to Lynn, though, at first, she pretended to ignore him. He said nothing, just sat there as someone might when all the tables are filled and it is necessary to share space with a stranger. His presence made her uncomfortable, yet there was nothing specific that alerted her. A short while later, Mac, the man who had been Lynn's handler in Mexico, came out of the shadows and stopped at the table. He was younger than the old man. His clothes were military casual, the type of garments that veteran students who have military experience might recognise, but not think unusual. He leaned over Lynn and kissed her gently on the forehead, spoke quietly to her, and then said 'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.' Those were the code words that would start the cover programme of which she was still part. The words led to her being switched from the control of the old man, a researcher she now believes may have been part of Dr Ewen Cameron's staff before coming to the United States for the latter part of his career, to the younger man. The change is like a re-enlistment in an army she never willingly joined. In a very real way, she is a career soldier who has never been paid, never allowed to retire and never given a chance to lead a life free from the fear of what she might do without conscious awareness.
Lynn Hersha (Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country)
Let’s consider another similar story — the dating website Plenty of Fish. German programmer Markus Frind started the company in 2003 as a programming exercise. He had been wanting to learn a new coding language called ASP.NET, so he built the site in two weeks — and to his surprise, it took off. Frind never raised a dime of outside money, because the venture was profitable from the beginning. “I didn’t see the need to raise money because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he said in a 2015 interview with Business Insider. “It was a profitable company, and there was no need to raise money.”3 Plenty of Fish grew slowly and organically for more than 10 years, eventually growing to about 75 employees and 90 million registered users. In 2015, Match Group (which also owns dating sites Match.com and OKCupid) bought Plenty of Fish for $575 million. “It wasn’t like I had a plan to create a dating site,” Frind said. “It was just a side project I created that got really big.” Not bad for what started as a hobby.
Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
Grades can also be profoundly unfair, especially for students who are unable to keep up, because the level of the exams usually increases from week to week. Let’s take the analogy of video games. When you discover a new game, you initially have no idea how to progress effectively. Above all, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of how bad you are! That’s why video game designers start with extremely easy levels, where you are almost sure to win. Very gradually, the difficulty increases and, with it, the risk of failure and frustration—but programmers know how to mitigate this by mixing the easy with the difficult, and by leaving you free to retry the same level as many times as you need. You see your score steadily increase . . . and finally, the joyous day comes when you successfully pass the final level, where you were stuck for so long. Now compare this with the report cards of “bad” students: they start the year off with a bad grade, and instead of motivating them by letting them take the same test again until they pass, the teacher gives them a new exercise every week, almost always beyond their abilities. Week after week, their “score” hovers around zero. In the video game market, such a design would be a complete disaster. All too often, schools use grades as punishments.
Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies. The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators would stop copying themselves, and start making material useful to the ASI that controlled them—programmable matter. The waste heat produced by the process would burn up the biosphere, so those of us some 6.9 billion humans who were not killed outright by the nano assemblers would burn to death or asphyxiate. Every other living thing on earth would share our fate. Through it all, the ASI would bear no ill will toward humans nor love. It wouldn’t feel nostalgia as our molecules were painfully repurposed. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Or would the roar of millions and millions of nano factories running at full bore drown out our voices?
James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era)
Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature's tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well. What makes the difference? In inner cities, some buildings are beautiful and clean, while others are rotting hulks. Why? Researchers in the field of crime and urban decay discovered a fascinating trigger mechanism, one that very quickly turns a clean, intact, inhabited building into a smashed and abandoned derelict [WK82]. A broken window. One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don't care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short space of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner's desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality. The "Broken Window Theory" has inspired police departments in New York and other major cities to crack down on the small stuff in order to keep out the big stuff. It works: keeping on top of broken windows, graffiti, and other small infractions has reduced the serious crime level.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
The nudge movement spawned by Thaler and Sunstein has been spectacularly successful around the globe. A 2017 review in the Economist described how policy makers were beginning to embrace insights from behavioral science: In 2009 Barack Obama appointed Mr Sunstein as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The following year Mr Thaler advised Britain’s government when it established BIT, which quickly became known as the “nudge unit”. If BIT did not save the government at least ten times its running cost (£500,000 a year), it was to be shut down after two years. Not only did BIT stay open, saving about 20 times its running cost, but it marked the start of a global trend. Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Nonprofit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030.32
Robert H. Frank (Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work)
The development of the economic programme which consists in the destruction of these monopolies and the substitution for them of the freest competition led its authors to a perception of the fact that all their thought rested upon a very fundamental principle, the freedom of the individual, his right of sovereignty over himself, his products, and his affairs, and of rebellion against the dictation of external authority. Just as the idea of taking capital away from individuals and giving it to the government started Marx in a path which ends in making the government everything and the individual nothing, so the idea of taking capital away from government-protected monopolies and putting it within easy reach of all individuals started Warren and Proudhon in a path which ends in making the individual everything and the government nothing. If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State. This was the logical conclusion to which Warren and Proudhon were forced, and it became the fundamental article of their political philosophy. It is the doctrine which Proudhon named An-archism, a word derived from the Greek, and meaning, not necessarily absence of order, as is generally supposed, but absence of rule. The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that "the best government is that which governs least," and that that which governs least is no government at all.
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (Selected essays and writings on Individualist anarchism & Liberty: (plus selected letters))
The concept of product/ market fit originates in Marc Andreessen’s seminal blog post “The Only Thing That Matters.” In his essay, Andreessen argues that the most important factor in successful start-ups is the combination of market and product. His definition couldn’t be simpler: “Product/ market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Without product/ market fit, it’s impossible to grow a start-up into a successful business. As Andreessen notes, You see a surprising number of really well-run start-ups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board—heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/ market fit. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to define product/ market fit than it is to establish it! When you start a new company, the key product/ market fit question you need to answer is whether you have discovered a nonobvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage or approach, and one that competing players won’t see until you’ve had a chance to build a healthy lead. It’s usually difficult to find such an opportunity in a “hot” space; if an opportunity is obvious to everyone, the chance that you’ll be the one who succeeds is exceedingly low. Most nonobvious opportunities arise from a change in the market that the incumbents aren’t willing or able to adapt to.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.
Anonymous
But I think if a program is well written, there will be something about its structure that will guide me to various parts of it in an order that will make some kind of sense. You know, it's not just what the program does—there's a story. There's a story about how the program is organized, there's a story about the context in which the program is expected to operate. And one would hope that there will be something about the program, whether it's block comments at the start of each routine or an overview document that comes separately or just choices of variable names that will somehow convey those stories to you. And one would hope that a good programmer, a really good programmer, will have given thought to conveying those stories in addition to the story of what the program actually does.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Keep These Things in Mind While Enrolling For A Professional Online Course While online courses are gaining in popularity due to the conveniences they offer, you must consider a few things before enrolling in one. Not all programs are suitable for everyone. Not everyone is good at learning online. There are a lot of conditions that must be satisfied to make such learning successful. It is better that you consider everything carefully before starting your e-learning course. 1. How Will The Course Help You? There are many online professional programs available from various universities and educational platforms. You must see which one will be most useful for you. If you are working and you need to acquire a skill to get a promotion, then you must choose such a course. It is not just money that you are spending on these courses. You are also investing a lot of your time and effort to successfully complete your learning. 2. Do You Have The Motivation To Learn By Yourself? Getting motivated to study when you are in a classroom full of students is easy. A professor is teaching and also watching you. But in online certification courses, you have the freedom of studying whenever and wherever you want. Many of the e-learning platforms allow you to complete the program at your pace. This can make you lethargic and distracted. You must ask yourself whether you can remain motivated to complete the course. 3. How Familiar Are You With The Technology? You don’t need to be a computer genius to attend online professional programs. But you must be familiar with basic computer operations, playing videos on both desktops and mobile phones, and using a web browser. The other skill you will require in e-learning is the speed of typing on different devices. When there are live exchanges with the professors, you will need to type the queries very fast if you want to get your answers. 4. How Well Will You Participate In Online Classes? It is very easy to remain silent in virtual classes. There is no one staring at you and pushing you to ask questions or give answers. But if you don’t interact, you will not be making full use of online certification courses. Participation is very important in such classrooms. You must also take part in the group discussions that will bring out new ideas and opinions. E-learning is not for those who need physical presence. 5. Who Are The Others On The Programme? Knowing the other participants in online professional programs is very important, especially if you are already working and looking to acquire more skills. There must be people in the virtual classroom whose contributions will be useful for you. If the course has only freshers from college, then it may not give you any value addition. As a working person, you must look at networking opportunities that will help you with career opportunities. To Sum Up….. For working people, virtual classes are the best way to acquire more skills without taking a break from employment. These courses offer you the flexibility that you can never get in campus education. But you must make yourself suitable for e-learning to benefit from it.
Talentedge
When I visited Watson and its programmers recently at IBM’s main research facility—where the machine, consisting of a stack of servers, resides alone in a basement, humming quietly and waiting for questions to crunch on—I inquired (directing my queries to the nearby humans, not the machine) whether Watson might ever turn the tables on us and start asking us wickedly complex questions. While that’s not its purpose, its programmers point out something interesting and quite promising: As Watson comes in increasing contact with doctors and medical students currently using the system, the machine is slowly training them to ask more and better questions in order to pull the information they need out of the system. As it trains them to be better questioners, Watson will almost certainly help them to be better doctors.
Warren Berger (A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas)
Start with the issue that looks the easiest or, if you want a challenge, the one that looks the most difficult. Or just start with the one that’s the most interesting.
V. Anton Spraul (Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving)
Step by Step… Can you write out your ideal business step by step Here is a business I am setting up for a client. She wants to shipping start her own shipping company… One she will need a US partner to collect and transfer packages to her in Jamaica. She will also need one in China. I have two contacts. One has a warehouse in Florida The other has two in China. Chinese connect makes goods available within 3 weeks, she has to tell her customers four. The US connect makes it within 3-5 days. She has to tell them within a week… Next she will need a website where her customers can login and track their packages. This will come with individual dashboards. She will need an interface and warehouse management software and logistics APIs. She will also need an automated email set up (journey) to send emails to her customers without her or her agents needing to do that. Without this Saas she would have to hire someone to reply to messages and emails about , someone to call and track, use usps and FedEx tracking numbers to track and reply back to customers. She also needs a beta ApI to allow her warehouse guy to update the CRM with information about her customers packages… Key nodes such as - Intransit to destinations Held at customs Clearance In transit to store Pick up available etc… These will come in as email notifications Fully automated. Everything will be connected using Webhooks… entire system. Saas she might need to use a combination of GOhighlevel, Workiz and To run this as a System as as Service. Each platform can work together using webhooks. Gohighlevel as a Saas is $500 a month Workiz is $200 dollars She can use Odoo which is open source alternative as a CRM And Clickup as Management. This is how a conversational business plan looks. You can see it. You can research it. You can confirm that it’s plausible. It doesn’t sound like pipedreams. It sounds workable to credit companies /banks and investors. It sounds doable to a BDO Client. I also sound as if I know what I am doing. Not a lot of technical language. A confused prospective business investor or banker don’t want to use a dictionary to figure out everything… They want to see the vision as clear as day. You basically need to do to them what I did to you when you joined my programme. It must sound plausible. All businesses is a game of wit. Every deal that is signed benefits both party. Whether initially or in the long term. Those are the sub-tenets of business. Every board meeting or meeting with regulatory boards, banks, credit facilities, municipalities is a game of convincing people to see your thing through… Everyone does Algorithm is simple. People want you to solve their problems with speed and efficiency. Speed is very important and automation. Progress, business and production are tied to ego… that’s why people love seh oh dem start a business or dem have dem online business and nah sell one rass thing. Cause a lot of people think being successful and looking successful are one and the same thing until they meet someone like me or people who done the work… Don’t rush it… you are young and you have time. There are infact certain little nuances Weh yuh only ago learn through experience. Experience and reflection. One of the drawbacks of wanting to run your business by yourself with you and your family members is that you guys will have to be reliant on yourself for feedback which is not alw
Crystal Evans
Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.
Richard Overy (Why The Allies Won)
Closer to home, the 1999 film Office Space, which deadpanned the meaningless rituals and bureaucracy of a fictional technology company, became a cult hit because it was instantly recognizable. In the movie, programmer Peter Gibbons describes his job to a hypnotherapist: Peter: So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life. Dr. Swanson: What about today? Is today the worst day of your life? Peter: Yeah. Dr. Swanson: Wow, that’s messed up.14
Laszlo Bock (Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead)
In addition to starting the ball rolling on an international convention, the Villach and Toronto conferences had another major upshot, this one quite unintended. Many governments, including that of the United States, did not like the scientific community taking the reins on policy entrepreneurship. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body established in 1988 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, was created (with US backing) for governments to assess anthropogenic climate change based on the latest science. Note the word Intergovernmental.
James Gustave Speth (They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis)
Have a Profession, Not a Job Everyone except trust fund babies and perennial welfare recipients need to work.  It is an unavoidable fact of life that if you don't want to be homeless, go hungry, constantly beg, or wish to have any semblance of a normal, healthy financial life you need to work.  But in the fact work traditionally consumes half of your waking life (more if you include commute), if your job has a point and purpose to it, then so too does your life.  This isn't to say there is anything wrong with being a general laborer, a barista, or a fast food worker.  We all start somewhere and these low-skilled, entry level jobs are a vital part of the economy and a starting point in everyone's working career.  But if you take the time to learn a skill, develop a trade, or earn an employable degree, you can have a profession, not merely a job.  This confers upon you and your life immediate purpose and value as now you get to declare yourself as an individual with a specific skill. “I'm a plumber.” “I'm a CPA.” “I'm a cop.” Or “I'm a programmer.” And this statement declares how you contribute to the economy, how you earn your keep in this society, and is usually the first thing people ask about you – what do you do? Furthermore, as it just so happens, being a professional pays more.  Admittedly, it takes some training and education, and for some particularly prestigious professions it can take years (for example, being a surgeon).  But if you go that extra mile and invest in yourself a year or eight to develop a skill or a trade, the remaining 50-60 years of your life will not only be more profitable, but will give you purpose and meaning for your entire working career.
Aaron Clarey (The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex)
Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
Most of my career has been spent selling “plans of action and programmes of collaboration,” whether to Rexall to start up Pronto Markets; or Bank of America to buy out Pronto; or landlords; or vendors, many of whom have been very skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, my plans; and above all to my employees. If you want to know what differentiates me from most managers, that’s it. From the beginning, thanks to Ortega y Gasset, I’ve been aware of the need to sell everybody.
Joe Coulombe (Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys)
Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges. Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment. Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose. So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper. [...] And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.
Cynthia Bourgeault
After lunch Ruth will still experience that old Sunday afternoon dread—a heady mix of undone homework and uniform drying by the fire, cosy and sad at the same time. She’ll get the Dread even though she doesn’t have to go to work tomorrow. Summer School is over and the holidays have officially started. But as soon as the Sunday evening programmes come on the television—costume dramas, antiques and the countryside—the Dread will descend.
Elly Griffiths (The Outcast Dead (Ruth Galloway, #6))
To get to the top of motor racing, to drive a Formula 1 car in one of the leading teams, you have to have certain qualities in the right proportion. One of them has always been much admired, and is now more important than ever: consistency. What matters is not a single outstanding move but your performance across the full duration of a race, a racing season, and indeed your career...Clearly consistency is not simply a natural talent within a driver, but the outcome of a long and tough physical programme which will allow us to give our best at all times and reach the end of a race - even the toughest - as fresh as we were to start.
Ayrton Senna (Ayrton Senna's Principles of Race Driving)
People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin.
Georges Perec (Les Choses)
Abhyantara Yoga is a traditional yoga school based in Rishikesh, Himalayas. Which started with the inspiration of spreading traditional spiritual values of yoga through various teaching programmes such as Yoga retreat and Yoga Teacher Training courses, which offers the first level of yoga training that allows you to become RYT 200 as per the standards and guidelines of Yoga Alliance, USA
Harindra Chaudhary
Until you have your ducks in a row, hold off on hiring a bunch of salespeople. First, hire an expert to help you build a solid playbook, figure out what kind of people you want to hire, set up your daily huddle, and figure out who your customers are. That’s really what it looks like to transform into a sales-driven culture, where it’s everyone’s job to think about how to make sales more effective, from the receptionist taking a message to the software programmer in charge of the Content Management System. As companies grow, it’s easy for them to become more siloed and disconnected from other departments, but a salesdriven culture reaffirms the principle that the company exists to solve a problem, to connect customers to the solution for their problem, and to close that deal.
Colin C. Campbell (Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs' Secrets Revealed!)
One can escape a rational requirement if one fails to meet its conditions in some way. One is then allowed to beg off, and the permissible grounds depend on the general principle from which the particular application of the requirement follows. That principle may in turn apply in virtue of a still more general principle plus further conditions, and if those conditions are not met, escape is again possible. But at some point the retreat must come to an end: one must reach a requirement (it need not be conditional, for it may have been the original one) from which it is not possible to escape by begging off. It is natural to suppose that principles of this sort must underlie ethics, if it exists. It is also natural to assume that the enterprise of justification should focus on these basic requirments, thus yielding an ethical system with cast iron motivational backing. But such a programme appears doomed from the start. For if we justify a requirement, it is in terms of a principle from which that requirement follows, perhaps with the aid of further conditions. But that principle must itself represent a requirement, or else what it is adduced to justify will not be one. Therefore any requirement which we set out to justify will not be ultimate. Something beyond justification is required. 3. I assume that a normative requirement on action must have correspondingly strict motivational backing. If ethics is to contain
Thomas Nagel (The Possibility of Altruism)
It is also natural to assume that the enterprise of justification should focus on these basic requirments, thus yielding an ethical system with cast iron motivational backing. But such a programme appears doomed from the start. For if we justify a requirement, it is in terms of a principle from which that requirement follows, perhaps with the aid of further conditions. But that principle must itself represent a requirement, or else what it is adduced to justify will not be one. Therefore any requirement which we set out to justify will not be ultimate. Something beyond justification is required.
