"Believing this statement will make you happier."
-- Ryan Lortie
"Make changes based on your strongest opportunities, not your most convenient ones."
-- MegaTokyo
"The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be
trusted with even an ounce of responsibility. If you were dating the
mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can
really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway. If you
hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one
of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned
'King of the Pit'."
-- Lore Sjoberg
"Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature to perfect."
-- Lee Corbin
"The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the unanimous view of all parts of my mind."
-- Malcolm McMahon
"The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've
made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction
workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were
largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become
readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to
come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came
down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply
got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects
quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them
over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at
least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise."
-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line
Lore Sjöberg prefers to write his last name with an ö (o with umlaut), as a Google search will verify.
Posted by: Peter | February 22, 2009 at 08:11 AM
I went and read that Neal Stephenson book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone--it's awfully dated and doesn't seem to have a strong point at the end that makes all the meandering worthwhile.
Posted by: pdf23ds | February 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM
I feel doubly let down. Not only did I too go and read the peice by Stephenson, which was disappointing, but when I came back here to express my disappointment I found I'd been beaten to it.
The quote itself is still a very good one, though.
Posted by: anonymous coward | February 22, 2009 at 03:08 PM
Sorry about that. It's been a long time since I read the Stephenson piece in question, and all I had was the quote in my file. If I'd realized, I wouldn't have quoted it, or would have dropped a warning in the comments.
Posted by: Eliezer Yudkowsky | February 22, 2009 at 03:13 PM
Do you have a reference for the Malcolm McMahon quote? Thanks.
Posted by: Jeroen | February 23, 2009 at 08:07 AM
I cannot seem to google the Ryan Lortie quote. Where did that come from?
Posted by: Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy | February 23, 2009 at 04:31 PM
anonymous coward & pdf23ds: Interesting that you went off on such an intellectual wild goose chase... ;)
Posted by: Fredrik Bränström | February 23, 2009 at 06:37 PM
Lore Sjoberg is my new hero.
Posted by: Paul Gowder | February 24, 2009 at 01:21 AM