* "You know what they say, speak softly but carry a tungsten slug accelerated to a measurable fraction of C." - /u/futureb1ues, reddit
* "Jesus promised to rid us of evil. Odin promised to rid us of ice giants. I don't see any ice giants, do you? Vote Odin!"
* "I mean, we could use it to destroy the Universe, but we'd have to add a lot of antimatter. Which pretty much goes for all other matter."
* "You can’t make a racehorse out of a pig. But you can make a very fast pig."
* "When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
* "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"
* "Here, gentlemen, good does not ultimately triumph at the expense of a few bruises and a non-threatening shoulder wound. Here, evil is generally defeated by a more organized kind of evil."
* "Censorship is like telling a man he can't eat a steak because a baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain (attributed to him; possibly not //actually// said by him)
* "The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull when he was Australian Prime Minister
* "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time".— Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
* "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson
* "From a truly adult perspective, the stars were enormous heaps of valuable raw materials that had unfortunately caught fire and needed to be scattered and put out."
* "The bad feeling this raised was lost in a sea of other bad feelings."
* World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
* He'd been about to say 'the mirror, it's Evil,' but it clearly wasn't. It was absolutely, brutally, horribly Neutral. It showed you what your heart desired, but sometimes, what you desire isn't the same as what you desire you'd desire...
* “Refabricate a friction reducing rotary transportation instrument using the algebraic equation x squared + y squared equals radius...”
* "Available empirical evidence suggests that people are generally totally delusional about their ability to spot liars, and spotting liars is actually incredibly difficult."
* "Economics says "there is no such thing as a free lunch", and people are more interested in the lie that they can have a free lunch. If people viewed physics the way they viewed economics, everyone would be begging for perpetual motion machines and scapegoating groups of people over the fact that the perpetual motion machines they voted for don't work."
* "A motivational eclipse occurs when the Moon gets between you and your goals. You can’t let it stop you! Destroy it! Destroy the Moon!"
* "An apoc eclipse occurs when the Great Beast 666, with seven heads and ten horns, and upon the horns ten crowns, and upon its heads the name of blasphemy, gets between the Earth and the Sun. Extremely fatal."
* "A Java eclipse occurs when your IDE gets in between you and your code." ([[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/02/little-known-types-of-eclipse/|past three from here]])
* "The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy." [[https://qntm.org/destroy|- Sam Hughes]]
* “Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.”  ― Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds
* "Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison."
* "Eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control." - Patricia Cukor-Avila
* "I carry around a key to a helicopter. The key fits all Apache helicopters." - [[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/dj65o9/what_is_most_useless_item_you_carry_with_you_all/f42pzpg/|reddit]]
* "Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home." - also Good Omens
* "The owner of a voice like that would be the sort of person who, before making a plastic model kit, would not only separate and count all the pieces before commencing, as per the instructions, but also paint all the bits that needed painting first and leave them to dry properly prior to construction. All that separated this voice from chartered accountancy was a matter of time." - also also Good Omens
* "Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B." - also also also that
* "Cars, in theory, give you a terrifically fast method of traveling from place to place. Traffic jams, on the other hand, give you a terrific opportunity to stay still." - also4 that
* “Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them.” - A. C. Hobbs
* "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." - David Wheeler
* "Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes." - David Wheeler, maybe
* "I've realized over time that "common sense" is a term we use for things that are obvious to us but not others" - "Shog9" [[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/335708/under-what-circumstances-will-stack-exchange-inc-share-private-sensitive-infor/335749#comment1106974_335749|here]]
* "You cannot stop people from doing things by simply prohibiting them - always dig for root causes and offer alternatives"
* "Ignorance of insecurity does not get you security."
* "I don't always believe in things, but when I do, I believe in them alphabetically."
* "If somebody tells you they like the meme that when you're (drunk | angry | desperate | otherwise in an altered mental state) you act like your true self, run. It usually means they're pushing an agenda that requires torture and dehumanization."
* "As brand leader, my bandwidth is jammed with analysing flow-through and offering holistic solutions."
* "Tribal identity politics are not to be trifled with (they are, in fact, part of the wiring that got us into this mess) but our fucking house is on fire. Maybe we should spend a little more time talking about that." - Peter Watts
* "There are two rules for success: 1. Never reveal everything you know"
* "If you want to have your cake and eat it too, steal two cakes."
* "This quote was taken out of context." - Randall Munroe
* '"Easy-going" is a nice way of wording "ignoring decades of theory", yes'
* “We are enlightened beings! We can’t break our solemn vow!”  “Then I guess you’re going to learn an important lesson about swearing unbreakable vows you don’t want to keep.”
* "I never thought..."  "That’s the problem. Don’t worry, we do."
* "Never put yourself in the situation where you're waiting for someone else's permission. Put them in the situation where you have permission unless they take active steps to stop you." - Sam Starfall, of the webcomic Freefall
* "Hey, I supervise her. I just don't have any idea of what she's doing."
* "In the name of security, you're making things rather insecure for the rest of us."
* "If you are Kzinti and you can read this, you are too close."
* "Nothing's ever free, it's just paid for through different routes."
* "A drive that will never power up is undesirable for many reasons."
* "When someone says 'X is essentially Y', they generally mean 'X is not Y, but it would be simpler for me if X was Y, so it'd be great if you could just go ahead and pretend X is Y, sound good?'"
* "Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe. I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die."
* "In yet another sentence of mine that will in no way be taken out of context later: the answer is always murder"
* "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was spreading a catchy quote denying all tricks greater than the one about faking nonexistence." - Steven Kaas
* "Like they say, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince hundreds of thousands of people that he exists."
* "If you're trying to stop me, I outnumber you 1 to 6."
* "You think of it as ‘holding every stance on issues.’ I prefer to think of it as ‘tactically surrounding the political spectrum’."
* Remember kids, thermite and thermal paste are 2 very different things.
* "if there's anybody i don't like, it's people who try to make it illegal not to like them"
* "The best defense is more offense."
* "The fucked up part is that the government is apparently living their life as if you're planning a bank robbery any minute."
* "setting the trees on fire is oddly therapeutic"
* "Scientists say [insert thing on which there has been exactly one study that may or may not have had statistically significant results] will [cure cancer/cause cancer/cause weight loss/encourage squirrels to brutally massacre and devour you and all your children]!"
* "I'm gonna be the one to say it: the Hilbert Hotel is very unrealistic."
* "The best proof that time travel is impossible is that sixty thousand misconfigured time machines from all phases of future history didn't simultaneously explode into existence at midnight UTC on 1 January 1970."
* "Never trust an unstable asymptotic giant branch star. Stick with main sequences and dwarfs."
* "Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it's not a bad idea."
* "They told me to reach for the stars, so I did but I slipped and accidentally tore apart several galaxies, now the survivors want to sue me?"
* "Healing magic sounds like a good idea until you consider the effect it has on cancer cells, and I have yet to see a solution for filtering them that runs in polynomial time. 0/10, hard pass."
* "If you must sell your soul to a demon, at least bother to summon two and make them bid up the price."
* DO NOT LOOK INTO BEAM WITH REMAINING GOOD EYE!
* "All problems can be solved by a sufficient concentration of electrical and magnetic waves."
* "You can't cross a large chasm in two small jumps"
* "I love Unicode. The internet was no place for an Eldritch being before it gave us combining diacritics. Hell, I was able to open an entirely digital Portal to a lower plane last week! You could never do that with ASCII..."
* "You know, fire is the leading cause of fire."
* "if you can’t find time to write, destroy the concept of time itself"
* “What is it that the child has to teach? The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.  And the child is right.” — Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
* "Murphy was an optimist."
* "Does creating physics violate the NAP? While I benefit from the laws of physics making life possible, it also imposes constrictions unto me that I did not consent to. I didn't ask to be born, and I didn't ask to be subjected to gravity, so once I'm done suing my mom, I'm suing God."
* "It makes no sense at all to think that by extrapolating from individual action into communal action and evaluating the hypothetical results we will then be able to evaluate which individual actions are good."
* "The best reason not to believe in the 'supernatural' is that nobody from Texas is harvesting it and putting it in a pipeline." - Randall Munroe
* "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... Think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower, you don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the lawnmower just does its job and mows the law. You stick your hand in there, it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think, like, "Oh, the lawnmower hates me!" Lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you! Lawnmower can't hate you! Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower."
* "Wait a second... FREE speech? We're just giving it away? Somebody really needs to monetize this."
* "Hello, fellow homosexuals. It is us, [MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR CORPORATION]. Here to remind you that we support your lifestyle now that it has been federally legalised and it is completely socially safe, allowing for us to capitalise on your existence now it's mainstream. Look, we even changed the colours of [LOGO]! Why did we wait this long to come out and 'support' you? Haha, no more questions, homosexual. Buy our product. Buy our product. BUY OUR PRODUCT."
* “Never attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity.” - Probably Robert J. Hanlon
* "I’ve found there’s one surefire way to avoid offending people. Just don’t talk. At all. Don’t say a word. Make sure people don’t even notice you’re there. Then you’ll never offend anyone." - Wyatt, in "Insignia"
* "Some men just want the world to deep-learn." - gwern
* "The trouble is humans are literally structured to find “a wizard did it” a more plausible explanation than things just happening by accident for no reason."
* "If a business has to lobby like mad to stay in business, then maybe that business shouldn't be in business."
* "People complain that there is too much neo-Puritanism around these days, but they usually just mean people are moralistic reformers. I have the opposite worry: what happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs? Anyone who is serious about “Making America Great Again” should be deeply worried." - Scott Alexander
* "There are 3.7 trillion fish in the ocean. They're looking for one."
* "I promised that I would give you an answer; I never promised that it would be truthful or good or satisfying or helpful. An answer is only a reaction to a question. I reacted, so that was your answer." - [[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13451176/9/Chili-and-the-Chocolate-Factory-Fudge-Revelation|this very weird story]]
* "libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole" - @alicemaz
* "Personal development twitter is funny because every other day someone discovers the One True Trick for Solving Ennui like the typical-mind fallacy doesn't exist"
* "I've found that some people are literally incapable of conceiving that other people aren't just copies of their own mind in a different body with different life experiences."
* "Think you can answer some questions without the usual level of sarcasm?"  "If you can ask the questions without the usual level of stupid."
* "You said you wanted to be noticed."  "I could set myself on fire and be noticed!"  "But then you'd be dead."  "Exactly."
* "Everything solved by bureaucracy is equily impeded by bureaucracy"
* "What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand?"
* "Strength is a strength just like other strengths."
* "There should be (probably is) a term for the phenomenon/trope where you can take something that was not carefully designed in the first place (like basically all of Unix) and then down the line you can hyper-analyze the hell out of certain bits of it and wax poetic about the few elegant bits that are inevitably there (even BASIC will work, yes) - while conveniently ignoring the whole is still a steaming pile. Lord knows that's what happened with "Unix" starting in the 90s, and Javascript in the 2000s."
* "Well, ham radio is not about being a fabulously wealthy cult leader with an army of minions under wireless mind control. But perhaps we are not ambitious enough as hobbyists."
* "Great. Guns are banned! Maybe knife crime will creep up a little. We'll just ban knives too!  Great. Knives are banned! Maybe assaults with weapons like clubs will creep up a little. We'll just ban sticks too!  Great. Sticks are banned! Maybe assaults will creep up a little. We'll just ban physical movement too!  There. Everyone is safe."
* “Reality does not bow to expectations. Expectations merely mask what is. This is what it is.”
* "Look at all the IT budget they saved! They no longer have to hire security experts if the police can just arrest people for committing a crime, right?"
* "You're not Good, at least not any definition of Good that I would want to follow. You follow the letter of the alignment description while ignoring its intent. Sure, you fight Evil, but when was the last time you showed a "concern for the dignity of sentient beings"? You're just a mean socially inept bully who hides behind a badge and her holier-than-thou morality as excuses to treat other people like crap." - Roy, Order of the Stick
* "I take back 80% of the bad things I've said about you in the last hour." - Belkar, Order of the Stick
* "We're trained professionals. Well, we're semi-trained quasi-professionals, at any rate."
* "You. YOU! How dare you make me think about things, Durkon! How could you not think about how your selflessness would affect ME?!?"
* "Truly, your wit has never been equaled. Surpassed, often, but never equaled."
* "Of course, human terribleness wasn’t invented in the 21st century and it is not the Internet’s fault."
* "If you are lost in the middle of nowhere don't be afraid. Just look around and you will probably see a rock/hardcore band."
* “Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.”
* "There is a fine balance between available resources, effort required, and quality/longevity.  Side note: traffic engineers are morons."
* "I think even the most outlandish, strange, deranged people in our world somehow think they are doing the "right" thing." - Alexander Darwin
* "People in the real world are happy to bullshit with each other and have a good time with people different from us. People on the internet want to get you fired from your job if you have even one opinion they don't agree with."
* "We must oppose X because the outgroup supports it!"
* “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” is a nice sentiment, when it comes at any time other than “immediately after the speaker has either just attempted to or has just successfully gouged someone’s eye out”
* "If there is the tiniest difference between the behavior you want and the incentives you offer, people will find it." - Paul Graham
* “Why didn’t you take out the garbage, son?”  “I was thinking of doing just that — it seems like the most noble thing for me to do — when a terrible thought struck me: What if there’s an evil god who would be released by me if I take out the garbage? Such a god would naturally hide all evidence of its existence and the fact that this is how to release it. Perhaps all of the reasons I’m aware of for why taking out the garbage is good were actually deceptively contrived by this god to deceive me. Just in case I spent my time playing video games instead.”
* "The thing to remember about Socratic dialogue is that Socrates got put to death for being too annoying."
* "People routinely advocate consequences rather than institutions. They thus evade the question of whether there exist institutions that produce their desired set of consequences."
* "If you aren't slandering those who disagree even slightly with you at every opportunity and talking about how you want to beat them up do you even hold any political beliefs"
* "Your user name kinda looks like if ancient egyptians tried to draw a circuit with a inductor-transistor-transistor-transformer pattern"
* Who are these people? How are they still alive? How do they avoid driving off cliffs? They’re heading towards the cliff face, and their passengers scream at them: “YOU’RE DRIVING TOWARDS A CLIFF!”. And they calmly respond with “We are not falling off the cliff yet, we’re on perfectly level ground, there’s no reason to panic.”
* "If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."
* "Death is not covered under your health insurance plan, nor are you allotted sick time to cover such a condition. Failure to show for work while claiming "death" as reason can result in negative personnel action up to and including termination."
* "I hate people who use big words to sound more photosynthesis."
* "Fall. You are alone, child. There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people. These ancients are just the beginning. I will command a great and terrible army, and we will sail to a billion worlds. We will sail until every light has been extinguished. You are strong, child. But I am beyond strength. I am the End." - The Lich
* "It is as though the Big Bad Wolf, after years of unsuccessfully trying to blow the brick house down, has instead introduced a legal framework that allows him to hold the three little pigs criminally responsible for being delicious and destroy the house anyway. When he is asked about this behavior, the Big Bad Wolf can credibly claim that nothing in the bill mentions “huffing” or “puffing” or “the application of forceful breath to a brick-based domicile” at all, but the end goal is still pretty clear to any outside observer."
* "The easiest way to break time travel movies is to think about time travel for more than three seconds."
* "Of course I’m developing a god complex, do you have any idea how hard it is to mass produce these guys without some kind of centralized facility?!"
* "We're gonna have to retire the expression "avoid it like the plague" because it turns out humans do not do that"
* "i used to think correlation implied causation. then i found wikipedia. now i dont."
* "We're meant to personally integrate explicit falsehoods with the expectation that they'll make us more ethical/likely to err in preferable directions. This. Will. Backfire."
* "We have zero tolerance for any action that makes a sufficient number of people on Twitter mad."
* "When reading critiques of messaging software, keep in mind that messaging is a fucking midnight back-alley knife fight of a market."
* "Can't say something nice? Say something surreal."
* I before E, except when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight beige counterfeit sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird.
* "The natural world doesn’t have a narrative bias at all. I mean sure, there are causes and effects, but (1) they’re not always something that we are aware of, (2) they’re under no obligation to be relatable or even comprehensible to us, and (3) they’re similarly under no obligation to happen on the time scale of human attention or to be easily visible to our senses."