Thomas Nagel (The Possibility of Altruism)
When we perform maintenance, we have to find and change the representations of things—those capsules of knowledge embedded in the application. The problem is that it's easy to duplicate knowledge in the specifications, processes, and programs that we develop, and when we do so, we invite a maintenance nightmare—one that starts well before the application ships.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
Alexis Tsipras, the Syriza leader, has in recent weeks abandoned his pledge to “tear up” the country’s bailout agreement with international creditors and is emphasising more moderate steps to address Greece’s debt load as well as his deep commitment to the euro. Krishna Guha, of Evercore ISI, warned that — at a minimum — investors now faced “a four-week period of elevated uncertainty in which eurozone risk assets will struggle to perform”. Yet Mr Guha added: “We believe that Tsipras will prove more pragmatic than past Syriza rhetoric suggests. He has opened back channels to Berlin, Paris and Frankfurt, and has every incentive to try to negotiate relatively cosmetic changes to Greece’s programme and ride the early-stage Greek recovery rather than derail it.” Nick Wall, a portfolio manager at Invesco, also noted Mr Tsipras’ recent attempt to tack to the political centre. “They are going to need private sector investors, particularly if they are going to start running deficits again.
Anonymous
If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
For example, one programmer argued vociferously for the inclusion of a question to female users: "How expensive is your perfume?" The answer would factor into the algorithm by increasing a female user's "femininity" variable if she purchased expensive perfume. Generally speaking, the higher the "femininity" variable, the better the male dates the woman would end up with. DateEx users quickly realized that fact, and the word spread through online forums: start buying more expensive perfume (or lying about it, which would still create the expectation among the general population that perfume was important). The programmer who came up with that question now works for L'Oreal. But,
Michael DiBaggio (Imagining Liberty: Volume 1)
In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created.
Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The magic of how this happens is called “real-time bidding” (RTB) exchanges, and we’ll get into the technical details before long. For now, imagine that every time you go to CNN.com, it’s as though a new sell order for one share in your brain is transmitted to a stock exchange. Picture it: individual quanta of human attention sold, bit by bit, like so many million shares of General Motors stock, billions of times a day. Remember Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, Goldman Sachs’s old-school brokerage acquisition, and its disappearing (or disappeared) traders? The company went from hundreds of traders and two programmers to twenty programmers and two traders in a few years. That same process was just starting in the media world circa 2009, and is right now, in 2016, kicking into high gear. As part of that shift, one of the final paroxysms of wasted effort at Adchemy was taking place precisely in the RTB space. An engineer named Matthew McEachen, one of Adchemy’s best, and I built an RTB bidding engine that talked to Google’s huge ad exchange, the figurative New York Stock Exchange of media, and submitted bids and ads at speeds of upwards of one hundred thousand requests per second. We had been ordered to do so only to feed some bullshit line Murthy was laying on potential partners that we were a real-time ads-buying company. Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
speak to computers in a language that they understand and have them do anything that you want to do. This skill is one whose demand is increasing at an increasing rate the world over. Whether you want to learn code to pursue a career as a programmer, web developer or graphics designer or want to learn code to be able to develop your own web applications and other computerized systems, the one thing you need to do is to start somewhere. What better place to start
Timothy C. Needham (Python: For Beginners: A Crash Course Guide To Learn Python in 1 Week (coding, programming, web-programming, programmer))
-“The greatest discovery of this generation is the knowledge that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind” William James -“A man is the sum total of his thinking. You can think your way into, or out of any emotional state, simply by the thoughts you have in your mind. -“Human beings have the power within them to programme their mind to achieve the desires of their hearts. “Whatever the mind can conceive if you believe you can achieve.” “According to your faith be it unto you.” -Mat 9:29 -“One of the most comforting thought is: God is always with you; the power of God is within you, and God has given you the power to call on the universe to attract the desires of your heart.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims POWER OF WORDS -“According to the bible, words were the tool that God used to create the universe. “Let there be.. and it was so.” -“Words have the power to shape our minds, influence our thoughts and move us to action. Knowing the effect words can have in programming our minds and influencing our behavior, we should be sensitive to how words are used when communicating. The Good news is, it is never too late to use words to make changes to our lives.” -“Be mindful of what you say……. for words spoken cannot be taken back. Think carefully before you speak, saying only what you mean. The closest ears to your mouth are yours. Learn to speak positive words both to yourself and to others, since you will be the first to feel the effects.” -“Let your manner of speech be positive if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming tranquil positive and optimistic words so your days will be pleasant and successful.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims PRACTICE -“Practice does not make excellence, but the right practice makes great improvements. If you Practice an activity the wrong way, all it serves to do is to make you better at doing it the wrong way.” -“Practice does not make perfect, it only makes you better at what you practice. There is no such level as perfection, for in the game of life change is inevitable.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims RELATIONSHIPS -“Take time to know him/her it’s not an overnight thing”… with time the real person will eventually reveal his/her true character. At the beginning of all relationships people often exhibit their best behavior…. they want to sell themselves to you. They will often tell you what they know you want to hear. You can know a person better when you see them at their worst.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims
Sekou Obadias
The true turning point came when I was about fourteen years old. I bought a copy of PC Plus magazine which included a cover CD featuring a full version of Borland C++ Builder. I installed it and carefully followed the "hello world" tutorial which was helpfully included in the magazine. This was it. A new world opened up before me. The restrictions imposed upon my imagination by the material world were gone. My creativity unshackled, the cathedrals in my mind would be made manifest! To what lofty end should I put this new-found tool? It was obvious. The Fuck Generator. As simple as it was elegant, the Fuck Generator (fgen.exe) was a command-line program, and my first advance beyond "hello world." Upon starting, it would prompt the user for a number. With this number n, it would then print out the string "fuck," n times. Finally the user was given the option to repeat the exercise, or quit. Perhaps a little limited in use, I nevertheless was hooked on the power that I had tasted. It is a particular joy that any programmer will know well, to see the machine do your bidding, no matter how simple a task that may be. It works, and it works because you understand how to make it work.
