Epigrams

My original quips. (At least I think they are original. Those that aren’t go on the quotes page. “Words and gods” is the most suspect.)

The correct name of this page is thanks to “Epigrams” on Gwern.net.

Contents

Upstreams

Never meet your upstreams.

Magitech

Reductionism: “We have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.” Magitech: “We have a robot, but it’s made of lots of tiny souls.”

Playlists

(Said in response to someone sharing an anti-work playlist.)

Every playlist is an anti-work playlist.

Everything

Actually, everything needs timeouts, exponential backoff, rate limiting, and usage quotas.

Poetry

Poetry is an early form of proof of work.

Manual memory management

Manual memory management, n.: The optimistic state of mind before you realize that sooner or later you will have to either abandon heap allocation altogether or implement reference counting.

Outsider art

If you say you are making outsider art, you probably aren’t.

Rat madness

A rationalist’s road to madness: between two maps of roughly equal probability choose the one that paints you as a worse person.

The brain

The brain is an inb4 machine.

Debugging

Debugging is applied pessimism.

Long timelines

On a long enough timeline, every story becomes cosmic horror.

Touch typing

Touch typing is a sign language.

Words

Words are weapons that subdue people. They can not subdue gods.

Social critics

Social critics are better at diagnosis than prescriptions.

Vigilance

(Re: “Should C be blamed for the Heartbleed bug?”)

Anything that requires constant vigilance is hard.

See also