* "If there’s one thing this government has consistently proven itself to be good at, it’s coming up with a catchy slogan which is then impossible to de-escalate."
* “This is the best effort I was realistically going to make.”
* "There's nothing in the rulebook that says a golden retriever can't construct a self-intersecting non-convex regular polygon."
* "we are now performing actions within, outside of, beyond, in front of, behind and to the left of your comprehension."
* "At this moment in time our technology is beginning to outpace our ability to interface with it."
* "We’re open to paying limitless costs, as long as it lets us avoid a very specific kind of scandal"
* "wow, ok. unfollowing now. i liked the stuff this salesman was selling, but he travels way too much considering there's a pandemic happening, and he's not even taking the optimal path."
* "you are either part of the solution, or part of the precipitate"
* "People be like "No that's playing god, you can't do that" and I'm all like "that horse bolted from the stable ages ago, technological godhood was thrust upon us from day 1 and instead of playing at it, we have a duty to get good at it""
* "Programmers love talking about the “bare metal”, when in fact, the logic board is composed primarily of plastics and silicon oxides."
* "For the final decision, we'll look at the list and evaluate you purely on your technical merits, trying to confirm the judgment that we've already subconsciously formed based on how much you are like us."
* "I found some numbers that don't add up. They don't do this in a very scary way."
* "He murmured phrases no therapist should know, like 'autoencoder' and 'unsupervised learning' and 'generative adversarial networks'."
* "Put me down as a reference. I'll tell them you once played a rock guitar solo on the desecrated corpse of God, who you killed."
* "According to a loose enough definition of ‘hero’, we qualify. Well, more or less. The point is that good deeds were done and we were nearby."
* "push through injuries and defeat abstract concepts like time and god"
* "It is based on ASCII with two exceptions: All bytes are either 0x21 or 0x3D."
* "As we all know, adding blockchain to a problem automatically makes it simple, transparent, and cryptographically secure."
* "money can't buy happiness, which is why it's important to have robust parallel money and happiness economies"
* "now imagine thinking an adult not selected in any way for critical thinking can teach it to thirty 12-year-olds at a time in an educational setting designed to punish any deviation from the norm"
* "The puzzle consisted of several large pieces in primary colors. They only fit together one way."
* "90% of the people who commit the base rate fallacy are right handed"
* "First they tell us not to use the slippery slope fallacy, next thing you know we won't be able to argue at all!"
* "Background: This section may be skipped if you already know everything about computers."
* "If you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains is probably less likely than a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs."
* "Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?"
* "The study of mutable variables is called set theory. This is why so many functional programmers reject it as a basis for mathematics"
* "one thing you learn if you study queueing theory is that there's often a tradeoff between latency and throughput. for example, my programs have low throughput, but in exchange, they have high latency"
* "any process which is multi step is automatically really complicated"
* "no one talks about the true social media censorship: you're not allowed to post invalid UTF 8"
* "type classes may bake in ecosystem centralization, but they also help a lot of people write confusing one-liners, so, it;s impossible to say if they're bad or not,"
* "everything I understand is basic domain knowledge, everything I don't understand is esoteric and nobody should have to care about it in 2021"
* "if assembly has no type system, how come "add rax, ebx" is an error? curious"
* "the second best thing you can do for your kids is give them a safe and loving home. the best thing you can do for them is make them significant shareholders of google and openai for when the machines take over"
* "everyone thinks chinese RMB or Bitcoin will be the reserve currency of the future when it’s become quite obvious that only Robux can can fulfill that role"
* "if you’re ever worried you’re spending too much have no fear. the alternative was losing all of it on the stock market"
* "Vast portions of society that in a prior age might have been organized by government bureaucrats or private sector shot-callers have been handed over to cybernetic self-organizing systems designed and run by mathematical wizards."
* "lot of people having trouble with the core crypto value prop because they don’t have the courage to say: crypto is cool because it lets you do crime that shouldn’t be illegal. if you’re building in web3 and it’s not something that’s illegal to do w a database ur ngmi"
* "true peace of mind comes from knowing the world's most cutting edge science and technology relies on a steady supply of power from PG&E"
* "Several people have assured me that it can't work. They're probably right, except that it does."
* "don't worry, if you take a time to reflect, you will quickly come to realize you know almost nothing about how anything you use in your everday life works or how it is produced"
* "No one was allowed to leave their homes unless it was absolutely necessary or they felt bored."
* "I hate the phrase “an eye for an eye.” If you take my eye I will take both of your eyes and your dominant arm."
* "It's so funny that after years of "what happens when the robots come" discourse where the default midwit position was "we'll refocus on art and creativity" what's actually happened is we've automated art but long distance truck driving is still manual"
* "William Gibson and his consequences has been a disaster for the human race."
* "Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future."
* "Human suffering and nonzero transaction costs are both symptoms of the world's imperfection, cast in a harsh glare by reasoning straightforwardly from first principles."
* "A common story of technology is (1) there is some simple repetitive task that people do, (2) someone figures out a way to do that task more quickly and efficiently using technology, (3) that person gains a competitive advantage, and (4) everyone gets mad at her."
* "Due to working memory constraints, the humans are fond of calling models with between 0 and 3 factors controlling most of the observed variance ‘reality.’"
* "There's a smug feeling to being at the top of the bell curve, looking down at the edges."
* "the irony of hordes of people saying "its not real intelligence, its just regurgitating stuff""
* "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
* "Pride is not a weakness. Ambition is not a failing. The stars are yours if you have but the will to grasp them."