Anonymous
You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you've done. Every now and then you'll throw a canvas away and start again.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
The book is also about cultivating the desire to live a remarkable life. Strangely, we don’t all set out on the quest to lead remarkable lives when we start our careers. Most of us are content to go with the flow. Our expectations have been lowered for us by the media and by our friends, acquaintances, and family members. So, leading a remarkable life is something you have to discover as even being a reasonable goal. It’s not obvious.
Chad Fowler (The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development (Pragmatic Life))
Caldwell ignores this speech and makes her appeal directly to the sergeant. “Melanie belongs to me,” she reminds him. “To my programme. If we lose her, it will be your responsibility.” It’s the wrong thing to say. Parks doesn’t seem to like being threatened. “I spent four years servicing your programme, Doc,” he reminds her. “Today is my day off.” Caldwell starts to say something else, but Parks talks over her–to Justineau. “If we let her go, why would she come back?” “I
M.R. Carey (The Girl With All the Gifts)
Reducing whingeing, complaining, pestering and arguing First, let’s remember that it rarely helps to reason with an immature child. Often he does not quite understand our adult reasons, or possibly he does understand but does not really care. So don’t bother trying to reason with your son when he is being unreasonable. A much more useful strategy is to look at him as he is whingeing or arguing, but bite your tongue and say nothing. This takes self-control! Wait a few seconds for a pause in the whingeing or arguing. Then you can say, ‘You’re not whingeing now,’ or ‘You stopped saying you want another ice cream.’ He might start whingeing or complaining or pestering again straightaway because he knows that usually gets a rise out of you, and he’s thinking there’s a chance you might give in. These annoying habits have been his way of getting your attention and, up until now, it has been pretty foolproof. So it is understandable that he may test you for a while before he realises that the old way of getting your attention is no longer working. If you have accepted my challenge and are making a point of Descriptively Praising your son ten or more times a day, he will soon see, probably within the first week, that now he is getting attention for the sensible behaviour. Here are some examples of Descriptive Praises for little bits of self-control:   You were so brave at the doctor’s. You didn’t make a fuss. You just sat there quietly while she gave you the injection.   I can see you’re upset, but you’re remembering not to shout.   You’re waiting patiently. (Say this after one or two minutes of waiting patiently. If you delay this praise, he will probably reach the end of his tether and start misbehaving; then you won’t be able to praise him for being patient.)   The Descriptive Praises will sink in and start to change how your son views himself. So whenever your son is doing something annoying, think ‘I’ll wait for a pause and then Descriptively Praise the absence of the negative.’ Parents report that at first they focused their Descriptive Praises on their son’s three or four most annoying habits. Within a few weeks or months, those habits had improved so much that they hardly happened any more.
Noel Janis-Norton (Calmer, Easier, Happier Boys: The revolutionary programme that transforms family life)
If your son does not start to stop within five or ten seconds of your giving a direct instruction, then you need to take immediate action. Of course we feel completely comfortable about taking immediate action when a child’s safety is in danger or when it looks as if property is about to be damaged. Following through immediately with action is just as important when the issue is not safety, but cooperation. The action that you will take will usually be either removing an object from the child or removing the child from the situation. As soon as you make a move to follow through with immediate action, your son will probably see that you mean what you say so he will start to stop. Reinforce his cooperation by following through with Descriptive Praise. If you are feeling annoyed that the initial misbehaviour made you late, it may not be easy to sound pleased. Remember that your son has not yet developed good habits, and it is our job as parents to teach and train the habits we want to see. It won’t happen overnight.
Noel Janis-Norton (Calmer, Easier, Happier Boys: The revolutionary programme that transforms family life)
Sitting apart. Sitting apart is a very effective consequence for impulsive misbehaviour that still remains even after you have been doing lots of Descriptive Praise, think-throughs, rewards for being sensible and action replays. Sitting apart is similar in some ways to a time-out, but instead of banishing your son to another room, which children often find very upsetting, it takes place in the room where you are. Your son needs to sit exactly where and how you tell him to, with no misbehaving and no crying or even talking, for the number of minutes of his age. If he gets up, put him back and step away so that he sees that it is his job to stay in the sitting apart place, not your job to hold him there. Then start the timer from zero again. A sitting apart is a learning experience because you are on hand to Descriptively Praise and Reflectively Listen. Other than that, don’t talk to him. His natural desire to interact with you will help him to control himself to get to the end of the sitting apart.
Noel Janis-Norton (Calmer, Easier, Happier Boys: The revolutionary programme that transforms family life)
Starting with a puppy Starting this recall training programme with a young puppy provides you with a unique opportunity to avoid the mistakes that so many people make with managing their first dog. Especially when it comes to exercising a dog out in the countryside. Achieving an excellent recall from scratch requires a structured approach to training. And that is what Part Two of this book is for. But before you begin training, do think about how you plan to supervise and manage your puppy outdoors, as he grows and becomes more confident. Find out as much as you can about the natural characteristics of your puppy’s breed. If he belongs to one of the more challenging breeds, it is very important that you pay extra attention to building a strong relationship with your dog. Make sure you are interesting to your puppy. One very simple way to be more interesting to your dog during your walks together is to be unpredictable, so when you first start taking your puppy out on walks try to avoid endlessly plodding along the same old path – change direction often. By that I mean literally turn around on the spot and start walking back the way you came. You cannot do this too much. Puppies less than six months old lack the confidence to lead the way and are inclined to follow you. Make the most of this to establish a firm habit in your dog, of watching you to see where you go next. This helps your dog to see you as the person who leads rather than the person who follows. Remember that pups do not need long walks, just five minutes or so per day for each month of their age. Half an hour a day is enough for a six-month-old dog. Make sure that you review your assessment of your puppy as he matures. Try to be objective and to take avoiding action if you start to feel out of control at any point.
Pippa Mattinson (TOTAL RECALL: PERFECT RESPONSE TRAINING FOR PUPPIES AND ADULT DOGS)
The Life Force To discover the Life Force on your Stone of Life, imagine that you are 100 years old and on your death bed with one minute left to live. Your great-great-grandchild asks, ‘Before you die, tell me what I should do with my life?’ Pause for a moment now and try to honestly answer the question immediately within the next minute. You have just one minute, start now and then when the time is up and you have worked out what you would say to them, continue reading. Answering this question will identify what is important to you, what is the essence of the Sun within your Universe. It is what life is all about to you. It is your ‘Life Force’. Many of you will answer with statements such as, ‘it doesn’t matter what you do’, ‘be happy’, ‘don’t worry’, and ‘make the most of it’. Whatever your advice was to your great-great-grandchild is really the advice to yourself. If you are not living by this advice, which is the essence of your existence, you are living a lie. Don’t live a lie; it will unsettle you more than anything else.
Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness)
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She didn’t turn the compassion off in time. She didn’t remind herself, the way she does at the start of every day, that when the programme wraps up, Beacon will airlift her out of here the same way they airlifted her in. Quick and easy, taking all her things with her, leaving no footprint. This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine. She can walk out as clean as when she came in, if she just doesn’t let anything touch her. That horse, however, may already have bolted.
M.R. Carey (The Girl With All the Gifts)
Zuckerberg did admit to Andy Barr (R, KY-06) that China had put its programme to start a central bank digital currency into high gear specifically because of Libra — that Facebook had caused the problem they were now selling a solution to: As soon as we put out this white paper on Libra, what we saw was, in China, especially, they immediately kicked off this public-private partnership with some of their biggest companies in order to race to try to build a system like this quickly, a digital renminbi.
David Gerard (Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money)
Many [Russian] treatment programmes will only treat [patients] for one health problem at a time, forcing them to choose between being treated for their addiction or for their TB. Since drug users' lives are often chaotic anyway, being unable to receive holistic care means that they often move between different treatment programmes, stopping and starting courses of different sorts of medication - exactly the circumstances that cause viruses to mutate. The result is one of the highest rates of multidrug-resistant TB in the world, a hazard to health that extends beyond the users themselves, affecting Russian society at large.
David Nutt (Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs)
People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction.
Georges Perec (Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep)
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
Even if a business commits to a well-structured customer experience improvement programme they often find they are hamstrung by legacy technology that is itself the product of the hurry-up mantra. Years of patches, bodges and duct-tape in the technology that runs the company can make the experience that businesses desire so much an impossibility. They need to re-platform first and then the whole cycle starts again because they need the new tech yesterday.
