Sten Tamkivi

“But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what--we have ten thousand friends. It's called"--she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen--"Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore