“There is a discipline to your routine brought about by the fundamental loneliness of business travel which would be good to take back to your daily life.

“I get asked every day to invest in private companies. I always ask the same couple questions. How soon till I get my money back, and how much cash can I make from the investment? I never ask what the PE ratio will be, what the Price to Sales ratio will be. Most private investors are the same way. For some reason buyers of stocks have lost sight of the value of companies paying them cash for their investment. In today’s markets, cash isn’t earned by holding a company and collecting dividends. It’s earned by convincing someone to buy your stock from you.

If you really think of it, when a stock doesn’t pay dividends, there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between a share of stock and a baseball card. Put your Mickey Mantle rookie card on your desk, and a share of your favorite non-dividend paying stock next to it, and let it sit there for 20 years. After 20 years you would still just have two pieces of paper sitting on your desk. The difference in value would come from how well they were marketed.

“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.