“Programming is an art with three elements. The writing of comments is prose literature, aiming to tell the story behind the code. The formation of layout through whitespace is sculpture, seeking to show the code’s hidden structure. Finally, the choice of meaningful identifiers is almost stylized poetry: a type of creative communication through a few words adhering to a specific form.

“The enemy is not the common denominator, but the Tyranny of the Normal, when the unproductive hamstring the productive because their code is different or dangerous. Or when the productive abandon the unproductive, because they are hidebound and not focused on the real business problems.

“Our imagination fails us in three ways. It lacks detail, it tends to extrapolate from the present, and it over-estimates how bad bad things will feel once they have happened.

Use other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it.

“It now costs more to park a car at one airport than to rent one at the other end. Machines are now reproducing so fast that they are cheaper than the empty space they fill.

“While LA-602_pdf was written by people curiously investigating whether a hydrogen bomb could ignite the atmosphere, the RHIC Review_pdf (about whether the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might create micro black holes) is a work of public relations.

No one can do serious analysis of existential risks anymore, because just by asking the question, you’re threatening the funding of your whole field. The only way to get a rational assessment of existential risks in our modern environment: the whole project is classified, the paper is written for scientists without translation, and the public won’t get to see the report for another fifty years.

“If I can’t write a simple, short docstring describing what a piece of code will do, it’s almost always a bad idea to try to write it without first putting some more thought into the design.