“When Twitter-friends do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of them Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

“Language expands the range of solutions while GUIs usually limit it to the vision of the creator. When you give people a language instead of a GUI, they come up solutions that you didn’t even know were possible.

“Where Kurzweil sees a steady march of progress interrupted by occasional hiccups, I see a few fragile and improbable victories against a backdrop of malice, stupidity, and greed: the tiny amount of good humans have accomplished in constant danger of drowning in a sea of blood and tears, as happened to so many of the civilizations of antiquity.

“It is, alas, a truism that authors generally have less experience than other men. This owing to the incontestable fact that you simply can’t be in two places at once. Either you’re in front of the typewriter, writing, or you’re out in the world having experiences. Therefore, since you need to write and you need to have experiences to write about, you have to learn to do more with less. And doing more with less is, in a word, what writing is all about.

“As software and hardware engineers, if our defaults put users in an unsafe situation, where their credit and savings are placed at risk, then we’ve failed them, and we’ve acted unethically.

“The problem in scaling software projects is not a communication problem; it’s a dependency problem. Control quality by being hierarchical and rigorous about how you test and accept changes, not how you generate them.

“I haven’t overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students.

“My biggest encouragement to those who are scared of criticism to enter the public space is this: if you don’t, the public space will be filled with people who have no fear of their failings whatsoever. And we all know what fools they are.