Matt Watkinson (Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, The: The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series))
Here is a question, how can one improve without deconstructing the old? It's the puzzle that's kept programmers in business since they started not figuring it out~! Answer: Build on top of older crumbling systems and allow the old ones to fail under the weight of greater prosperity.
Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
Easy!,” you think. “Gently lower the collective pitch lever and you’ll descend gracefully to the ground, a hero.” However, when you try it, you discover that life isn’t that simple. The helicopter’s nose drops, and you start to spiral down to the left. Suddenly you discover that you’re flying a system where every control input has secondary effects. Lower the left-hand lever and you need to add compensating backward movement to the right-hand stick and push the right pedal. But then each of these changes affects all of the other controls again. Suddenly you’re juggling an unbelievably complex system, where every change impacts all the other inputs. Your workload is phenomenal: your hands and feet are constantly moving, trying to balance all the interacting forces. Helicopter controls are decidedly not orthogonal.
Andy Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
One broken window, left unrepaired for any substantial length of time, instills in the inhabitants of the building a sense of abandonment—a sense that the powers that be don’t care about the building. So another window gets broken. People start littering. Graffiti appears. Serious structural damage begins. In a relatively short span of time, the building becomes damaged beyond the owner’s desire to fix it, and the sense of abandonment becomes reality.
Andy Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master)
I start with interrogating the way the word ‘creativity’ circulates and gets used in corporate settings. What does it mean to be ‘creative’ in any corporation? If we agree that one of the key ingredients of creativity is ‘to create’, then we can safely say that most of the American people feel alienated from the work they do and from their employers, because they can’t create in the deep sense of what creativity means. Even those who do, most of them feel alienated from the product they create, because they feel it is being utilized for profit only. One quick example that comes to mind is utilizing technological advancement for surveillance and manufacturing weapons. Over the years, I have talked to many people in different professions from pilots to engineers, from coders to programmers, from doctors to other healthcare professionals, who repeatedly confirmed that they often feel that the human and creative value of what they accomplish only seems to matter to the extent it can be monetized and used to expand businesses and increase profits for the few at the top. As such, people feel alienated even with their most creative products and moments. And, if they decide to be critical of the status quo and challenge it (being critical is another key ingredient in creativity), then they face disciplinary action or dismissal from their work. Creativity, then, as propagated by corporate interests really means being creative in maximizing profits and numbers for the few at the top, and to do so, one needs to be creative to lure as many customers as possible to buy products. So, two of the key ingredients of creativity (to create and to be critical) are often replaced with maximizing profits and marketing. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
Louis Yako
There are real ramifications of reading these articles for decades and decades. You start to believe it. You start to think the only way to manage money is to hoard it and create an increasingly long list of noes. Soon, the guilt isn’t just coming from money experts and the outside world. It’s coming from you.
Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich: No guilt, no excuses - just a 6-week programme that works)
As demonstrated especially by the fox, goose, and corn problem, restating a problem can produce valuable results. In some cases, a problem that looks very difficult may seem easy when stated in a different way or using different terms. Restating a problem is like circling the base of a hill that you must climb; before starting your climb, why not check out the hill from every angle to see whether there’s an easier way up?
V. Anton Spraul (Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving)
Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systemsand you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.
Joe Armstrong
State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.” “I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.” “How do you mean?” “It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?” “Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.” “So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room. “Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?” “The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.” “So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?” “Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.” “Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?” “Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?” “About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.” “I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?” “I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?” “I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.” “That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?” Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said. “Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.
John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar)
Listen to Nagging Doubts—Start When You're Ready
Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
So in 2011, when Nokia needed to lay off 18,000 employees due to difficulties in its mobile phone business, it had learned its lesson. It launched the Bridge programme, giving these workers five potential paths forward: finding another job within Nokia, finding another job outside Nokia through outplacement, starting a new business, taking business or trade courses, or building a new path such as volunteering – the last three funded by grants from Nokia.
Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
Imagine the power to resolve dozens of issues right on the spot. If a press release needed approval, everyone (including the CFO, the VP of sales, and the software development and marketing chiefs) was there to review and resolve it in minutes. It didn’t float around in emails for days, sucking up hours of management’s time. If Sales was having a problem with the CRM system, the head of IT was there. If Development needed to hire additional programmers, the head of HR and the CFO were there to start the process and sign off on the budget.
Verne Harnish (Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0))
Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.
Joe Armstrong
We don’t even know that we are trapped in them. It was exactly those subconscious programmes of learned helplessness and powerlessness that we acquired as children which were causing us to hand over our power to abusers and to stay traumatised. It isn’t until we start shifting out of these ways of being that we can unravel the old self and begin to be released into our true self.
Melanie Tonia Evans (You Can Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse)