User Profile

GREAT SECRET Even a little work will burn me out, unless I feel that my work makes life better for somebody, somewhere.

— Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar by James Bach (78%)

David Silver was getting a lot of criticism. The criticism came from nemeses of the Hacker Ethic: the Al theorists and grad students on the eighth floor. These were people who did not necessarily see the process of computing as a joyful end in itself: they were more concerned with getting degrees, winning professional recognition, and the, ahem, advancement of computer science. They considered hackerism unscientific.

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 106)

Besides being a technical genius, Nelson would attack problems with bird-dog perseverance. "He approached problems by taking action," Donald Eastlake, a hacker in Nelson's class, later recalled. "He was very persistent. If you try a few times and give up, you'll never get there. But if you keep at it... There's a lot of problems in the world which can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will."

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 86)

Some of the planners envisioned a day when artificially intelligent computers would relieve man's mental burdens, much as indus-trial machinery had already partially lifted his physical yoke.

— Hackers by Steven Levy (Page 57)

Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is “breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

— On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder