"What the skeptics overlook is that platforms that are open to third-party developers have the following characteristic: it’s hard to think of important use cases before they are built, and hard to find examples where important use cases weren’t developed after they were built."
"Necessity, which is allowed to be the mother of invention, has so violently agitated the wits of men at this time that it seems not at all improper, by way of distinction, to call it the Projecting Age. For though in times of war and public confusions the like humour of invention has seemed to stir, yet, without being partial to the present, it is, I think, no injury to say the past ages have never come up to the degree of projecting and inventing, as it refers to matters of negotiation and methods of civil polity, which we see this age arrived to."
"There is a wonderful fertility of mind, and almost whimsical precision of detail, with good sense and good humour to form the groundwork of a happy English style."
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4087/pg4087.html
Quite a sentence.
"And that is precisely the point — you can’t have people freelancing their way through software code that flies a spaceship, and then, with peoples lives depending on it, try to patch it once its in orbit. “Houston, we have a problem,” may make for a good movie; it’s no way to write software. “People have to channel their creativity into changing the process,” says Keller, “not changing the software."
Read this right now, it resonates with GDS. GDS is a spaceship.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
"How weighed down is public life with its emphasis on certainty. How dumbed down is belief. The big divides are not between different beliefs, but the differing degree of certitude in which those beliefs are held."
"It’s ironic that the situation the world is in today is because we’ve had a lot of productivity increases, which should have led to rising living standards for all citizens due to [advances in] science and enormous numbers of big and small productivity enhancers,” the former economic adviser in the Clinton White House said. “The change in the global rules should also have led us to higher standards, and yet it seems just having the opposite effect."
(via nyc past)
"Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus."
This column will change your life: Helsinki Bus Station Theory | Life and style | The Guardian
