Adam Hamrick

“This book is about one thing: complexity. Dealing with complexity is the most important challenge in software design. It is what makes systems hard to build and maintain, and it often makes them slow as well.”
― John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

“Under this scenario, in sum, we would collectively stumble our way toward a fragmented, parochial, Big Brotherish kind of information system “characterized by supervision, regulation, constraint, and control.” Moreover, given his view of the world in 1979, Lick had to rate this possibility as far more likely than his optimistic projection. An integrated, open, universally accessible Multinet wouldn’t just happen on its own, he pointed out. It would require cooperation and effort on a time scale of decades, “a long, hard process of deliberate study, experiment, analysis, and development.” That process, in turn, could be sustained only by the forging of a collective vision, some rough consensus on the part of thousands or maybe even millions of people that an open electronic commons was worth having. And that, wrote Lick, would require leadership.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“And his dreams late that night, after the Braintree/Bob Death Commitment, seem to set him under a sort of sea, at terrific depths, the water all around him silent and dim and the same temperature he is.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Roger Penrose discovered that if you launch the object at a clever angle and make it split into two pieces as figure 6.4 illustrates, then you can arrange for only one piece to get eaten while the other escapes the black hole with more energy than you started with. In other words, you’ve successfully converted some of the rotational energy of the black hole into useful energy that you can put to work. By repeating this process many times, you can milk the black hole of all its rotational energy so that it stops spinning and its ergosphere disappears.”
― Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence