December 16, 2007
⇒ Aidan: “I am annotating a 17 page article on an Indian cricket player.”.“I think I understand why India is so interested in cricket these days: the one thing that could possibly make cricket more arcane and confusing is Indian names.”
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(Aside, aidan, cricket, powerset, quotable) October 16, 2007
⇒ Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents.“I think we all woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else.”
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(Aside, quotable) September 12, 2007
⇒ Aidan: “the increases in human intelligence that have evolved since our split with living relatives have been driven significantly by specific need for social processing skills rather than a drive toward general intelligence.”.Also points to how complicated and difficult the social is, something we encounter everyday trying to replicate social patterns into software.
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(Aside, evolution, intelligence, quotable, social) August 21, 2007
⇒ Jakob Nielsen: “In 1997, I chose to suppress similar findings…”.The truth about this dreadful cover up is coming out.
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(Aside, nielsen, quotable, scandal, usability) June 5, 2007
⇒ Stewart: “expression of human creativity is one of the things that gives purpose to the universe.”.For the times when its all ajax, and tags, and platforms, and Alexa, and APIs.
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(Aside, flickr, quotable) March 6, 2007
⇒ Q: How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?.A: I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal.
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(Aside, community, inspiration, quotable) “Pipes has all the ingredients of something that should really set me off. Pipes, filters, mashups, RSS, Atom, RDF (singing) these are a few of my favorite things! So, what gives? I’m genuinely worried that I’m sick, depressed, losing it, or otherwise replaced by a pod alien. Possibly all the above. … So, it’s not you, it’s me.” – Les – Thoughts on Pipes on the Web
Yeah, exactly that.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say they wouldn’t use Ruby because it lacks automated refactoring tools. Ruby doesn’t actually need them in the way Java does; it’s like refusing to switch to an electric car because there’s no place to put the gasoline.” – Steve Yegge on the NBL
“I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous.”
– GoDaddy General counsel Christine Jones on following the DMCA takedown laws (already lousy!)
A pyschotherapist in Glasgow:
“Dave confirmed that Guy Fawkes is the badgers’ Special Day. … My [grandpa] would say that in shamanistic terms, Dave’s badgers are trickster figures who act as his power animal and enable him to creatively channel power from the Lower World. However, I suspect that Dave prefers not to put ideas into their heads, so he simply refers to them as “sociopaths.”
July 20, 2006
⇒ Tim Bray: “Python programmers are Serious Men and Women who Don’t Have Time For Ponies.”.No luv for Perl, the original pony enabled language?
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(Aside programming, quotable, tim.bray) May 10, 2006
⇒ Bush: “The best moment of my presidency was catching a perch on my lake”.Like Rafe said, something the President and I can agree upon. Make sure to vote in the poll
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(Aside bush, politics, quotable) Great quote from Thomas Hawk comparing image search engines
“If I were Google and Microsoft right now I’d be thinking about where I could find about 2 million or so users to rank my pictures on the cheap rather than wasting time on all this other stuff.”.
Still I think 2006+ is going to be about rediscovering that smart computers can help us get value from the rankings of handful of personally relevant opinions as well as 2M strangers in aggregate.
update [2006/4/3]: It was pointed out to me that Google has a stake in von Ahn’s ESP game (not to mention a whole new CMU/Pittsburgh lab focusing on data mining and AI).
Heard muttered in the standing room only crowd after Jason Fried’s keynote, “I’m working on my new keynote, its called ‘Eat When You’re Hungry, Sleep When You’re Tired’”.
HJ: “Do you love the Internet?”
EF: “I love the Internet, but it still has to go home in the morning.”
Aaron Boodman on why web developers don’t care about “making it work in Win/IE.”
“It’s hurt us enough, and we want to hurt it back.”
“Live blogging SxSW is rather besides the point.”
“This is what life should always be like!” (ambiguous in context, either in reference to the wall to wall, don’t stop partying with 3000 of your closest friends, or on the prevalence of dodgeball to organize much of it)
“If there isn’t a chocolate fountain, it’s not my revolution”
February 22, 2006
⇒ The fact that 20 million viewers are riveted each week.to the travails of a fictional community that feels both abandoned by the world and besieged by unseen enemies says a lot about where this country’s head is at.
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(Aside lost, quotable, tv) February 9, 2006
⇒ Topix: The Architecture and Ambition of Craigslist.“Craig’s lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam.”
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(Aside community, craigslist, quotable) February 6, 2006
⇒ I tried being an artist.and all I got was older
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(Aside life, quotable) January 31, 2006
⇒ Bill Clinton: “First of all, in this age of culturally changed circumstances,.I should make it clear for the record that Senator McCain and I are not married.”
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(Aside clinton, quotable) January 24, 2006
⇒ “WoW is very pretty and very complex. It’s not just a nice GUI for a spreadsheet application like some other RPGs”.Nicely put.
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(Aside quotable, wow) You're reading Laughing Meme, personal website of Kellan Elliott-McCrea.
This blog is roughly a decade old, and at no point, including now, has it ever represented the opinion of any of my employers.
I tend to write about books, coffee, the Web, open source, collaboration technologies and XML.
I spend most of my days writing code, and occasionally fomenting dissent.
Currently Residing: New York