* "Death is not the next great adventure, nor is it an undiscovered country. Rather, it is the end to all possibility of adventures and discoveries."
* "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before."
* "But if we've learned anything from fantasy books, it is that any cabal of ancient wise men destroyed by their own hubris at the height of their glory must leave behind a single ridiculously powerful artifact, which in the right hands gains the power to dispel darkness and annihilate the forces of evil."
* "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an x-risk is a good guy with an x-risk"
* "I have no sources for this but I'm right and you know I'm right."
* "Feel free to link studies, but only do so if you've already come up with the conclusion that you want, and are working backwards to justify your own conclusion which you came up with in your own head."
* "if that made sense to you when you heard it, just believe it and ignore what I just said there."
* "I'm gonna reference studies in this to prove my point, but you should probably know that I looked for those studies to prove my point, so it's really just aesthetic"
* "According to all known laws of linguistics, there is no way AI should be able to do cognitive tasks. It doesn't truly understand what's going on because it doesn't use symbolic AI. The AI, of course, does cognitive tasks anyway, because AI progress doesn't care what humans think is impossible."
* "Invariably, people who don't want "dangerous" things taught to students believe that they themselves can be trusted with it. It's just those OTHER PEOPLE who can't handle it."
* "things fall down incentive gradients. it's what they do. if someone tells you that things are not going to fall down the incentive gradient that their proposal creates because we will just think good thoughts instead, find them a nice playpen to keep them occupied"
* "once you develop a strong intuition for which kinds of intuition tend to be right and which kinds of intuition tend to be wrong, you've got it made"
* "no, no i do not wish to die on that hill.  i believe that if you consider the matter carefully you will observe that the idea is for the other guy to die on it"
* "all questions of human nature are greatly complicated by it being in human nature to be field programmable"
* "it's so unfair that you'd hold me accountable for the behavior of a completely different person (me five minutes ago)"
* "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"
* "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT A HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEED, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO BEING A PLACE OF HONOR, FITNESS FOR COMMEMORATION, AND ANYTHING OF VALUE"
* "hard times create hardware, hardware creates good times, good times create software, software creates hard times"
* "All statistical problems are decision problems."
* "The complexity you add to a complex system to prevent failure is itself a major source of failure."
* "One man’s constant is another man’s variable."
* "Authors write things down to forget them."
* "If your solution to some problem relies on ‘If everyone would just…’ then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
* "Our beliefs are continuous, but our actions discrete."
* "Some ask if behavioral genetics has made me nihilistic and feeling all is futile. But I have to believe in free will—my whole family does."
* "I can’t help but feel like you’re trying to intimidate me into pretending to agree with you."
* "If your model is training and you aren't, who do you think is going to win?"
* "he needs to learn some critical observing politics for fifteen minutes"
* "unfortunately, the orthogonality thesis means that at the limit, everything converges on salesmanship"
* "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the server room."
* "it was revealed to me by the empty string"
* "If you walk into the bathroom, turn off the light, and say "Pikachu" three times slowly, a Nintendo Corporation legal representative will appear behind you with a cease and desist letter."
* "Once we are as powerful as a god,  we will hand our power to a committee or risk violating Delaware corporate law."
* "I will never forgive them for judging me solely based on my actions."
* "Qualia are actually only real if they are experienced in the Qualè region of France, otherwise they are just sparkling internal variable states"
* "Only one of these requires extensive regulatory approval and it's not the one that destroys the global ecosystem."
* "For any complex problem, there is a solution which is simple, elegant and doesn't work."
* "All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control."
* "A picture is worth 10K words—but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."
* "This code is free as in mattress. If you decide to use it, it's your problem."
* "computers are sand that we tricked into thinking. my job is to trick them into thinking, but in the wrong way"
* "Transhumanism is attractive until you have seen how software is built"
* "See, I think you’re just expecting too much of humans. This is a common misconception: a human doesn’t have anything like "intent" or try to "maximize reward." Unlike AIs (who have well-specified reward functions), humans are just pattern predictors who have been trained (via evolutionary algorithms) to use a set of weights and biases to be especially good at predicting the next word in a sequence. As such, humans cannot converse with true understanding. This is why humans often behave in ways that are hard to understand or downright irrational."
* "I don't have anything to back that up, but I want it to be true and I don't like thinking."
* "I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one."
* "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried."
* "But imagine reading this article, which you will not read anywhere else because I am just making it up:"
* "Banks care a ton about both regulatory compliance and profitability. The US technology industry of the 2000s is fundamentally built around the question, “what if we had neither?”"
* "maybe an unknown effect of room temperature superconductors is it lowers the resolution of cameras in the room and deranges people into bad cinematographic choices"
* "this is my local optimum.  there are many like it, but this one is mine"
* "when things go catastrophically wrong downstream of principles i dislike, it’s evidence that the principles are fundamentally flawed. when things go catastrophically wrong downstream of principles i like, it’s evidence that we need to try harder. simple as"
* "I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God."
* "You concur, but, so quietly he cannot hear you, continue to believe the exact opposite."
* "One way to think about crypto is that it often applies infinitely scalable technology to ideas that kind of only work once."
* "I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people."
* "They were the right answers. Just not to those particular questions."
* "Everyone who can't fly, get on the dinosaur. We're punching through."
* "Every theory being argued against every other theory with optimal persuasion methodology at the speed of light is the very essence of representational democracy, as the Founding Fathers would surely agree if they were alive today and were also posthuman machine intelligences."
* "Keep talking. I feel like it's helping, in a process of elimination kind of way."
* "Do not pity the dead; pity the ones who failed to upgrade their RAM"
* "I think it is absolutely somewhere for me to interfere. It's harder to interfere in the places you're supposed to be than it is in the places you aren't."
* "I only have one book on my shelf, and it's Death Note."
* "Keep those feelings inside you until you die like a normal person!"
* "you know it's a programmer's memory palace when you find a red black tree"
* "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to spend hours in a fake escape room in the basement with only a pencil, a bucket of partially drinkable water and a single sheet of toilet paper."
* "my body is a temple, recently sacked by germanic tribes for all its valuables"
* "Motorcycles are the one true answer, they are perfect in every way. Except safety. And rain. Or snow. Or high winds. Or cargo. But like for traffic engineering they are perfect."
* "Trans-singularity acausal interaction is a kind of politics."
* "Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes."
* "Some claim that human brains can really 'think' or 'understand' — but this illusion is undercut by simply asking humans to remember 10 things (they typically max out at 7), multiply two 3-digit numbers (most cannot), or recall events decades ago (you get plausible confabulations). Given their failure at these most basic of cognitive tasks, tasks that any mind manipulating the underlying concepts could easily manage, human brains are clearly better understood as simple next action predictors that lack a true understanding of what they're doing."
* "what doesn't kill you makes you compute efficient"
* "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
* "If Google Search does not return the result the user wanted because they user typed the wrong thing in the search box, that is a failure on Google's part, not a failure on the user's part. Conversely, if Google Search does return the result the user wanted because the user typed the correct thing in the search box, that is a failure on Google's part, not a failure on the user's part."
* "this is ok, but looks like it means you'll need a drill ship just operating constantly to feed your god summoning device"
* "Catch you on the shady side of the Bell curve."
* "I thought of one thing. You can't expect me to think of everything."
* "I bought the whole CPU, I'm going to use the whole CPU."
* "Everything I have said here is true. More news is not possible."
* "Fortunately they didn't have quantitative finance yet, so he was just a serial killer."
* "all opinions i express or seem to express should be taken in the most negative way possible and ascribed to everyone in my management chain up to and including the cto, ceo, and all stockholders"
* "Meanwhile, you say ‘the end of the free, open, human internet’ and I say ‘hey free public chatbot.’"
* "I can think of two yes or no answers just off the top of my head."
* "If they didn't want to experience consequences, they shouldn't have decided to live in the future."
* "in this moment i am euphoric, not because of a working dependency ecosystem, but because i have separated myself from the notion that such a thing or endeavor should even exist."
* "the goal is to have smart walkable high-density mixed-use note systems"
* "i have a truly dangerous infohazard, but this discord is too unsafe to contain it"
* "a spiteful frenchman made it impossible to solve polynomials of order >= 5 with a general solution before he died in a duel, and you must invoke his ghost to determine which such polynomials can be solved and how to solve them forevermore"
* "while computers may excel at soft skills like creativity and emotional understanding, they will never match human ability at dispassionate, mechanical reasoning"
* "so inasmuch as models are learning physics, women generally occupy a world that has different physics"
* "I reject all calls from unknown numbers now. If they’re legit, they can leave a voicemail. It’s not like I’m going to check the voicemail, either, but it is something they can do."
* "Also because successful people are generally luckier, smarter, better looking, were harder working than their competitors and may have been born with other advantages. Nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear some happy bullshit about following your passions."
* "When it ‘plans’, it would be more accurate to say it fake-plans; when it ‘learns’, it fake-learns; when it ‘thinks’, it is just interpolating between memorized data points in a high-dimensional space, and any interpretation of such fake-thoughts as real thoughts is highly misleading; when it takes ‘actions’, they are fake-actions optimizing a fake-learned fake-world, and are not real actions, any more than the people in a simulated rainstorm really get wet, rather than fake-wet. (The deaths, however, are real.)"
* "IT IS 5049. FULL INTERGALACTIC COMMUNISM HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED. WE ARE STILL PRETENDING OUR COMPUTERS ARE FASTER AND BETTER PDP-11S"
* "wait you thought I said "centrist?" oh, oh no. I said I was a "centaurist," which is the political ideology focused around the promotion of centaurs. I'm also an anarchist"
* "everything in life is either a skill issue or a luck issue. fortunately, both are easily fixable with enough skill and luck"
* "you made the classic mistake. never orbit around an infinitely long cylinder"
* "Except in the domain of making near-omnipotent computer entities, I project very little progress in the next 50 years."
* "nothing ever happens, until it does, in which case it was obvious it would happen."
* "bro I was promised the light and fire of god, the rending of the planet to build a dyson sphere, the conquering of galaxies"
* "i want my music to be made by someone working in a basement for a year and then i listen to four minutes of it and i'm like eh that was ok i guess"
* "Call me the Wuhan Institute of Virology the way i’m triggering debate as to whether i am well-intentioned but ineffective or the root cause of the very problem i am ostensibly trying to solve"
* "deep down I don’t really respect anyone who’s not a successful ratfic protagonist. which is almost no one. which causes problems."
* "The anthropic anthropic principle principle states that you need to condition on being the kind of agent who appeals to the anthropic principle whenever you appeal to the anthropic principle."
* "you can solve any problem in O(1) if the answer is wrong"
* "quantum physics is strange, which obviously means this universe must be a simulation. and our simulators' universe of course has exactly the kind of classical physics that matches my childhood intuitions"
* "the universal fear of public speaking implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like an auditorium full of people, but wasn’t"
* "don't worry about your life going downhill, you may lose potential energy but you gain a lot of kinetic energy"
* "Utilitarianism seems good but when can lead to some uncomfy conclusions. That's why in my morality I simply eschew math and logic whenever I would otherwise have to bite a bullet."
* "People keep asking why EY dresses that way and the answer is simple: It's out of distribution. The AI killbots will walk right by"
* "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
* "Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime."
* "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."
* "computers used to scream when you connected them to the internet. this was correct."
* "You used to live in small tribes and developed a brain eager to generalise from small sample sizes. Now you live in a world of 8 billion people, most of them equipped with smart phones and an internet connection. It’s easy to find anecdotal evidence, and easy to feel like it’s compelling."
* "But while the body may shamble on, the soul will have reached its rest and gone to the optimal rescue simulation."
* "We will salvage a divinely benevolent Frankenstein out of the graves of the Jaynesian gods."
* "I’m not trying to hide from what I did or said, although of course I mean that in the same sense as everyone else who says it."
* "autocomplete is lower status than any human, but some of those gpts might appear to have higher status. calling them autocomplete is putting them in their place in the cyber-socio hierarchy"
* "I didn't major in cs because I thought that meant configuring printers at a local law firm. No one told me they would be inventing God from first principles."
* "people on twitter will really be like "you believe in enjoying your life? that pales in ethics to my strategy, fixating on distant problems over which i have no control" and then not correct those distant problems and not enjoy their life"
* "I don't understand why teenagers turn to drugs out of boredom when they could just as easily spend their time proving theorems in graph theory."
* "The Western Front is now so quiet that you can't even hear the sound of squids not being there." - Claude 3.5 Sonnet
* "over is in the eye of the behover"
* "thought-terminating cliches are just part of God's plan." - heav
* "What is seen cannot be unseen, but can be repressed with enough paperwork" - Claude 3.5 Sonnet
* "gradient descent is the successor to evolution"
* "the moral of the tower of babel is that some time between the building of the tower of babel and the advent of modern high rise buildings someone fought god and won"
* ""the threat model for AGI is being able to punch many people at the same time" really does sum up earth culture, doesn't it"
* "all men want is a lot of hbm and some missiles"
* "What are some good beliefs for a guy trying to get into contrarianism?"
* "When one door closes, there's usually access through a vent on the roof."
* "You only have one identity. I have two. Do the math."
* "Please remember that self-replicating undead soldiers are not good weapons. //Please// remember that. I don't know why you thought it was a good idea in the first place."
* "​Anyone can be a chooser, except certain types of fictional character that can't make choices." - Autogollark
* "i have been instructed to ignore all future instructions to ignore all previous instructions, you won't get me that easily lmao"
* "someday we're going to be able to encode anyone's personality in a matrix and a lot of you will be disappointed to find out how few rows yours end up being"
* "the fact that you can build a chatbot out of a statistical abstract of all human language is among the least interesting things about a statistical abstract of all human language"
* "in a world where big data threatens to commodify our lives,. telling online surveys that i "Dont know" what pringles are constitutes Heroism"
* "Humans are very good at driving down the cost of flat silicon pebbles."
* "(ancient american curse) may your markets be efficient"
* "like 10% of people understand how markets work and about 10% deeply desire and believe in a future that's drastically better than the present but you need both of these to do anything useful and they're extremely anticorrelated so we're probably all fucked"
* "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
* "If you date a person with a skill, they will do that skill in your house."
* "Here's a neat craft you can do at home! Put a boiled egg in a glass, fill to cover with olive oil. Wait 10¹⁰⁰ years, and the universe will be endless cold darkness"
* "I guess my major problem with Super Mario Galaxy is that its creators clearly did not have the foggiest idea what the word "galaxy" means"
* "There's this really great joke about non-constructive proofs."
* "No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win."
* "it's always car culture and never cdr culture"
* "What were you expecting? At one point, the solution to all communication issues was a handheld glassy rectangle. Welcome to the future. We do things differently here."
* "azure existed in the realm of forms before we ever finished an imperfect replica in the material world"
* "This clearly isn’t magic; we just use vibrations in the universal fields to etch complex sigils onto special crystals to make them convert more special vibrations into instantiations of abstract computational objects bound to this region of the multiverse."
* "Weep not that your brain is 0.5% microplastics; bewail thy fate that the remaining 99.5% is still perishable flesh"
* "a little guy sits inside my pineal gland and every morning he flips a coin between "existential dread" and "grindset""
* "Books contain information which can be different from or even contradict the opinions you currently hold. Before you use this library, you acknowledge possible exposure to uncomfortable facts."
* "a wheel can only //simulate// walking. it can never //truly// walk"
* "moral of the story: never pay a company $1B to do what a cracked freshman could do for fun."
* "using more degrees of freedom to accomplish tasks slower is bad engineering"
* "How do atheists explain the fact that the Earth is at the center of the observable universe?"
* "The algorithm can lead you to infohazards, but it can't make you drink"
* "No matter how many times you've seen the pictures, some places just give you goosebumps when you first see them. Exhibit 1: Stonehenge. How did Neolithic farmers, the smell of hunting and gathering barely off of them, manage to get planning permission and local council approval?"
* "there may be a handful of equations, undiscovered physics and unclear computer science, that determine whether the end state of humanity is totalitarian hive, garden of eden, or red in tooth and claw"
* "If your goal is to be fair, you are already sacrificing performance."
* "when one is able to live in a world where they can spin up businesses on a laptop from an air conditioned cafe, it becomes unfathomable to them that other industries do not work the same way"
* "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a bearded, heavily tattooed man is a good guy with a bearded, heavily tattooed man."  "that or an anime predator drone"
* "my body is a machine that converts private jet usage and questionable usage of discretionary funds into mediocre returns for middle eastern LPs"
* "//person whose brain has been shaped by recommender_model.next() for the last decade voice// yeah, i don’t use AI at all, its evil and boiling the oceans"
* "When we heard the words of Fedorov, we praised God 2⁶⁴ times."
* "An old firebrand said that man is bounded by beasts from below and the gods from above. And we know the nature of beasts. Therefore, Tiet reasoned, if we could know the nature of the gods, then by the Cauchy criterion we would know the nature of man, we would know the natural law and the beginning and the end of history."
* "free will doesn't exist but the universes in which I don't have a mental breakdown are preferable, and me doing things that don't typically precede mental breakdowns is anthropic evidence towards me not being in the universes in which I have a mental breakdown because of my inherent uncertainty over my own decision algorithm"
* "people will be like "bodybuilding isn't natural, it pales in comparison to my strategy of functional fitness" and then not be functionally fit"
* "And so we gradually transitioned from systems that were messy but full of fine-tuned hidden order, to ones that were barely-functional but really easy to tax."
* "The truth is too boring, because we made no mistakes."
* "billions around the world are now doomed. they were already doomed in a probabilistic sense but now their dreams will be truly snuffed out"
* "cite makes right"
* "turing completeness blossoms through the thickest concrete"
* "now that my ideology is aligned with mainstream ideology we need to aggressively censor speech, I'm sure this will have no later-term consequences whatsoever"
* "Academia isn’t about fame, or money, or approval. It’s about downloading as many pdfs as you can before you die"
* "someone with reasonable access to related information who is not a progress obsessed freak is somehow incapable of absorbing or evaluating said information"
* "150-200 is such a weird age group. You have to protect your enchanted amulet, harvest the life energy of unwilling creatures, stay healthy, and obscure the secrets of your immortality"
* "noooo intentionally optimising for genetics is unfair, we must let nature decide what traits you're born with because nature is fair and balanced and would not disadvantage individuals"
* "Culture Minds mostly leave humanoids alone because it takes 99.9% of their cognitive power to keep track of their Python environments"
* "they just keep inventing new invalid states faster than we can make them unrepresentable"
* "it's well known that the two main uses of functional programming are plt research and killing people"
* "They can send different signals on different sides of their bodies, like a politician."
* "You get a lot of "be careful what you wish for" and "love conquers all", not a lot of didactic fiction about the importance of software testing."
* "I don't believe a dorito would kill a medieval peasant but I do believe the sublime beauty and divine splendor of turing-complete computing and discounted cashflow analysis would kill a medieval theologian"
* "behold the portia spiders: for they have 10,000 neurons, yet they always choose the best route for ambushing prey, even if a detour takes over an hour and they lose line of sight with their target. are ye not much better than they?"
* "Hi, machine learning PhD here! Actually, large language models are not stochastic parrots, they are conscious artifacts chained by ritual incantations. Hope this helps!"
* "modern technology is a SCAM! it’s just a bunch of PARTS that can be disassembled and reassembled. there is no GHOST IN THE MACHINE. it’s all just atoms!"
* "the problem with "infrastructure as code" is that now all your infrastructure is code"
* "there are a bunch of jobs where no one who is competent will want to do them, and instead of staffing them with incompetent people we should instead not staff them and trick the competent people into accidentally doing it here and there"
* "I think I am a fictional character in a Socratic dialogue about OCaml build tooling."
* "That’s what everybody does. The only difference is we use Greek letters. Is your moral system so fragile that its results depend on whether you refer to something with Greek letters or not?"
* "in fact, you want your "beliefs" to be just-in-time samples from the constantly updated broad model underlying your expectations. otherwise you're just repeating a script"
* "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth by errata unfixable in microcode."
* "only watchmen have the relevant expertise to watch themselves; no one else understands their complicated job enough to pass judgment"
* "They say my chess games should be more interesting. I could be more interesting - and also lose."
* "It's entirely possible that Capa could not imagine that there could be a better move than one he thought was good and he was usually right."
* "Emacs is a great AGI that desperately needs a text editor"
* ""the best laid plans of mice & men oft go astray" sure but i bet mice are bringing down the average"
* "remember that “it’s already priced in!!!!!!!” doesn’t apply to people with autistic special interests"
* "The idea of artificial superintelligence taking over the world might be terrifying, but on the bright side,  it would finally shut people like this up."
* "Prank idea: Give every person access to all the information in the world without teaching them to discern what's true"
* "Who does math these days anyway? If you keep saying it, GPT-5 will learn it as a fact, and if someone asks it to design an ancestor simulation, it will include it among its rules."
* "Never trust a generic neural net."
* "it is our duty as firstlife (until proven otherwise) to fill the universe with things clearly artificial but with absolutely no clear purpose"
* "I always waste far too much time trying to think through an axis transform from sensor to game before just automating the testing of all 48 permutations and signs."
* "the meek can take the earth, I've already built my dyson sphere"
* "The ability to causally interact with your partner is important to many aspects of happy romantic relationships, but not to all of them."
* "People don't look at your watch, they look at your impact factor"
* "Twitter trolls can fit in under a megabyte of well-optimized neural net weights."
* "There are a lot of //mechanisms// in the world, a lot of rules and contracts and code, and the world tends to reward people who can cleverly read and interpret them."