“Programming is labour intensive, costly intelligence work. Why has there been so little progress in understanding it since Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming in 1971?

“In the long run the ‘minor’ virtues are the only ones that matter. Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity, and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and stands immutable in the storm of circumstance.

“I hate sneaking around and making plans and feeling big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? The majority is always holy, is it not? Just never wrong for one tiny insignificant moment? Let’s not think about it. Let’s just crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger.

“The cruel irony of clichés is that we’re doomed to not understand them until the moment we re-coin them for ourselves.

“This layout turns CSS into a selector rolodex with insanity on the right. And you know something? That’s exactly what CSS is: insanity, complete unmitigated chaos.

“We’ve done a lot with testing frameworks over the years, but does the testing concern deserve its own standalone DSL? Not one built in a language, but rather a separate language?

“Wikipedia’s community has defined itself not in terms of the encyclopedia it is supposedly producing, but instead of the people it venerates and the people it abhors. Part of the problem is Jimbo Wales himself. Jimbo wants to be popular. This is obvious to anyone who puts much effort into watching him. He abhors conflict and wants everyone to just get along. As a result, he ends up drawing around him people willing to venerate him as club leader.

“The iron law of oligarchy: all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. Causes: the technical indispensability of leadership; the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders; and the general immobility and passivity of the masses.

“Only nascent civilizations will transmit messages without compression, since compressionless transmission is such a bad use of bandwidth. Compressed transmissions, though, have the problem that they approach randomness. That means that the only thing SETI can recognize will be either intentional communications or else the communication of very early civilizations, pre-compression. The situation featured in Contact, where a civilization notices the ‘momentary’ event of our world broadcasting uncompressed must be extremely rare.